Opportunity at the Intersection of Technology and Public Policy

The two main reasons I chose to pursue my Masters in Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon was because of the various disciplines of the students and the school's emphasis on innovation.

At Heinz College students work together on a systems projects, combining their different disciplines to solve problems. I believe the same approach will be needed to solve some of today's most challenging social problems.

Also, Carnegie Mellon University is arguably one of the world's best schools for computer science and robotics. As a Heinz student and budding social entrepreneur, this presents a wonderful context to explore opportunities that exist at the intersection of technology and public policy. Simply put, how can we use technology to solve public problems?

In the following I will highlight the work of kiva.org, DonorsChoose.org and CrowdRise; three organizations that are attempting to answer this question.

As early as 2007, I heard about an online social venture called kiva.org. The mission of this organization is to spur economic development by providing loans for entrepreneurs in developing countries, effectively cutting out the middleman (banks). But what was so fascinating to me was how they were using web technology to make it possible for people all across the world to give micro-loans through their web platform.

Another tech social venture is donorschoose.org. The mission of this organization is to provide teachers of low-income public schools with necessary classroom materials, such as books, supplies etc. Again technology was used to deliver it's services by allowing teachers to create profiles of the materials they need, donors to use the web platform to easily fund the materials and after the materials are funded an automated procurement system orders the materials and ships them to the school.

The third tech social venture, was one I just recently learned about, it's called CrowdRise and was founded by actor Edward Norton. The basic premise of this organization is to raise funds to sponsor volunteerism, much like a marathon runner raises funds to sponsor their race. Below is an excerpt from their website.

“We're huge believers in Sponsored Volunteerism at Crowdrise but we need your help to make it the coolest, most exciting new way to raise money for charity. There is a culture of giving around marathons we love and support, but it just doesn't exist around volunteerism and it should. Volunteers put in the time and energy and deserve to get sponsored. Together we are going to make that happen and one day you can tell your grandkids that you were part of the sponsored volunteerism movement. Granted, they won't care but it's still a nice thing to say.”

Already CrowdRise has shown signs of creating social value - read about their involvement in helping to raise record funding for the New York Marathon.

What I think is interesting about CrowdRise is that there using technology to boldly introduce an element of micro-donations in the context of sponsoring volunteers.

My questions for you

• CrowdRise has been attributed to decentralizing philanthropy, aggregating smaller donations of many people to make change vs. a few wealthy people and foundations, is this a good thing?
• Using our classroom definition of social entrepreneur, would you consider Edward Norton a social entrepreneur? Explain.
• Does sponsoring volunteerism create pathways to service by addressing financial obstacles?
• Does addressing these financial obstacles of volunteers and volunteer projects diminish the altruistic nature of giving back?
• More broadly, how can you harness the power of web technology to deliver solutions to other challenging social problems?