Can the internet, social media and mobile apps be deployed in some way to help non-profits achieve goals such as getting all kids to read by third grade, improving health literacy, and boosting student interest in science, math and technology?
More than 100 people will gather this Wednesday and Thursday from the seemingly disparate worlds of information technology and non-profits at a venue just North of the Golden Gate Bridge to brainstorm together in order to come up with some potentially powerful ideas, and a follow-up action plan.
Among those in attendance will be Twitter-co-founder Biz Stone (above right,) Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, and the United States’ Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, as well a TechNet CEO Rey Ramsey (above left) who organized the whole effort.
While it might sound unlikely, the serendipitous spread and use of Twitter in crisis situations around the world illustrates that information technologies can play important roles in enabling social change.
“Our objective is quite simply to find advancements and breakthroughs and accelerations in the social sector,” Ramsey told TPM’s Idea Lab in an interview about his project. “We’re really looking to try to accelerate social innovation, and so the idea is to bring together subject matter experts and technologists, and others to try to look for those advances that are enabled by technology.”
Ramsey says that the participants of the meetings this week are expected to come up with a blueprint for action that will be shared with others in the non-profit sector around the country, and Converge, the non-profit that’s running this effort under the wing of TechNet, will go about finding the human and financial resources to follow-through with the ideas and plans that emerge.
As the former CEO of One Economy Corporation, a non-profit that connects low-income homes with high-speed internet connections, Ramsey is a veteran of the idea of using technology to affect social change.
“You take the technology that may be created for one thing, and oftentimes it’s adapted for use for something that’s completely different. That’s kind of what I’m looking at here,” he said.
