During the course of Project Red Stripe we have come to realise that assessment, reassessment and change are natural parts of the innovation process. As part of this process – and with some regret – we have decided that we had to move on from Lughenjo.

We went public with Lughenjo four weeks ago, primarily to test our idea on a wider audience. Since then we have continued our conversations with social entrepreneurs and NGOs and worked on producing a business plan.

The feedback that we received was overwhelmingly that Lughenjo was a good thing for us to do. There were, however, two problems. Firstly it was not obviously something that The Economist Group should do. Secondly, and more importantly, it became clear that there was not an immediate demand for a knowledge network from NGOs and social entrepreneurs.

The upshot was that we would have had to force the creation of the network from a demand point of view as well as marketing it to potential donors. This would have put a barrier in the way of us being able to grow the community quickly and therefore monetising it. And the one thing that pretty much all the people in the NGO community that we spoke to said, was that they expected us to run Lughenjo as a profitable business, because that would be our motivation to stick with it.

Lughenjo had already gone through several iterations before being made public, each time being refined into a simpler proposition. It had its roots in us wanting to make a ‘major difference’ and originally deciding to help achieve one of the UN’s millennium development goals – that of universal primary education by 2015. The idea that we came up with was to create a platform for digital donations with a novel map interface. It then became a skills exchange to help achieve universal primary education, before ultimately seeing the light of day as Lughenjo, aimed at helping anyone working on projects involving international development.

With Lughenjo we had always thought that after philanthropy we would be able to roll out other “verticals” that would be of value to The Economist Group’s high-end audience, but we hadn’t focused on that wider goal. The feedback that we got made us see the need to put the wider goal of a knowledge network at the front of our idea.

Maybe think of it as a for the Economist Group’s audience (let’s call it HiSpace).

For it to be engaging for a time-poor audience, it would need to deliver something that couldn’t easily be found elsewhere. Maybe a starting point would be to allow members to engage with each other to create knowledge repositories like a deeper, more targeted or Naver (the answers site that ranks above Google in South Korea) within closed or self-selecting groups of members.

You can see how the relationship between a HiSpace site and its members would be substantially different to that enjoyed by most readers of mainstream media – not only would members of HiSpace consume information but they would also be the principal generators of such information. Certainly the ability to manage this “3D journalism” will become increasingly important for mainstream media companies.

So, what’s next?

Well, Project Red Stripe ends on 27th July. Going forward, though, I will explore the issues around starting a HiSpace with the intention of coming up with what the next steps should be in November.

So, as Project Red Stripe ends, we hope that our legacy will be felt both in HiSpace, and in The Economist Group continuing to encourage this kind of innovation. We also hope to publish some feedback on what has and hasn’t worked for us during the process, as a practical guide for you to follow or dissect and to tell you how, with “So many good ideas to review! So little time!“, we came up with HiSpace.

Last, but not least we want to thank you for your ideas, feedback and support over the last six months, especially those of you in the NGO and social entrepreneur community who have given us your valuable time.

Farewell and maybe see you in HiSpace soon.

People may get ever busier, but they also appear to find more time to volunteer. Witness the plethora of studies that saw the numbers of people donating their time reaching record numbers, particularly in the US. To most experts this is the result of the terrorist attacks of 2001. Not since the attack on Pearl Harbor has the country seen this kind of lasting increase in volunteering.

But press coverage of these studies often omits to mention one key fact: While the absolute numbers of volunteers are certainly up, for many this translates only to a one-time experience. Of the 65.4m American adults who volunteered in 2005, nearly one third did not do so in 2006, according to a report by the Corporation for National and Community Service.

It is certainly possible that many volunteers have simply lost interest and want to spend their free time on less socially-correct activities. But it is also true that most charities focus mainly on motivating people to volunteer, instead of putting resources into making volunteering a rewarding experience and offering appealing opportunities to do it again. Many US organisations do not even have a paid person in charge of volunteer coordination, according to a 2004 study by the Urban Institute. And if they do have such an employee, it is unlikely that this person has received proper training for the job.

It is safe to assume that the situation is not much better among the majority of organisations dedicated to solving development problems, particularly those based in developing countries. Worse, they are probably even less set up to work with online volunteers. Jayne Cravens, one of the rare experts in the matter, as the manager of the UN’s online volunteering site until 2004, argues that “the biggest obstacle in online volunteering is the lack of an organisation’s capacity to involve any volunteers effectively.”

This looks like bad news for Lughenjo. What use is a skills and knowledge exchange if there is no real demand? Yet only where there is a major challenge can a major opportunity arise and we believe that there are ways to stimulate demand.

- One, of course, is to make it as easy as possible to post “help” requests. The existing online volunteering sites tend to be hard to use – for both donors and those asking for help.

- Another way of creating demand is working with major international and local NGOs to get them to serve as a kind of aggregator of such requests. In recent weeks, we have been talking to more than a dozen organisations to get them on board.

- But most importantly, we will need to identify a “killer application” for Lughenjo to take off – in the same way that Pez Dispensers, Beanie Babies and other collectibles helped eBay to get traction.

Any suggestions for what THE task could be? Is it copywriting, help with accounting or just answering questions?

One place to start gauging the supply for our skills exchange – meaning volunteers who offer services – is to look at offline volunteering. In recent years, particularly in the US and the UK, this has reached record levels. In both countries, nearly 30% of adults volunteer. In the US, this represents an increase of almost 10% since the late 1980s, bringing the number of volunteers in 2006 to 61.2m, according to a recent volunteering study by the Corporation of National and Community Service. Across the world, the average volunteer rate is at 10%, according to the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies (see table below).

With some back-of-the-envelope calculations, one should be able to estimate Lughenjo’s potential market. If the share of volunteers is the same online as offline, there are 40m potential online volunteers in the US alone (in 2005, the country’s internet population reached 140m). Globally, if indeed more than one billion people worldwide now use the internet, the number of potential online volunteers should be around 100m. If only 1% became regular Lughenjo users, we’d be set.

Of course, things are not that simple. For one, many people still see the internet as a medium to consume information rather than a new way to get involved. Also, volunteers may be more hesitant do give time online because they cherish being among people and want direct feedback. And only a small minority of those volunteering offline do so for organisations that focus on development issues.

Yet we see even more (and better) reasons to be optimistic:

- As people get used to doing more and more things on the internet, volunteering will not remain an offline phenomenon. VolunteerMatch, the biggest volunteer-matching site, lists more than 5,000 virtual volunteering jobs - about 13% of all opportunities. What is more, the generation that has grown up with the internet, those 20-somethings known as “digital natives”, will find it perfectly normal to help others online.

- The internet makes it easier to volunteer. One can do it from home, the office (many companies encourage volunteering) and whenever one has a few minutes, for instance during a lunch break. In fact, a majority of those in the UK who do not volunteer said that it isn’t compatible with work commitments, according to a study by the Home Office.

- The internet also allows people to pick the volunteering opportunity best suited to them. What keeps many professionals from donating their time is the fact that they are rarely given the opportunity to use their workplace skills to help charities to tackle business issues, according to 2006 study by Deloitte, an accountancy firm.

- Baby boomers, many of whom will retire in the next few years, want to do something meaningful in the next stage of their lives, according to a study by Denver-based The Rose Community Foundation. More than half already volunteer and nearly as many intend to do so in the future.

- There is a growing awareness that the world’s challenges – infectious disease, international terrorism and environmental degradation, for example – are indeed global. Experts are already talking of a “globalisation of philanthropy”.

- Last but not least, people already spend an amazing amount of time online participating in projects without pay. One example is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, another TripAdvisor, the largest travel review site. In fact, one might even describe much of user-generated content as a form of online volunteerism (off which a lot of money is made, for instance on social networks such as and MySpace).

To jump-start Lughenjo, we will try to get readers of the Economist, Economist.com and other Economist Group publications to sign up. Whether they and others will stick around, of course, depends on how compelling an experience the site that we build will be. It also depends on us attracting enough charities, NGOs and other organisations who ask for help - the topic of the next post.

By now if you submitted an idea to us you should have received your six months subscription to Economist.com.

We wish you happy reading and thank-you once again for taking the time to put together so many well thought out ideas.

With hindsight getting your permission to publish all the ideas on the site certainly had merits - it would have been great to get comments, builds, bombs, sun and rain for them - but equally we were pretty time-poor.
Still, there is always the potential son-of-Project Red Stripe!

If you live in the US or the UK, it feels like the answer should be “no”. In these countries, it feels as if there are now as many of them as pet food-selling start-ups during the dotcom boom. To mention only a few: VolunteerMatch, NetworkForGood, Idealist and TimeBank. The biggest is San-Francisco-based VolunteerMatch. In 2006, it averaged more than 38,000 active volunteer opportunities a day

Yet when it comes to sites listing opportunities in international volunteering, the field is much less crowded. And international online volunteering, although it has been around for quite a few years, is an even more open space. The UN, for instance, has pioneered the concept with a site called OnlineVolunteering. But the more relevant example for Lughenjo’s purposes is Nabuur, a Dutch site, whose name is an old Dutch word meaning “neighbour”.

Nabuur selects local communities (“villages”) that then can ask for help with projects such as a new computer training centre and a library. Specially trained volunteers (“facilitators”) split up the projects into tasks, which registered users (“neighbours”) can do on their computer within two to eight hours. In 2006, Nabuur had 150 villages and 8,000 neighbours, who completed 150 tasks and seven projects. OnlineVolunteering, for its part, had some 70,000 registered users last year, who among them completed 2,800 assignments.

Nabuur and OnlineVolunteering clearly show that online volunteering has a future. But they also underline what is missing for it to really take off, particularly at a global level. In many ways, it is in the state that online music was before Apple introduced the iPod and its iTunes service. Digital music players, tiny hard drives, downloading sites and rights management systems all existed before Steve Jobs combined his determination with a thick layer of marketing glue to create a set of blockbuster products.

As was the case with online music before the iPod, a trigger is needed for online volunteering: one powerful player with a highly trusted brand who dares to put it all together in order to create a global platform.

To see the potential of knowledge-and-skills-exchanges online, one need only take a closer look at for-profit firms in this space. On Elance, for instance, tens of thousands of small businesses post projects such as building a website and designing a logo. Freelancers around the world then bid for these projects. Elance facilitates these exchanges and takes a cut. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, for its part, shows that even small jobs - which the service calls “human intelligence tasks” (or HITs) - are tradable online.

A similar site to exchange skills and knowledge to solve development problems could make a huge difference. International and local development organisations need money of course. But skills and knowledge are often the true bottleneck. And even if both are available locally, the networks to spread them are often missing. We believe that Lughenjo will not only be a partial substitute for such networks, but also help build them.

Great idea, you may think, but can Lughenjo attract a critical mass of volunteers and organisations to this skills exchange to give it enough liquidity? This certainly is a crucial issue, and we’ll cover it in our next post.