Kopernik : Connecting technology with people who need it the most

Incase you haven’t discovered the difference in the writing style – from well put together prose to someone writing a personal diary, here is the revelation. I am the person who does the videos and not the writing. That said, Ria is on vacation and will be back soon.

This morning I woke up and was thinking of the next groundbreaking idea that changes the world (I do that occasionally). I thought of the shortest way of getting design for the emerging world really on its feet. Here is a list of things from my diary this morning -

1. Go places
2. Meet with NGO’s
3. Offer them your awesome design help
4. Come back wherever home is for you
5. Raise money for the project from the great crowd-sourcing tools out there
6. Employ people
7. Get the project on its feet
8. See lots of smiling faces and then turn the whole thing into an award winning documentary.
9. Win an award

If you are thinking of stealing this idea, you are late in the game. Kopernik partially does those things and does them even better (other than the film part). Instead of going all over the world looking for projects and spending your wives hard earned money, they have a grassroots approach to the problem. The NGO’s are encouraged to submit proposals for the technological and design help they need. These proposals are assessed by the donors. Kopernik raises funds for the chosen organizations through crowd-funding. Once the funds have been raised, the proposal is handed over to the technology providers, who manufacture the product and ship it to the users. On implementation, the recipients have to report back on the use of the technology/product/ design in use.

The whole service seems flawless but when I look at the fund-raising page, it seems that they have a long way to go. That said, Kopernik seems to be in good hands. It was started by World Bank and UN Development Fund alums Ewa Wojkowska and Toshihiro Nakamura. This model eliminates the top down approach of the traditional aid agencies and promotes more grassroots level, bottoms up approach of getting design and technology to the right people.

For designers wanting to step into the social realm, it does make one elephant size problem really simple – that of distribution. By giving the reins of decision making into the hands of the organizations that work within the community, the process becomes more streamlined and evolved and gives all of us some hope.

Here is one of their success stories