Can you help? We need more teams of makers to help us make Good for Ideas...

The crisis in East Africa isn’t getting better. Sadly, it’s likely to get much worse unless the world starts doing more very urgently. 

We’ve teamed up with Tom and friends at Good for Nothing to see if we can make some digital things to raise cash. We wanted to share some of the ideas that have been proposed, and to ask for more support - particularly from other teams of makers.

The first few days of Good by Ideas have seen lots of ideas added. It looks like we’ll end up with many more great ideas than we can make on our own.

We need to find more teams of makers

Our initial plan was to choose one and make it over the course of next weekend in a hackathon. We still plan to do that but now we’re beginning to wonder if we can find some other teams of makers to take some of these ideas and make them at the same time.  

This is how Andrew describes the type of teams we need:

We need teams; micro-agencies within agencies; small groups of dedicated individuals with, at their core, someone to lead/inspire, someone to design and someone to build. A team should be able to claim an idea and turn it around, quickly. They need to be self-sufficient and shit-hot.

Here’s a taster of three ideas that seem to attracting votes

We plan to highlight a few more each day and would love your feedback and comments. If you haven’t added your ideas, or voted on others, please go to Good by Ideas to add them immediately, or to vote on which you think we should go ahead and make at the weekend. We know the site is a bit basic, it was something we re-purposed very quickly.

 

According to the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) and The Guardian, the so far amount raised is falling far short of the funds raised during the initial response periods of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, or the Haiti and Pakistan earthquakes. Worryingly, we actually need to raise about five times as much.

To quote the DEC:

We can’t lose sight of the fact, however, that this is an escalating crisis. It is now for the UN to act and for governments worldwide to dig deep to alleviate the suffering.

The UN appeal for countries covered by the DEC appeal, including South Sudan, stand at just over $3bn. Less than half that has been met.'

Meanwhile, the crisis is escalating with the UN declaring three more regions in Somalia to be suffering from famine, and expressing fears the crisis may also spread to northern Uganda, where more than half a million people already face food insecurity.

There are other ways you can help as well

We also need people to help us spread the word - perhaps you know someone or a team who would be able to help us make stuff. Perhaps you can help by re-tweeting or writing about one of the ideas or the initiative. Whatever you can do will be really helpful.