Andrew Sprinz's posts

Over the past few months we've encouraged our peers to create fresh and innovative fundraising campaigns for the famine in East Africa as part of the 50/50 Project. At the same time, we set out to break down some of the barriers that often face online fundraising campaigns. It's been an interesting process (that started with a simple site to showcase the projects that our partners created) that has since evolved into a platform offering two key barrier-busting features:

1. A mechanism for projects to start gathering donations immediately. Simple enough, but complicated by a self-imposed caveat: all funds donated had to go directly to charity–no middle-man, no fees, no set-up costs. 100% of money donated right into the charity's bank account.
2. An API allowing projects to integrate into the 50/50 platform in order to track, analyse and have some fun with their donor data.

Currently, it looks a little something like this for US projects:

At the end of last week Tim asked us what we'd learned from 50/50. Confronted with such a seemingly impossible question, I floundered.

Stepping back a bit, what is it that we were trying to learn? As he puts it:

"We've all been trying to work out how to leverage networks and new models of digital engagement to raise money for famine relief."

As we reported yesterday, we have had so many great suggestions posted to Good by Ideas that we have decided to try to do justice to as many of them as possible by building a temporary countdown site. Online for just 50 days, this site will showcase some great fundraisers and their efforts, as well as telling some of the stories of those affected in East Africa – and we are assembling it as we speak!

Web technology moves fast, especially now we've made it through the dark ages of Internet Explorer, however, it would seem that we're yet to reach the enlightenment, to shed the constraints of a single platform web. It's time to move on; it's no longer acceptable to create web interfaces that don't – even on the most basic level – embrace platform agnostic development.

It's no secret that we're pretty huge fans of Instagram, so I won't spend too much time waxing lyrical about its potential (Tim is probably your man for that) instead, I'd like open up something that we've been working on to allow us to rapidly develop real-time Instagram-fed web apps.

Since the API was announced in February, only a few (albeit fantastic) real-time Instagram apps have surfaced. Which is pretty strange; this innovation could, and should, finally push us away from the photo-bank model, and into the stream.

While scanning a recent study on crowd behaviour I started to ponder the hows and whens of launching a web service; how can we best drive an idea into the crowd?

The study begins by reminding us of a fairly obvious fact about opinion and crowd feedback, assuming wisdom is what you're going for (the crowd could equally decide your idea is doomed to failure, which is probably a good time to get out) this is pretty useful information:

[…]certain conditions must be met for crowd wisdom to emerge. Members of the crowd ought to have a variety of opinions, and to arrive at those opinions independently.

Makes sense, this is why we expend so much energy testing on diverse user groups before releasing a service into the wild. However, it then goes on to conclude that the wisdom of crowds can be polluted by the cross-pollination of opinions:

Ideas are pretty useful. Without them we wouldn't have much going for us as a species – they help drive evolution; keep us happy, busy, warm, satiated.

In the realm of the geek, he who has the best idea is King, or at least, was; something has invaded our space recently: the investor. The investor has turned a world that was once driven by passion — in which the only currency was e-kudos — into a simple search for that ever elusive next big thing.