Starting up a start-up

OpenCauses.org - Do Good.

2009-02-25T16:35:00.004+01:00

Finally we've gone public...

Re-posting from blog.jayway.com

I had the opportunity to present the Way Group initiated project OpenCauses.org at TED@PalmSprings this year. It was a fantastic experience and I got a great response on the project. But what is it we are doing with OpenCauses.org?

For good or for bad, the market is unprecedented in its power to generate wealth. What if we could use this power, not to generate wealth, but to generate good?

Since the market understands money really well, why not create representative money based on donations? If we do this, everyone will be able to handle donations as money. We could own it, measure it, trade with it, work to generate more of it... and every cent of it would represent donations for good causes.

This is what OpenCauses.org is doing.

OpenCauses.org really only aims to change one word. Instead of saying “I make donations to good causes” you will say “I buy donations to good causes”. This slight change makes all the difference.

What is it we are doing?
We are creating the Open Causes Platform, a non-profit donation platform, which will enable donations to causes aimed at the UN Millennium Development Goals. The Open Causes Platform will also hold Cause Credits. Causes Credits is representative money based on donations. This means that each Causes Credit represents a donation made to a good cause.

When you donate through the Open Causes Platform you receive Cause Credits for your donation. Your Cause Credits are measurable and accumulative, and they are also transferable between users of the platform. All this combined effectively makes Cause Credits into a means of trade.

The Open Causes Platform is an infrastructural platform which exposes a number of web-services. With these services integrators can integrate basically any site or Internet connected product to the platform. Anyone can create pretty much any implementation of donation based services imaginable. They will be able to make donations, show how much users have donated, compare and transfer donation.

Using Cause Credits
If you, as a person or an organization, own 100 Cause Credits you have donated $100 through the Open Causes Platform. If you later donate $10 more, you own 110 Cause Credits.

Now, let’s say that I have a cellular phone that I don’t use. If you give me your 110CC, I’ll give you my phone. If so, I have made the actual donations for $110 and you have bought my phone in two steps. The value of my phone has paid for the $110 donation. You now own a phone, but have not made any donations.

Summary
We are implementing a currency based on donations. Essentially we want to complement the market of today with a market based on generosity. Just imagine if every corporation where to accept a currency based on donations for 1% of their services and products... What couldn’t we do then?

Mattias Ask,
Founder of OpenCauses.org

If you have any questions or want more information about the project, go to OpenCauses.org or contact me at mattias.ask@opencauses.org.

Talking at TED

2008-11-28T09:40:00.006+01:00

Last week I got to know that I will talk at TED! Before you get to fired up I have to say that I won't be talking at the main venue in Long Beach, but the Palm Springs multicast venue which me and Peter Neubauer will be attending. I really hope that my talk will be multicasted back to the main venue in Long Beach and the 1300 or so people sitting there. I'll know this in mid-December... and of course I also hope for the video to be published on TED.com after the conference :)

The presentation at TED will be "the great unveiling" for this project, which means that after TED, the cat is out of the bag and the project will be out in the open! I hope we'll get a good response from the crowd there, and the public in general.

PS. If you're reading this and wondering why I haven't written anything the last month it's because I haven't had time due to other obligations. That's the way life is. I hope that I will have time to write here on a more regularly basis from now on.

I didn't apply to Project 10 to the 100th

2008-10-20T11:22:00.005+02:00

I decided not to apply to Project 10 to the 100th. You might think I'm crazy but trust me, I gave this decision a great deal of thought.

Project 10 to the 100th is Google's initiative where they dedicate 10 million dollars to projects that will make the world better. This seemed to be a perfect fit for this project but, after careful consideration, it wasn't.

In the application you where able to describe your idea in 300 word and with a 30 second movie on YouTube. These ideas will later (Oct 27th) be subjects for an open vote which will result in the pick of a couple of project for a final consideration made of experts. A conceptually complex idea, like I have found ours to be, will have a slim to none chance to get past the open vote due to the sparse information that can be provided. And, yes, of course I did a 300 word informative description and a 30 second movie of the project. In whatever way I did it, it lacked the soul of the project... that thing that makes people excited when they hear about it.

The most probable outcome of applying would be that we go public with the project, do not get Google to do it and diminish our TED talk-value since the theme is "Great unveilings" and we would already have unveiled our project.

The fact that Google has last say regarding who should implement the project has had little to no impact on this decision. If Google where to implement this project they would most certainly make it a hit. The problem is that I don't think they would do so within Project 10 to the 100th. This, combined with a certainty that the companies within Way Group and our friends are able to get this project running, has lead me to the conclusion that not applying was the correct thing to do. I just hope I'm not proven wrong on this...

Should I hope for TED or for Google's Project 10^100?

2008-10-13T13:15:00.003+02:00

I am faced with a predicament... As man of you know, I have a chance to get up on the big stage at TED for a 3-minute talk. The 3-minute talks will be set now in mid October (yes, there has been delays) and because of this I don't know if I'll get to talk yet. The theme this year is "The Great Unveiling" and the talks will be focused on projects that has not been disclosed before. This might be a problem...

Google has started a project called "Project 10 to the 100th" which will fund projects that helps a large amount of people... like our project! The application is due on October 20th and Google (legit and to no surprise) claims the right to publish all applications... You see my problem now?

If comes the 20th and the 3-minute TED talks aren't set yet, what should I do? Should I bet on getting a spot at TED or getting funding from Google? Drop a comment and tell me what you think I should do...

The prototype is finished!

2008-10-13T10:45:00.002+02:00

Yes, the prototype is finished :) It is as simple as it can be, but it shows the basic concept in action. This is good since I have a meeting with a fundraising specialist this Friday and for the first time I will be able to show what it is we want to do instead of just talking about it and showing conceptual pictures. Hopefully that will pay off...

Jayway blog

2008-10-06T12:48:00.003+02:00

I have to say one more thing... Jayway now has a public blog which is great! Check it out at blog.jayway.com.

One-man agility

2008-10-03T09:52:00.005+02:00

I'm still working on the prototype, but I've suffered from context switching the last week. I have decided to be more open inside Way Group with what I'm doing and thus tried to formalize a project backlog and a prototype backlog. It takes some time to get things to a good level where it communicates what I'm doing and supports me in my daily work without adding extra load. I think I have found a balance now...

I've worked with Scrum the last couple of years and I love the feeling of progress you get when you see burn down charts and tick things of in your sprint backlog. I tried to work with Scrum at the beginning of this project but it's hard when you're the developing team, the project owner and the Scrum master. Instead I have figured out what I loved the most about Scrum and I came up with three things that are the most important elements for me:

What did you do yesterday?
What are you going to do today?
Ticking of things in a backlog.

Well, no one asks me what I've done or what I'm going to do on a daily basis so I added these questions to the wiki page I have in the Way Group wiki. Every morning I open the page and write down what I did yesterday and what I'm going to do today. Then I tick of things in my backlog (or todo-list) as I've finished them... and all of the sudden I feel that I have enough structure to help me without adding extra work as well as communicate what I do to people that are interested.

The psychology of evil

2008-09-25T09:18:00.003+02:00

I know this is off topic on this blog, but I have to post it anyway. This is one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen, and when I saw it the first time at TED I seriously doubted that there is any hope for mankind. I think that everyone has to see this to better understand what man is capable of if we don't actively try to be good.

Philip Zimbardo on the psychology of evil

Noteworthy is that the slide show shown in the talk was actually much longer. It just kept on going, beyond the point where I got sick to my stomach... It shows pure evil originated from ordinary people like you and me who where put in extraordinary situations. That's worth taking a moment to think about...

Meeting with the Red Cross in Stockholm

2008-09-24T11:21:00.005+02:00

Yesterday me and Peter was in Stockholm to talk to the Red Cross about our project. This was the first time we talked to any organization that will be on the receiving end of our project, and naturally I was looking forward to hearing what they had to say... I mean, if the Red Cross where to say "You may not unleash this abomination upon the world!!!" we would have to think things over one more time ;)

We meet up with Robert Cederlund and presented the project and got great feedback. He seemed genuinely positive and wanted know when we could start a proof of concept or a controlled test of this together. When we started talking about this I thought a) "Fantastic! The Red Cross is positive! We're getting traction!" and b) "How can we develop something when we don't have money to do it?". I think I have to speed up the fundraising a bit, and I hope that the meeting with Peter Rohmée will help out with that.

To summarise: Fantastic news! The Red Cross wants to move forward with us on this project.

QDay in Lund

2008-09-24T09:44:00.006+02:00

Last week I was at QDay in Lund with Emil Eifrem and Peter Neubauer. I got to know of the conference from Therese Karlsson whom I meet at TED@Aspen and she said that they where doing a TED-inspired thing in Lund... QDay was a really nice event made to broaden once mind and thing in new ways. There where speaker who talked about innovation, climate change, the US election, tourrettes syndrome etc. All and all it was a great evening which I would recommend anyone to go to.

When mingling with the other participants I landed at the same table as Rolf Hedman. He was a great guy who was very interested in what we do and how we work. When I talked to him about Jayway he got all fired up and exited about our culture and manners (he got interested enough to contact Thomas Dagsberg afterwards to get a meeting and talk about how we work). I also told him about our project and once again he got fired up. After the conference he connected me with Peter Rohmée who specializes in fundraising and works for Brakeley. I'm meeting him in a couple of weeks and hopefully he can help us to get fund for our project.

Going to QDay the absolutely the right thing to do. I turned out to be both productive for the project and a great evening :)

Now anyone can comment

2008-09-17T09:32:00.002+02:00

This is just a short post to state that from now on anyone can comment this blog. I was alerted to the fact that you needed a Blogger account or an OpenID before, which simply is a mistake from my part. Now it's changed, so comment on!

We're buidling a prototype with the help of Neo and Jayway!

2008-09-11T12:53:00.006+02:00

Great news! After my latest post here Emil Eifrem, a friend and the founder of Neo4j, mailed me and offered to help out with a prototype. Emil said that he and his colleague Johan could set of two to three days to get a prototype up and running. I talked to Thomas (Dagsberg, CEO of Jayway) and I got yet another great guy, Jan-Olof Eriksson, for a couple of days. All of the sudden we're a "prototeam" of four people on one weeks notice... Cool! And today we've started... one guy stronger then planned since Mattias from Neo also joined us :)

I had two days to prepare for a 3 day prototype spike. What do you need to land running? This is what I brought to the table:

Short user stories of what we are going to prototype
Lo-fi mock-ups of the visual parts
A sketch of an initial "meta" node space to define the domain

Janne tried to see to it that Subversion accounts etc. where available for everyone, but the time wasn't on our side on that one. Still, I think the preparations where good enough.

When we meet up today we started out by getting a collective feel for what we want to accomplish. The mock-ups and the user stories where good as a starting ground for both the API, the domain and the boundaries of the prototype. All and all we kept it simple and focused on a prototype and not the full implementation, and I think we managed rather well. At 11:00 the first lines of code were written (we meet up at around 09:00) and I have a good feeling about this :) Next week I hope to be able to show people a functional prototype, describing what it is we work on!

Contact with Johan Sellström and the power of a prototype

2008-09-03T09:13:00.008+02:00

A couple of month ago I sent out a mail to a couple of people that I met at TED this year informing them that I had started with my project. I basically said that I'm looking for money and if anyone wanted to know what I was going to do they could send me a mail. Surprisingly I didn't get that much feedback ;) In hindsight I can compare it with sending out a mail to publishers saying:
"I have this great script for a book! It's about a guy who's running from the law even though he is a good guy... and the a lot of cool stuff happens and there's a twist at the end... I can't really tell you more about it in this mail, but let me know if you're interested in knowing what it is about!"

Anyhow... Yesterday night I got a mail from Johan Sellström, co-founder of Icon Media Labs, who was one of the people that I mailed. It turns out that he is also doing a non-profit at the moment... He sent me a link to a prototype of his project and I understood it right away (and it fits very nicely with what we are doing)... This got me thinking of my own project. I said early on that if we have a prototype it would be soooo much easier to communicate what it is we want to do. The thing Johan showed me was pretty rough, but it absolutely did the job of communicating what he wants to do. This is noteworthy, I think...

After looking at Johans project I sent him a a document describing our project and asked if he has any connections that might be interested in funding it. Hopefully he knows someone that is, but either way I think our two project can have some nice effects on each other.

Waiting for TED

2008-09-01T13:15:00.003+02:00

This week I'm hoping for Kelly at TED to get back to me regarding the three minute talk that I'm shooting for. It would be sooooo cool to get a mail which said "We think your project is really interesting and would love to give you a chance to present it at TED."... But then again, what are the odds? I mean, next year the theme of TED is "The Great Unveiling" and they sent out requests for projects and products that hasn't been presented before. You can imagine that they got quit a lot of answers on that request ;) But I'm still hoping for the best...

When we're on the subject of presenting... I attended a presentation workshop last week and saw myself present this project on video for the first time. My God, I'm ranting! I realized after this session that I have to be so much, much more structured then I am today when I talk about this. All the details are clear in my head and on paper, but I have to disregard them and present the big picture to get people on track with what it is we want to do... Some really clever colleges where in the room and they said afterwards that "Well, the first half of the presentation I got, but after that I kinda' lost you."... and that's not what you want to hear. At least I know what I did wrong and am able to change it to the better :)

On a different note Peter Neubauer is setting up a meeting with the Red Cross in Stockholm and I hope to get some great feedback from them. Hopefully they like what they see...

The past week

2008-08-20T10:46:00.005+02:00

It's been a couple of days since my last post. During this time we've had two setbacks actually:

The meeting with Dr. Yunus did not go at all as we wanted it.
I did not get to be a part of the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows program.

Both of these thing are kind of downers which at least I had high hopes for. But there's nothing to do but to brush the dust of our shoulders and keep on going. Who knows? This might be "the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure" ;)

And speaking of "begin again"... I was contacted by a college of mine mailed who said that he might have an opportunity to preset a project for Morten Lund and asked if the project we work on could fit. Since Morten Lund has his 'WILD' investment portfolio (Worldwide Investments and Involvement in Life Development) I think it just might be a perfect match :) I'm hoping for the best!

Also, thanks to another college of mine (Joakim Back) I've started to plan a happy-hacking prototyping session of our project. I hope to get a couple of great developers together in a room and try make functioning prototype of what it is we want to do. If we have that we are able to show anyone we meet what It is, and not just describe It... and that I think would be of great value!

I am a developer

2008-08-12T10:28:00.003+02:00

This week has been a bit of an in-between week. I'm waiting for mails to be returned, the vacations to end for some of the people I have been in contact with and so on.

The main goal is to raise the funds needed to make this project real. Many of you might know that we have secured funds from Way Group which means that their excellent consultants will develop the system for no profit (which actually means "at loss" since all of their consultants are in profitable assignments most of the time). This means that Way Group will pitch in about half the cost of the system. The other half is what we're chasing at the moment...

Anyhow... Since I'm waiting for stuff and not really feeling that things are going forward with the fundraising this week I have opened up Eclipse (a Java development tool) for the first time in ages. Since my weapon of choice really is Java, I thought that I might as well define the domain model and the interface for the system's services in code... and I must say that it feels really good to create some pseudo-code which has only existed in my head or in documentation before. It's manageable and validating, somehow... I guess you can't take the code out of a developer :)

Problems with a word...

2008-08-07T10:59:00.003+02:00

I have recently realized that the word “charity” has a very negative ring to it in many peoples ears. When I hear the word I think of “a foundation created to promote the public good”. Apparently many think “the providing of goods or money to those in need” and by that relate it directly to the first part of the old saying "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life.". Even though my interpretation of the word includes teaching the man how to fish, I can’t change peoples view of it. That’s why I have decided to stop using “the word” all together. But that presents a problem... What should I use instead that?

As I state in my profile, the innovation I have come up with will be able to drive more money to any “foundation created to promote the public good”. We have decided that we should focus mainly on those working with the UN Millennium Development Goals, and in my mind these goals are all about sustainability (or “teach a man to fish”).

I, personally, have no knowledge of how to save the world. If I tried I would most certainly screw things up even worse then they already are. What we can do with this innovation is generate more money to organizations that know how to save the world. These organizations are the once working to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals, but we can help them do so by providing means.

Back to the question. What should we call the organizations that we want to generate money to, and the action of giving money to them? Should we focus on the word “causes” and say e.g. “giving to a cause”? “Cause” is a good word but in my mind it is zooms out on a macro level; many “foundations created to promote the public good” can focus on the same cause. Any help on this would be very appreciated...

Full feed...

2008-08-04T13:08:00.002+02:00

On request I have changed the RSS feed to include the full post. I didn't do this to begin with since I wanted people to go to the blog and post comments and interact. When I stop and think about it for a second this was obviously an attempt to steer you readers rather then accommodate you. I apologize for my blatant disrespect for you all and right my wrong ;)

Example of a social business

2008-08-01T11:03:00.002+02:00

In this short video Dr. Yunus describes how Grameen Danone came to be and why it is a social business.

Innovations and social business

2008-07-31T09:06:00.003+02:00

I have been reading up a bit on Dr. Yunus' work. He writes and talks about "social business" and "non-loss" as a missing piece of business. Only focusing on profit maximization creates one-dimensional people and organizations, he says, and I fully agree with him.

"Many of the problems in the world remain unresolved because we continue to interpret capitalism too narrowly. In this narrow interpretation we create a one-dimensional human being to play the role of entrepreneur. We insulate him from other dimensions of life, such as, religious, emotional, political dimensions. He is dedicated to one mission in his business life ---- to maximize profit."
Social Business Entrepreneurs Are the Solution, Dr. Muhammad Yunus

While reading this I came to think of another thing. A while back I was at a lecture by Curtis R. Carlson, President and CEO SRI International, where he talked about innovation being the next competitive edge for businesses (the first two being cost and quality). This creates a situation where every company should/will have a "labs"-department to which employees can bring their innovations and get what they need to realize them (if they pass screening, that is). This is what Way Group has done by creating Waylabs. What happens if the innovation, like in my case, is non-profit innovation or social innovation?

If a profitable company invests money in innovations, they expect the successful once (about 8/10 fail miserably) to be moneymakers. This fits perfectly with the profit maximization-model, but if the innovation will make the world better rather then generate money, what then? I see that there are two options here:

1. The company gives/donates money to the project without anything to show for it but their involvement. This generates positive publicity, which works well with profit maximization.

2. The company decides on a "non-loss" strategy and loans the money to the project. This may not be as noble, but the risk is still about 8/10 that the project fails so the nobility is still significant. This also generates positive publicity, and works even better with profit maximization since the investment hopefully is returned.

Why not just give the money if the company wants to do good? Well, the next time someone comes up with a non-profit project the cost is equally high. This will create a situation where the company wont go for some projects since they have already given money to others (read this article on a similar subject). With the non-loss strategy the company can have a dedicated amount of money that goes in and out of these projects over time. But what if 8/10 non-profit projects fails? When it comes to profitable innovations, the once that succeed pays of in multitude for the once that doesn't. The non-profit innovations could follow the same principals; they share a collective responsibility to regenerate the non-loss investments that the company has put in. This means that the 2/10 projects that succeed will pay back all losses made on failed non-profit projects.

I think that this model has another effect as well. It ensures a healthy economic strategy for the do-good projects. When a project is released it has to, according to me, be self reliant. If the project relies on charity, once that charity stops coming the project sinks. With this model, the project will only see the light of day if there is a financial model that can support the project as well as pay back the investment made in it.

The project I work on will be self reliant. This means that if anyone would like to make a non-loss investment in it, just give me a call or send me a mail and I'll tell you all about what it is we want to do and how we intend to do it!

Fantastic news!

2008-07-30T09:23:00.004+02:00

Yesterday Mats Weidmar contacted me and said that Dr. Muhammad Yunus (awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize) has accepted to talk to us! From what I know, Mats has sent Dr. Yunus' staff a presentation and a short paper describing our innovation and based on that he has granted us a 30 minute phone meeting. If that's not a breakthrough I don't know what is...

The next 5000 days

2008-07-29T13:54:00.004+02:00

I just saw a video from December 2007 of Kevin Kelly where he talks about the Web being only 5000 days old and what he thinks will happen in the next 5000 days. There are a lot of things you might know or see, but his way on looking at it is interesting. Take a look at the video and let me know what you think.

Kevin Kelly: Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web

I think that if you are starting up a web based project today, you have to take into account the things he is talking about; semantic web, ubiquitousness, sharing of information and so on.
If you don't at least think of these things, I believe the odds are against you.

Google and Gapminder

2008-07-29T10:28:00.004+02:00

What does it mean when a foundation owns a piece of software or an innovation? Since we´re in the process of starting a foundation for my innovation I wanted to look into this, and I came to think of the Gapminder Foundation.

Gapminder is a foundation that was started by Professor Hans Rosling at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Prof. Rosling has an incredible understanding of the statistics that describes counties development over time and Gapminder developed a software that visualized these statistics in a way that anyone can understand it.

To my knowledge, Prof. Rosling's major public break-though came when he talked at TED 2006 and presented "the best stats you've ever seen" in a fantastically enthusiastic and engaging way. What did this result in? Google bought the Gapminder software for an undisclosed sum of money...

Is that what we want? No. My innovation is a non-profit project with the aim of changing the world for the better, and that is not something we want to sell for personal profit. Why did Prof. Rosling do it then? Well, he didn't really...

"It is a charity that has sold the programme so I haven't had any money." says Hans Rosling.

The Gapminder Foundations statues says that "Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.". Selling their software to Google enables them to work towards their goal, and should in no way discredit neither the Gapminder Foundation nor Prof. Rosling.

In my case, I do not see a potential sale of my innovation but there will always be people that are suspisious of charity. I think that the Gapminder case shows that if the innovation is owned by a foundation it is hard for anyone to doubt the sensarity of our attempt to change the world.

Dr. Yunus

2008-07-28T09:37:00.004+02:00

One thing that has happened during the last couple of weeks is that Mats Wiedmar, a college of mine and the CEO of Dotway, was at a Microsoft conference. The keynote speaker there was Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner 2006, and the fantastic thing is that Mats actually got the opportunity to send Dr. Yunus a presentation of our project. It will be extremely interesting to hear what Dr. Yunus has to say about what it is we want to create. Big thanks to Mats for making this possible!

I'm back

2008-07-28T08:43:00.000+02:00

Well, it was quite a while since my last blog post and I've been a bit ashamed for that. My biggest fear is that I've scared away readers due to inactivity. I'll see If I can't do anything about that the coming days.

What is the status of the project, you're asking? To mention a few things I have

... had a coupe of days of semi-vacation, meaning that I've tried only to answer mails and maintain contacts in need of maintenance.

... applied to the Pop!Tech Social Innovations Fellows Program, and I've been told that I'll get an answer this week.

... sent my presentation to TED and "applied" for a three-minute talk (I don't remember if I mentioned this before, but Rafe recommended me to talk at TED which was pretty flattering) and gotten great response from them. In September I'l know if I'll get up on stage or not at TED.

... formalized how the innovation should be handled from a foundation/company point of view, and I've registered domains matching these thoughts.

I'll try and summarize a couple of things later on in the blog, but right now I have to get some stuff out of my head and down on paper.