12 years ago, an unknown American's idea to do business differently

http://www.p-ced.com/History/tabid/57/Default.aspx

Today, a Marshall Plan

http://www.p-ced.com/Projects/Ukraine/AMarshallPlanforUkraine/tabid/69/Default.aspx

Tomorrow, a foreign policy based on smart power.

http://www.csis.org/smartpower/

Following up on a project proposal. The publication of a plan to offset the cost of major childcare reform with IT revenues in a full cost recovery program/

http://en.for-ua.com/analytics/2007/08/06/121201.html

http://en.for-ua.com/analytics/2007/08/06/121201.html

It seems one of my efforts has attracted some diplomatic interest, as I learned last week when a collaboration to raise signatures for a petition to recognise the famine-genocide period of Ukraine hit their government news site.

Today I learned that their embassy is sending over a cultural attache. Not to me fortunately to my collaborator who's Ukrainian.

Now he might even notice the Net2 button. Well if it was still there he might,  now it's just a line of text, something about collaborating.

A business working in what's regarded as nonprofit territory gets some strange reactions,  incomprehension that you're doing stuff with your own funds rather than someone elses.

Whether anyone else here is in similar circunstances, I don't know but there are two most common. "You're doing this stuff and you're a business, you must be a liar and a crook" more amusing the response when in Russia "You want to create businesses for total strangers, you must be crazy, or a communist"

Well I hope we're not taken as liars and crooks, the rest I'm more ambivalent about.        

When we talk of social tools, especially here, there's often the assumtion that these tools are being used in a beneficial way, to collaborate share and engage.

Yet there are circumstances, when, fired with enthusiasm for a shared purpose, one attempts to engage with no response. Some even turn off the ability to add comments,  rendering perhaps a pulpit, more than a social space. I've even seen social efforts being pilloried in these kinds of blogs, with all sorts of defamation as content. I've even encountered bloggers who go overseas where cyber crime laws are more lax to take advantage of the freedom. 

Pleased to see today that a small collaboration effort started two weeks ago, entered the news section of a government website today. We had a simple DotNetNuke framework up within a day, linked with other campaigning groups and gathered public domain material to create:  

http://www.holodomor.org.uk/ 

With the following response a few hours ago: 

http://www.kmu.gov.ua/control/en/publish/news_article?art_id=71671146&ca...

More relevant to our efforts was something that took nearly a year, raising awareness of childcare conditions for the disabled, a week ago we saw it bear fruit.   

There's been a few lone voices advocating for business participationin poverty eradication over recent years. Today, in a conversation on the omidyar network, a critical mass seems to have gathered in a conversation which might at last prove to be the tipping point:  

http://www.omidyar.net/group/foodchain/news/207/

Bookmark the page, it might be part of social enterprise history in future! 

There are many sources for research into the plight of social orphans, ie those in institutional care due to economic circumstance. Today I found a summary of some of the more heavy reading: 

ORPHAN STATISTICS

The statistics will amaze you:
1. There are over 100,000 orphans in Ukraine.
2. The older an orphan gets, the chances for his/her adoption drastically decrease.
3. Each year many orphans between 15 to 18-years-old leave the orphanages.
4. Most of these orphans have no one to turn to for help.
5. About 10% of them will commit suicide after leaving the orphanage before their eighteenth birthday.
6. 60% of the girls will end up in prostitution
7. 70% of the boys will enter a life of crime
8. Only 27% of these youth will find work
These youth live in a country that labels them as “useless” and gives no assistance to turn their lives around. It is a society that has created its own problem by placing thousands of children in orphanages, and then when they come of age, they give them no assistance to lead a successful life. It is almost as if the system places them in trade schools to become “slaves of the State” to fill the low-income jobs of unskilled labor and remain the under-trodden, 2nd-class citizens that the majority of the population of Ukraine believe that they are.

Only by joining here, have I realised what tagging is all about and I'm sold. What a great way to get out a message.

My interests include the rose revolutions particularly in Ukraine, institutional childcare, modern day slavery, poverty reduction and social business.

So if anyone else  here is interested in these topics, I'd be glad to be part of your network

my username on del.icio.us is Jeff.Mowatt 

Sometime last year I did a little reasearch into what some of these packages had to offer. I had several contstraints, wanting something compatible with the ASP & SQLServer platform I used as a business software developer, the appearance of a website rather than a blog and relative ease of construction.

Many of the packages were quite complex in the context of creating content and allocating permissions and in the end DotNetNuke seemed to satisfy most of my needs.

Most of them had a developer community doing interesting things with opensource and value added additions but when it came to collaboration in building content, there is still a little to be desired. I didn't get around to trying Drupal.