And the idea is…
After four and a half months of sweat and toil we are pleased to announce our idea:
We are developing a web service that harnesses the collective intelligence of The Economist Group’s community, enabling them to contribute their skills and knowledge to international and local development organisations. These business minds will help find solutions to the world’s most important development problems.
It will be a global platform that helps to offset the brain drain, by making expertise flow back into the developing world. We’ve codenamed the service “Lughenjo”, an Tuvetan word meaning gift.
So how does it work?
In a nutshell, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), charities and other organisations - as well as entrepreneurs active in developing countries - will be able to post tasks on Lughenjo asking for help in solving problems. Qualified individuals can then provide such help by donating their knowledge and skills. By connecting these two groups Lughenjo will create a marketplace for good and a new channel for skills and knowledge transfer.
So what difference can it make? We can’t help but think that if we allow The Economist Group’s community to give their time and expertise online - quickly and easily - then something great will happen. Initially we’ll start small. Lughenjo users will be able to answer questions that are posed by accredited international development organisations. Think Yahoo! Answers for good.
The key will be what happens later, when tasks become more complex. Imagine a CEO examining a business plan for a developing world social enterprise. Or when one of the 450 000 finance and accounting professionals of CFO and Economist.com can look over the books of an NGO in Nairobi. The possibilities are endless. What’s more, by allowing skilled, smart, professionals to help development organisations, they will help solve development problems with market-based solutions.
But what’s the business model? Lughenjo will be a social business enterprise. A business that does good, and returns a profit. To do this we’ll do what media companies do best and put ads in front of eyeballs.
Time for questions
There are many questions, which we have thought long and hard over. Does the world need another volunteer-matching site? Will time-poor professionals donate their time? Do NGOs and other organisations actually need such a site? Can you make money on the back of charity?
In the next few weeks we’ll be dealing with these issues on our blog (starting with the question of making money from philanthopy, below) and at the same time putting together a great pitch for the Group’s management team.
So there it is. We’d love to get your feedback on the idea - feel free to post a comment.
And if you work at an NGO or are a social entrepreneur who would use Lughenjo for getting help, then please e-mail us on:
June 29th, 2007 at 9:47 am
Sounds like a chimera of Nabuur.com, MANGO (Management accounting for non governmental organisations) and Aid Workers Network. Most interested to see the business plan!
June 29th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Good idea but not to the point. What the Third-World poor needs at this moment is marketing help. Thailand is one good example. After the end of every hot season and beginning of rain, the country is flooded with fruits sold at very low price. And it has been like this for generations.
The solution to this problem is simple: create an online fruit market which buyers around the world can buy directly from growers. How? The technology is already available. Think about it.
I think solving the problem directly is better. Your blog already worries about time-poor professionals. So why offer them time-consuming tasks? Why not ask them to do something which they can do immediately, without fuss and with fun attached? Like organising and promoting online fruit stalls in an online fruit market.
This task is more fun than just brainstorming. Because it would involve things like communicating with village leaders by email. And afterwards help them set up sales outlets and obtain financial assistance.
I’m not against your “Lughenjo” service, but write to suggest it should be made more to the point. And, along the way, more fun.
June 29th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
I like the idea, especially if there can be simple ways for leveraging the help of the “time-poor” volunteer professionals.
Two suggestions towards this end –
1) Make it simple for volunteers in the Economist Group to extend (contingent) offers, based on the readiness of others (including local groups) to provide sweat equity to help in assembling data, doing first-draft writeups, etc.
Pledgebank.org is on to a useful framework for making contingent standing offers.
2) Encourage members of the Economist Group to spark engagement of student groups at leading campuses with local good causes around the world.
Many students might be glad to work with Economist Group advisors in practical research, tutoring, mentoring and other services in help local projects become sustainable and to pilot innovative uses of technology.
The NY Times reported on October 5, 2005 (”Korea’s High Tech Utopia”) on how students at Cal State Fullerton have been providing such direct design inputs for a private sector financed, $25 billion free economic zone megaproject:
>>imagine public recycling bins that use radio-frequency identification technology to credit recyclers every time they toss in a bottle; pressure-sensitive floors in the homes of older people that can detect the impact of a fall and immediately contact help; cellphones that store health records and can be used to pay for prescriptions.
“These are among the services dreamed up by industrial-design students at California State University, Long Beach, for possible use in New Songdo City, a large “ubiquitous city” being built in South Korea.
“…New Songdo, a free-enterprise zone where English will be the lingua franca, is often called the largest private real-estate development in the world. When completed in 2014, it is estimated that this $25 billion project will be home to 65,000 people and that 300,000 will work there.
Such project-based opportunities for engaging students in volunteer projects could be a great source of expertise for “base of the pyramid” projects as well. They could work with Economist Group volunteers on specific initiatives to wake up the value of dormant capital in land values, through private land registries, design and research of bankable agro, tourism, residential, and IT-enabled business parks.
Where local counterparts deemed these inputs to be of value, they might agree at the outset to include the global volunteer groups as stakeholders in the success of such projects — establishing a sustainable model for ongoing relationships.
A number of private “eCenters” with microscholarships to spread valued skills have been launched in Kyrgyzstan (http://tinyurl.com/q4aqv ) , with land grant endowments for sustainability. Sri Lanka’s pioneering market-driven rural learning venture (www.horizonlanka.org ) would also welcome partnerships to develop lands on a success-sharing basis.
Such projects could benefit enormously from Economist Group volunteer engagement, either directly or with campus-based groups that want to launch sustainable and replicable initiatives in emerging economies.
Best,
Mark Frazier
Openworld, Inc.
“Spreading zones of freedom, peace and prosperity”
www.openworld.com
June 29th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
K. Kumragse, marketing is clearly a function that is needed by many entrepreneurs in the developing world. Our platform, we hope, will be able to connect them to some smart marketers to help get their papayas to Paris. Thanks for the comment though.
June 29th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Sounds very similar to the Techdirt Insight Community. Good luck.
June 30th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
Interesting idea. I personally have no problem seeing ads on the site. I like the brand and brain power behind this idea. So when will we see a prototype site up and running?
Do I understand it correctly that the idea/site matches problems/tasks with qualified professionals? And then they “go off to the sunset” to solve the problems or handle the tasks? Meaning this idea/site is a matching service.
If my above understanding is essentially right, I have a suggestion to expand on the idea. I think it will be even more beneficial to expose and capture (with full respect of the organizations’ privacy) as much of the problem solving processes and also the solutions. My add on suggestion is to allow this idea/site to extend itself and make it not just a “matching service” but a matching service plus a full blown knowledge base on how to deal with various problems. Share everything with a Creative Commons license. Think — McKinsey & Co., BCG, Monitor internal knowledge base built as a side-effect of the problem solving.
The above are my initial thoughts on a Saturday afternoon thinking about your idea for a few minutes.
I wish you all the best of luck. And thanks for the Yunus and Posner articles you linked to. Will try to have a quick scan of them.
Best Regards,
Kempton
July 1st, 2007 at 3:05 am
The pitfall I foresee is inaccurate data. It is very difficult to obtain accurate data from the field. What Lughenjo could do about this problem is to set up standards and criteria for each type of project. Once set they will help force field workers and project administrators to pay attention when collecting and examining data.
Also, it may too soon to mention this, but the number-one scourge of the Third World is corruption. Lughenjo could help by doing something like developing a special portal for examining terms of reference for those big-ticket procurements.
There will be a lot of fun, really, once this portal is set up and running. Because the world will get to see how some seemingly reputable people and firms can resort to every trick and practice to make sure their bid will be the winner.
In fact, combatting corruption should be Lughenjo’s top priority.
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:18 am
Good idea. Coming from stakeholders of Economist, the advice/suggestions are more likely to be useful and practical.
If potential areas of interest from the online community are gathered, it would help in directing queries to relevant people.
July 2nd, 2007 at 1:49 pm
One idea that I’d like to put out there is the importance of Range Voting, for social choice. Charities and NGO’s could use it for their internal policy making, to make better decisions.
If you like economics, consider that Range Voting has the best social utility efficiency of any feasible voting method:
http://RangeVoting.org/vsi.html
We believe Range Voting has life-saving potential for the world.
http://RangeVoting.org/LivesSaved.html
I hope this can be put to good use.
July 2nd, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Is a loable idea, but it does not work, an example, all the presidents of Peru for example, came for the best universities in all over the world, as their ministers , so in 187 years of being ruled by the best minds , we are still a poor country.
Our current president, came from La sorbona, the former-Toledo, came from stanford, the last before him , came from Brussels, the last last before him, came from Harvard.
That is the best example , brain drain does not work.
yours
July 2nd, 2007 at 11:38 pm
I’m happy in some way to have helped with your process of identifying such a global project for The Economist Group.
Yes there will be lots of issues to be solved along the way but global brainstorming is a very powerful means to create global solutions.
Brainstorming is just as powerful in implementing global solutions. After all implementation is only a series of focussed ideas.
If such a project is to be directed towards solutions to third world problems we of the developed world must be careful to allow them to be part of the problem definition and take ownership of the solution otherwise the solution will never be implemented.
I’ve noted a few commentators have talked about the need for time-poor professionals to see it as having fun to be prepared to make a contribution. Obviously such fun should not be at the expense of accurate problem definition and ultimate solution implementation.
After all your project is proposed to make a real impact for good globally. I presume in some way The Economist Group will retain responsibility for the website and it’s ultimate global success.
All the best!
July 3rd, 2007 at 9:13 am
The idea of making gift (lughenjo) is interesting, but how people link profit to philanthropy. Let us see what it brings.
July 3rd, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Having worked in international development for almost 15 years, I think this is a most welcome initiative, one that could set a reference for involving individuals in combating poverty and achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Time and knowledge is sometimes often more useful for development organizations and communities than monetary donations (which can be highly unstable to produce and manage anyway). And this is what this Lughenjo project would provide.
Some of the earlier posts are already indicating potential uses of such an online-volunteer driven project. And there are a lot of really smart people (apparently about 1 million Economist suscribers) to which this opportunity to contribute will be directed. If only 1% were to respond positively, it´d be 10,000 people lending a hand directly to some development organization somewhere in the world!
Kepmton’s suggestion is particularly interesting, ie. creating an open, Creative Commons-type knowledge base, whose contents would be ways to get around problems found in the developing world, derived from the contributions made by Economist readers through Lughenjo. It´d be a kind of meta-knowledge base, structured by actual problem (eg. removing arsenic from contaminated water sources, or using credit cards for e-commerce in countries where the banking system does not allow it directly, etc…). Well designed and organized, it could be quite a useful asset for development organizations everywhere!
In terms of how to make the initiative financially sustainable, I´ve no issues with online-ads either – many development NGOs run them. What I think should be done, however, is to invest back money made into the Lughenjo service – a non-for-profit enterprise can certainly be successful and sustainable. In other words, I don´t think any profits should feed back into the Economist Group. Plus I have the feeling that if the project starts well (and clever, Economist-type marketing would be essential for this), a good number of companies would be willing to pitch in and see themselves associates with such an innnovative initiative.
So, I wish you lots of luck, and look forward to see the project take off. I do remember the Economist taking a rather dim view of Corporate Social Responsibility in a relatively recent special report. But, who knows, may be they´ll see themselves hosting a highly successful CSR-type project and change their minds along the way… In a way, it´s a challenge not for the magazine, but for its 1-million strong readership: “what can you, as an individual, do about poverty and exclusion around the world with your knowledge?”
Manuel Acevedo
July 4th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
I think this is a really clever bit of positioning for The Economist. Let me explain:
The Economist, bless it, is relentlessly optimistic about the possibility for non-state methods to sort out the problems of the world. For those of us many readers who are slightly less optimistic, we would prefer to be able to point to really good examples of private do-gooding that really, pretty unambiguously, does do good.
If, whenever The Economist ends a piece of good journalism by an up-beat reference to the power of us all to do good as individuals, it could insert an aside “as our sister-company Lughenjo does every day”, then we would be far readier to take the optimism seriously.
Excellent joint branding. Looking forward to seeing it realised.
Tony
July 5th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
There is one flaw in the initial concept. Only one percent of people in Africa have access to Internet, and in most cases can’t afford to be on-line. We in the North have all the technology in the world available, but an hour in an Internet cafe in africa costs the the same as the amount of money people need survive it will be “talking about” as on the other on-line networks, instead of talking with the people on the ground to assist them to find ways to build a better future.
I am sure the Economist network has clever ways to create a Paypal like system that provides the folks in Africa with a pre-paid Internet acces service. All you need to do is talk to all the telco’s subscribing to the Economist, as they allready have the infrastucture to make it work. Now that would be really a revolution. Once that’s in place the on-line volonteering initiatives will be succesful as well
Cheers
Ben (talking to Africans daily via the web)