2016

2016

How technology is making the world better

„ ON THE ONE HAND, TECHNOLOGY COULD MAKE THINGS A LOT BETTER, ON THE OTHER, IT MIGHT JUST MAKE THINGS REALLY WEIRD.”

„ ON THE ONE HAND, TECHNOLOGY COULD MAKE THINGS A LOT BETTER, ON THE OTHER, IT MIGHT JUST MAKE THINGS REALLY WEIRD.”

LOUISA HEINRICH, DESIGNER

New name, new look, new info. The Trendreport is now known as the trendradar (more dynamic!), it‘s colourful (happier!) and off ers exclusively researched articles (on rhinoceroses!) Our motivation: We want to get more people interested in the trendradar.

ALL NEW.

The trendradar now works to include more than just our former audience of solely niche digital organisations with social ambitions. Now, in the full expansiveness of society, it’s engaging citizens including friends of the rhinoceros, who we think will take page 32 especially to heart. People in institutional settings also tend to enjoy reading the trendradar and feel inspired by it, as are foundations, government devel-opment co-operations and start-ups with social goals; as do people to whom common welfare is more important than money, not to mention people who are excited about new technologies and innovative solutions.

Since “technology”, “world” and “improve-ment” are big words, we have divided trend -radar into smaller chunks. MACHINES, MONEY and WORK are the three, admit-tedly, equally large words we are using to categorise our trends, cases and articles.

We ourselves are strongly aff ected by the concept of WORK at this particular time. We would like to share our experiences from restructuring the betterplace lab. The signature mark of this prologue represents one of our most important changes: better-place no longer has a boss. The team is the boss now, and our work is based on a com-petence hierarchy (see p. 74).

As for MONEY, we are gearing ourselves toward the fi nancial inclusion trend, which is more relevant than ever, considering the cabinet’s decision on the right to a check-ing account. Let‘s face it: without access to the fi nancial system the “unbanked” don‘t stand much of a chance of improving their living situation.

Mobile banking has started improving things in Asia, Africa and America. And did you know: Parasitic algorithms are turning us into Robin Hood. So, there is quite a diff erence between for-profi t and not-for-profi t.

This issue begins with MACHINES: Firm when it comes to drones and the Internet of Things, yielding when it comes to big data and a society that is overwhelmed by it. More and more citizens are using aff ordable sensors to measure air and water pollution (and thus undermine the governmental monopoly on information), and NGOs fl y assistance in using drones. What does the Privacy Commissioner have to say about that? And then there are the rhinoceroses...

We end on a LONGING note. That’s when those to whom we presented the issue‘s structure moaned: Machines, money, work and longing. Oh, my! Wouldn‘t it be great if refugees got to benefi t from our new tech-nologies? They do; our trend confi rms it (p. 94). What if we no longer had to worry about borders? That’s what’s happening in Estonia right now (p.122). What if we could age with dignity? The smart home can help (p.118).

Could you help us get better at what we do? Please send your feedback to dennis.buchmann@betterplace.org. But for now: May the reading of this magazine help you generate many ideas!

Your betterplace lab team From left to right: Medje Prahm, Stephan Peters, Paul Schapitz, Dennis Buchmann, Kathleen Ziemann, Ben Mason, Jana Breidenbach, Franziska Kreische. Not pictured here, but a member of the team: Angela Ullrich, Moritz Eckert and Sebastian Schwieckler.

32

New name, new look, new info. The Trendreport is now known as the trendradar (more dynamic!), it‘s colourful (happier!) and off ers exclusively researched articles (on rhinoceroses!) Our motivation: We want to get more people interested in the trendradar.

ALL NEW.

The trendradar now works to include more than just our former audience of solely niche digital organisations with social ambitions. Now, in the full expansiveness of society, it’s engaging citizens including friends of the rhinoceros, who we think will take page 32 especially to heart. People in institutional settings also tend to enjoy reading the trendradar and feel inspired by it, as are foundations, government devel-opment co-operations and start-ups with social goals; as do people to whom common welfare is more important than money, not to mention people who are excited about new technologies and innovative solutions.

Since “technology”, “world” and “improve-ment” are big words, we have divided trend -radar into smaller chunks. MACHINES, MONEY and WORK are the three, admit-tedly, equally large words we are using to categorise our trends, cases and articles.

We ourselves are strongly aff ected by the concept of WORK at this particular time. We would like to share our experiences from restructuring the betterplace lab. The signature mark of this prologue represents one of our most important changes: better-place no longer has a boss. The team is the boss now, and our work is based on a com-petence hierarchy (see p. 74).

As for MONEY, we are gearing ourselves toward the fi nancial inclusion trend, which is more relevant than ever, considering the cabinet’s decision on the right to a check-ing account. Let‘s face it: without access to the fi nancial system the “unbanked” don‘t stand much of a chance of improving their living situation.

Mobile banking has started improving things in Asia, Africa and America. And did you know: Parasitic algorithms are turning us into Robin Hood. So, there is quite a diff erence between for-profi t and not-for-profi t.

This issue begins with MACHINES: Firm when it comes to drones and the Internet of Things, yielding when it comes to big data and a society that is overwhelmed by it. More and more citizens are using aff ordable sensors to measure air and water pollution (and thus undermine the governmental monopoly on information), and NGOs fl y assistance in using drones. What does the Privacy Commissioner have to say about that? And then there are the rhinoceroses...

We end on a LONGING note. That’s when those to whom we presented the issue‘s structure moaned: Machines, money, work and longing. Oh, my! Wouldn‘t it be great if refugees got to benefi t from our new tech-nologies? They do; our trend confi rms it (p. 94). What if we no longer had to worry about borders? That’s what’s happening in Estonia right now (p.122). What if we could age with dignity? The smart home can help (p.118).

Could you help us get better at what we do? Please send your feedback to dennis.buchmann@betterplace.org. But for now: May the reading of this magazine help you generate many ideas!

Your betterplace lab team From left to right: Medje Prahm, Stephan Peters, Paul Schapitz, Dennis Buchmann, Kathleen Ziemann, Ben Mason, Jana Breidenbach, Franziska Kreische. Not pictured here, but a member of the team: Angela Ullrich, Moritz Eckert and Sebastian Schwieckler.

32

MACHINESMONEYWORK

LONGING

TABLE OF CONTENTS2 PROLOGUE: ALL NEW

6 MACHINES

8 TREND: THE INTERNET OF THINGS

14 CASE: DON’T FLUSH ME

16 CASE: DUSTDUINO

18 CASE: WASPMOTE

20 TREND: GOODNESS DRONES

26 CASE: SYRIA AIRLIFT PROJECT

28 CASE: DRONE ADVENTURES

30 CASE: BIO CARBON ENGINEERING

32 3D PRINTERS SAVE RHINOCEROSES

36 INTERVIEW: DATA GOVERNANCE

IN CIVIL SOCIETY

40 MONEY

42 TREND: FINANCIAL INCLUSION

50 CASE: AIRTEL WEZA

52 CASE: EKGAON

54 CASE: KILIMO SALAMA

56 DIGITAL CSR-TRENDS

60 THE DIGITAL ROBIN HOOD

66 MODELS IN COMPARISON:

NON-PROFIT OR FOR-PROFIT?

72 WORK

74 WHEN THE BOSS IS NO

LONGER THE BOSS

78 LIQUID RECREATION

84 INTERVIEW:

THE FUTURE OF WORK

88 INTERVIEW:

LIFE AS A DIGITAL NOMAD

92 LONGING

94 TREND: DIGITAL REFUGEE ASSISTANC

100 CASE: GHERBTNA

102 CASE: THE WIFI BACKPACK OF

OTVORENA MREŽA

104 CASE: WORKEER

106 INTERVIEW: THE SUCCESSFUL FLUCH-

THELFER.IN(ESCAPE AGENT) CAMPAIGN

110 REALITY-CHECK: WHICH TRENDS ARE

WHICH, HONESTLY?

114 THE LONGING FOR IMPACT

118 HOW HIGH TECH CAN HELP

WITH OLD AGE

122 CITIZENSHIP IN THE CLOUD

126 PHOTO SERIES:

LOW-TECH IN GHANA

130 PUBLICATION DETAILS

132 DAS BETTERPLACE LAB —

WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE DO

134 OUR WRITERS

4 5

MACHINESMONEYWORK

LONGING

TABLE OF CONTENTS2 PROLOGUE: ALL NEW

6 MACHINES

8 TREND: THE INTERNET OF THINGS

14 CASE: DON’T FLUSH ME

16 CASE: DUSTDUINO

18 CASE: WASPMOTE

20 TREND: GOODNESS DRONES

26 CASE: SYRIA AIRLIFT PROJECT

28 CASE: DRONE ADVENTURES

30 CASE: BIO CARBON ENGINEERING

32 3D PRINTERS SAVE RHINOCEROSES

36 INTERVIEW: DATA GOVERNANCE

IN CIVIL SOCIETY

40 MONEY

42 TREND: FINANCIAL INCLUSION

50 CASE: AIRTEL WEZA

52 CASE: EKGAON

54 CASE: KILIMO SALAMA

56 DIGITAL CSR-TRENDS

60 THE DIGITAL ROBIN HOOD

66 MODELS IN COMPARISON:

NON-PROFIT OR FOR-PROFIT?

72 WORK

74 WHEN THE BOSS IS NO

LONGER THE BOSS

78 LIQUID RECREATION

84 INTERVIEW:

THE FUTURE OF WORK

88 INTERVIEW:

LIFE AS A DIGITAL NOMAD

92 LONGING

94 TREND: DIGITAL REFUGEE ASSISTANC

100 CASE: GHERBTNA

102 CASE: THE WIFI BACKPACK OF

OTVORENA MREŽA

104 CASE: WORKEER

106 INTERVIEW: THE SUCCESSFUL FLUCH-

THELFER.IN(ESCAPE AGENT) CAMPAIGN

110 REALITY-CHECK: WHICH TRENDS ARE

WHICH, HONESTLY?

114 THE LONGING FOR IMPACT

118 HOW HIGH TECH CAN HELP

WITH OLD AGE

122 CITIZENSHIP IN THE CLOUD

126 PHOTO SERIES:

LOW-TECH IN GHANA

130 PUBLICATION DETAILS

132 DAS BETTERPLACE LAB —

WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE DO

134 OUR WRITERS

4 5

MACHINESThe industrial revolution is done. Now we are onto the digital one. Nowadays, machines are quiet and precise as they work through ones and zeros, as instructed by us, and they do it by the rules. Add to that their sensomotoric capabilities which keep getting better: Thanks to the Internet of Things, sensors receive input, which is why networked machines are able to autonomously carry out tasks. This includes drones. This chapter outlines how trends can be used for the common good. Also: An interview on how these ones and zeros, like big data, are steering us toward a major overload.

6 MACHINES

MACHINES 7

THE INTERNET OF THINGS

Computers are not only operated by humans. Computers can also operate themselves. When computers are integrated into everyday objects, and these objects gather and save data and interact autonomously with one another, we’re talking about the Internet of Things (IoT). Re-frigerators, washing machines, cars, toilets – by 2020 there will be 50 billion things connected worldwide (for a projected global population of eight billion). By automating more and more processes, these gadgets will save a great deal of work. But what else does the advent of the Internet of Things mean in practice? How big is the potential for social good? Can it help solve problems facing society?

BY ANGELA ULLRICH

8 MACHINES

The Internet of Things connects real-world objects virtually. Fitted with the right sensors, individually identifi able objects be-come intelligent and exchange information with each other via an infrastructure simi-lar to the Internet. The mass of information and data communicated in this way is then aggregated and evaluated by algorithms to produce a pre-programmed action. This action is carried out without any further human intervention. Naturally humans are the ones who put these processes in place to begin with by installing the sensors, designing the software, defi ning and moni-toring the functionality and performance of the system. But increasingly not only nor-mal operation but also maintenance work and even adaptations to better achieve system objectives can be carried out by the devices themselves. The result of this is a self-sustaining process which continues to improve and become more intelligent over time.

The good side of the Internet of Things

Areas of application for IoT solutions are very diverse, ranging from optimised agri-cultural practices to intelligent organisation of cities, healthcare provision, energy us-age and environmental protection. The signifi cant media attention that the IoT is currently receiving is also strongly driven by its latent economic potential. An im-portant branch is represented by so-called “wearables” – small computer systems that users wears on their bodies, which measure data about things such as pulse rate, body temperature and movement. The market for such devices is growing by millions of euros every year. Similarly in agriculture, where networked machines and optimised crops bring about big gains in effi ciency, the market volume for IoT applications in the USA is estimated at 1.3 billion dollars.

From a non-profi t perspective, we are mainly interested in IoT solutions which

also have a social impact. The bandwidth of possible spheres of application is broad. Since we like to show trends through concrete examples, we’re going to focus on problem solving in the area of envi-ronmental protection and natural disaster management.

Sensors are not just becoming increasing-ly aff ordable, but also smaller and more robust. With this, not only are costs for manufacturing and maintenance falling, but the possibilities of deployment are also increasing in all areas – including the third sector. Add to this the fact that there is already specialised Free Open Source Software (FOSS) that anybody can use to process sensor-generated data for their own purposes.

An example of this is the open physical computing platform Arduino, which pro-vides software and hardware with which interactive objects are controlled and connected with computer software applica-tions. Open data services like Opensensors, by means of which millions of data streams from every networked device can be trans-mitted in real time via the internet. And fi nally, there are also software platforms like xively, through which well processed data is made publicly available.

Since open source software is also ma-turing, it is becoming accessible even to users without advanced technical exper-tise. In short, access to the Internet of Things is becoming increasingly simple and aff ordable.

Sensors report on water quality

Sensors placed directly into waterways make it possible for water quality and their fl uctuations to be continually measured and reported, so that immediate measures can be taken if there is a problem. The Wa-ter Innovation Centre at Bath University

MACHINES 9

has developed a very aff ordable sensor for this which measures the percentage of toxins in drinking water with the help of bacterial cultures, and sounds an alarm when necessary. The robust Smart Water Platform from the company Libelium also provides an exact image of water quality and is particularly suited to being posi-tioned in diffi cult to reach locations or harsh conditions.

In New York, the project Don’t Flush Me helps protect inner-city water canals from contamination with the help of an IoT application. Whenever sewage drains – measured by sensors – exceed a critical level, the neighbourhood is warned directly so that they can avoid sending more sewage into the pipeline.

Sensors can be used to measure not only quality but water levels. In future wells across the world may be fi tted with cheap measuring devices, so that people know in advance whether a well will bear water, saving them many kilometres of walking for nothing. This could also result in trans-parency for donors: if they have given to a non-profi t which has built wells, this could provide a clear indication to donors even far away of how eff ective and sustainable this has been.

A bottom-up approach to air quality

Air pollution is a life-threatening plague in many places across the world, in partic-ular in capitals of Africa and South-East Asia. According to the fi gures from the World Health Organisation (WHO), around seven million people die each year as a result of air pollution; almost 90 per cent of the world’s urban population breathes air which has concentrations of pollutants above the maximum recommended levels. Publicly available data is usually not suffi -cient to gain a clear picture of the problem.A new generation of cheap, internet-ready

measuring devices off er the possibility to measure the air pollution at minimal cost, in a very decentralised way, providing much more comprehensive coverage. They can help to complement the existing read-ings and provide at least a rough check on their accuracy. An example of this is the Air Quality Egg, an egg-shaped device that records carbon monoxide and nitric oxide levels via wifi from an external sensor, and sends this data in real time to the open data service Opensensors. On the Xively platform, this data is visualised and made accessible to everybody.

Further examples of these kinds of aff ord-able measuring devices that anyone can use are the Smart Citizen Kit, the DustDuino and the Motes from Wimoto. Using a You-Tube instruction video, you can build the devices yourself, and for just 55 US-dol-lars, you can monitor the air quality right outside your own front door. People will certainly make the valid criticism that the quality and comparability of the data from such devices is not yet able to keep up with those of established, expensive measuring devices – but they can still deliver valuable data. Also, they can create an improved and more interactive understanding of air qual-ity in the area, and this may make people think more about their behaviour, which in the end will lead to better air quality.

Environmental protection through IoT Applications

The causes of the poor air quality in major cities is above all car traffi c and the burning of carbon, oil and gas. Ineffi cient energy use in buildings also plays a part. Accord-ing to a study from the climate research group Carbon War Room, the Internet of Things can contribute to reducing annual CO2 emissions by 9.1 gigatonnes, which corresponds to about 17 per cent of annual emissions. That would be a huge step on the way to saving the climate, which could

10 MACHINES

be achieved above all through the use of intelligent devices in the fi elds of energy, traffi c planning and agriculture. Smart solutions that effi ciently structure private and industrial energy use and which also fi nd ideal routes for planes, boats and cars without traffi c jams and long search-es for parking spots would contribute the lion’s share here. But effi cient farming practices, optimised animal husbandry and networked machines would also lead to immense resource savings in agricul-ture, which at the same time would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Disaster response through IoT

Sensors cannot actually avert natural di-sasters, but through early detection and warning they can help to get people to safety in time. This is how bushfi res and fl ooding have been recognised in Spain, with the help of Libelium sensors. The sensors, attached to trees, measure factors which change during bushfi res (tempera-ture, air humidity, CO2 and CO). When

critical combinations of these readings occur, the fi re brigade is immediately in-formed. The sensor network gives an alert with precise GPS coordinates in order to directly locate the fi re. Similarly, in rivers and dams, water levels and movements are recorded with the help of sensors, and transmitted quickly when critical levels are reached.

A few years ago, Rio de Janeiro was hit by a terrible storm that left many people dead. Following this, in cooperation with IBM Smarter Cities, the city founded the Rio Operations Centre. A network of measuring stations record data on water supplies, the electricity network, weather and traffi c, and send them directly on to the Centre.

In the case of an emergency – which can range from traffi c disruptions to severe storms – the Operations Centre informs its more than 50,000 followers via Twitter and sends notifi cations via SMS or email.

To Opportunities and Risks

MACHINES 11

Risks:

• Durability of the sensors is important, since other-wise a huge amount of waste is generated through all the used up sensors, which may not all be collected.

• Open source software must be made broadly avail-able. The threshold of required technical expertise cannot be too high, otherwise many people will be excluded.

• The enormous learning potential created by the IoT can only be fulfi lled if data is made broadly available. Data collected by public agencies where individual privacy is not at issue – for example air pollution lev-els – should be open by default.

• More comprehensive standards and regulations need to be put into place.

Opportunities:

• Monitoring and real-time data on environmental sit-uations, which brings with it rapid intervention and quality preservation.

• Democratisation of quality controls, since for very little money, anybody can measure environmental standards locally and in a decentralised fashion, and respond to this with the appropriate attitude.

• Social impact can be better measured and made more quantifi able. This promotes transparency for investors/supporters, but also for the non-profi ts themselves.

12 MACHINES

Our world is becoming more networked every day. For designers, developers and companies, the Internet of Things provides a playground for developing products and applications that have never existed before. But we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves: we are really standing right at the starting line. For many of the examples mentioned here, there still needs to be a person somewhere coordinating the use of the data being transmitted. It is only when devices and machines carry out actions entirely without our intervention that the Internet of Things reaches its full development.Though this is an exciting prospect for many, it also raises a lot of questions and new, unprecedented challenges. This scepticism applies perhaps above all to the non-profi t sector, where the users and benefi ciaries are typically disadvantaged groups. We should be very cautious in how we collect and manage their data. We need to ensure that automating processes does not erode accountability for their wellbeing.For this reason, some experts who work in the fi eld of the Internet of Things have decided to set out a manifesto in which they have nailed down a Code of Conduct for themselves and for others. Without claiming to be complete, and welcoming comments and add-ons, they commit for example only to develop products that have a genuine use for people, which benefi t all participants and stakeholders and which conform to certain security and data privacy requirements.

SUMMARY

MACHINES 13

DON’T FLUSH MEWith the aid of an IoT app, the Don’t Flush Me project helps protect inner-city waterways of New York from pollution. Additionally, it seeks to increase people’s environmental awareness and bring about positive changes in behaviour.

14 MACHINES

Whenever sewer levels (measured by sensors) exceed a critical limit, the sur-rounding neighbourhood is immediately notifi ed to ensure that they do not con-tinue pumping waste into the system. Washing machines are stopped, toilets temporarily cease to fl ush, and the

washing up is put off until water levels fall suffi ciently and the all-clear is given. The warning signal is directly triggered through a network of sensors and can take the form of a light that shines in a particular colour.

www.dontfl ush.me

MACHINES 15

DUSTDUINOThere used to be little that anybody who was worried about the air quality where they live could do about it. It’s no use going to the authorities unless you can prove the point with emission measurements. But it’s precisely these authorities which have a monopoly over the data from measuring stations. At least for now.

16 MACHINES

Whereas some air quality monitors mea-sure levels of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, DustDuino concentrates exclu-sively on the level of dust particles present in the air, which are proven to be primarily responsible for the majority of respiratory and lung-related disorders. The advantage of only measuring levels of one substance is above all that many of these devices can be distributed very quickly and are very sim-ple to use. The sensor is combined with an Arduino-compatible board and transmits the data it collects directly to a server.

DustDuino makes the data it gathers open, meaning the information can be utilised by anyone for a range of purposes. Citizens of a community can use such information as a basis for demanding specifi c regulations to improve air quality, and in the long run, help reduce the amount of fi ne dust parti-cles in the air that we all breathe.

www.dustduino.org

MACHINES 17

WASPMOTEThe Waspmote Smart Water Platform from the company Libelium is able to analyse water quali-ty in hostile and inaccessible environments, powered by solar panels.

18 MACHINES

This device is fi tted out with several sen-sors that measure various dimensions of water purity in drinking water, swimming pools and rivers. Data about acidity, salin-ity and concentration of metals is gathered and evaluated in real time. This yields an accurate picture of the water quality, allowing quick intervention if a safety lim-it is exceeded. Critical results are made

public, sending automated email and SMS notifi cations to aff ected people. The hardware is considerably cheaper than previously available kits, so rapid scaling may be possible.

www.libelium.com/smart-water-sen-sors-monitor-water-quality-leakages-wastes-in-rivers-lakes-sea/

MACHINES 19

DRONES FOR GOOD

Drones diff er from ground vehicles in that they fl y through the air by remote control, mean-ing they can potentially reach every point on Earth, and are diffi cult to obstruct. Drones are a source of fun for hobbyists, a possible delivery method for companies, and a lethal weapon for militaries – meanwhile NGOs are using them to save lives. The excitement around drones has reached the non-profi t sector, and they are already being deployed to coordinate aid operations and provide supplies to crisis regions.

BY FRANZISKA KREISCHE

20 MACHINES

Drones have the military to thank for their bad image. Headlines such as “Death in Yemen: US Drone Accidentally Kills 15 Wedding Guests” are not uncommon, and are the most immediate connotation of the word drone in the media and general public – even though only one percent of all drones worldwide are deployed in the military sector. We should bear in mind the words of robotics expert Raff aele D’Andrea: “how we use drones is not a technical but rather a societal question”.Many people are engaged in deploying drones for good causes. Take Adam Klap-tocz for example, the founder of Drone Adventures. The organisation, founded in Switzerland in 2013, has already deployed drones for many humanitarian projects, including mapping land-mine areas in Bos-nia-Herzigovina, estimating radioactivity levels in Fukushima, photographing the Namibian desert, monitoring population numbers in protected animal species, or measuring and documenting the damage caused by Typhoon Haiyan in the Phil-ippines in 2013 and co-ordinating relief eff orts. Since 2014 the UAE Drones for Good Award celebrates the best ideas in the fi eld to highlight positive potential and encourage new projects. But what exact-ly are drones? Put simply, a drone is an unmanned fl ying object. In contrast with remote-controlled hobby aeroplanes or he-licopters, a drone is capable of fl ying with much more autonomy and intelligence, including automatically avoiding obstacles. However, the extent of their autonomy depends on the software used to program them. A greater degree of autonomy re-quires more sophisticated software, and this comes with a bigger price-tag.

110% growth

There are two types of drones: fi xed-wing drones and rotary-wing drones. Fixed-wing drones look like small aeroplanes and are often used for mapping territories and for

generating 3D models. Their advantage is that they are fast and can fl y long distanc-es. Rotary-wing drones resemble small helicopters – they are divided into sub-cat-egories depending on the number of rotors they have. A quadrocopter for instance has four rotor blades. Rotary-wing drones can take off and land vertically, which makes them more versatile in terms of where they can operate, and also means they can also hover on the spot and take photos of a particular site or examine buildings in de-tail (fi xed-wing drones would need to turn around and fl y back).

A recent market research study estimat-ed that the market for the civilian use of drones in 2020 will be worth over a bil-lion US dollars (in comparison 15 million US-dollars in 2014). That amounts to a growth rate of 110% within six years. Why the sudden growth? It’s due in part to the sharp decrease in production costs over the past few years. Moreover, drones can undertake relatively cheap tasks that have historically been expensive (such as aerial photography). In the long run, they will su-persede satellite photography.

The advantages of drones over satellites are clear: they fl y lower and can also take pictures under cloud cover – at ten times the resolution. That’s particularly import-ant in the aftermath of natural disasters such as hurricanes, where clouds might linger for days after the initial event. Satel-lite pictures are also much more expensive and diffi cult to obtain, especially for small NGOs who want to use them for their work. Drones can be deployed within minutes of a catastrophe to deliver pictures, whereas satellites usually require between 48 and 72 hours. Drones can also take multiple pictures, while a satellite needs up to fi ve days to photograph an area a second time. Imagery from drones can also be used to track changes in the situation virtually in real-time.

MACHINES 21

Nobody can aff ord their own satellite, but they can have a drone.

Satellites cost roughly 300 million US-dol-lars to manufacture, and two million dollars every year to maintain, a cost be-yond the realm and reach of non-profi ts. The price of drones today ranges from 500 US-dollars for a basic device with a range of two to three kilometres up to 20,000 US-dollars for a professional device with software to create high-defi nition maps and 3D models.

Drones fi ll the gap between satellites and technology on the ground. They can moni-tor, transport things, or be used as a tool.

Monitoring: Drones can not only take high-resolution photos of landscapes and natural disaster sites, but also generate 3D imagery. Many aid organisations use such pictures to analyse damage and prioritise relief operations. For instance, the UN de-ployed drones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to monitor crisis areas in order to ascertain the current location of rebel groups, document ground fi ghting, or track the fl ow of refugees. Because they are quiet and can often operate unnoticed (meaning they have less chance of being shot down than helicopters), drones are well suited to crisis regions and politically contested areas.

Journalists use drones in places where their reporting is prohibited. For example, during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, a New Yorker journalist fl ew a drone over an area that was cordoned off by po-lice, enabling them to document the extent of the process. The photos taken by the “Occucopter” then travelled around the world.

Transport: Drones can penetrate areas that are diffi cult to access within a short space of time and deliver important goods such as food or medication. In this way, the

team from the Syria Airlift Project provides supplies to Syrian refugees around the bor-der between Turkey and Syria, which they are otherwise unable to access due to the tense military situation.

The start-up Matternet has developed small courier drones in order to deliver medication to areas with low levels of in-frastructural development. Matternet has developed a network of funnel-shaped loading stations in order to expand the range of their drones. The transport of two kilograms of cargo supposedly costs just 25 cents, which is much more aff ordable than building conventional infrastructure.

Drones as Tools: Many developers are also working on ways of using drones as versatile tools. For instance, in future per-sons missing in the wake of the natural disasters will be able to be detected using heat sensors. Drones can also help in the area of conservation: the company Bio Car-bon Engineering is working on drones that can identify barren sections in forests and drop seeds there. They then observe the germinating seeds and provide them with additional nutrients if necessary. Aquila, the drone belonging to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, will soon ensure that the highest possible number of people in the world gain access to the internet by deliver-ing Wifi hotspots to remote regions. Google is working on a similar program supple-mented by giant balloons with antennas.

Code of conduct for drone pilots

Despite the euphoria surrounding drones, there are still questions that remain unre-solved, especially around issues of security and data protection. As manufacturing costs continue to fall and more private in-dividuals and aid organisations begin using drones, airspace is getting increasingly crowded. This is particularly a problem following disasters: private drones in the

22 MACHINES

USA, for example, wanting to take spec-tacular photos of fi res, have hindered fi re fi ghting operations, with the fi re brigade having to land their aircraft in order to avoid collisions.

As a result, the Californian government developed the “Know Before You Fly” cam-paign to educate the public on rules and consequences regarding unmanned aircraft, as existing standards were not stringent enough. In Germany, too, regulations are not yet coordinated – every now and then a hobby plane crosses the path of a passenger airline’s landing approach at an airport.

There was also a lack of co-ordination be-tween the many small fl ying helpers after Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. Of-ten, aid organisations and drone operators are not in contact with one another – one group does not know how the technolo-gy works, while the other doesn’t actually know what to do with the footage they have recorded. In response, the Humanitarian UAV Network founded ‘UAViators’, whose goal is to bring aid workers, policymakers, and drone experts together so that drones

can be more safely and responsibly de-ployed following disasters. This included the creation of a code of conduct that all participants have to agree to before being able to use the platform.

As is so often the case with advances in technology, the legal frameworks around drones are lagging behind the technologi-cal progress – particularly in the areas of data protection and storage. What exact-ly can the footage obtained by drones be used for? Who does the data belong to and what can and can’t be done with it? What happens when people are recognisable in the pictures – what about the right to one’s own image, and to personal privacy? These questions are especially relevant for drone usage in urban contexts. The EU is currently in the process of putting togeth-er appropriate guidelines, while the UN already has policy in place for the use of drones, demanding that the intended pur-pose is of an ethical and legitimate nature and does not endanger either public securi-ty or individual privacy.

To Opportunities and Risks

MACHINES 23

Risks:

• Rules and laws need to be developed to prevent mayhem in the air

• Questions around data protection are unresolved: what purpose may images from drones be used for?

• Not every aid organisation needs its own drone. Agreements between NGOs, drone manufacturers, drone owners, and politicians to co-ordinate the effi -cient use of drones is much more important.

Opportunities:

• Drones replace expensive satellite imagery

• Drones contribute to the safety of support person-nel, as they can undertake dangerous tasks and serve as advance parties during disasters

• Drones can provide people in diffi cult-to-access ar-eas with important supplies such as medicine

• Drones are faster than conventional transportation and can help save lives during fi rst aid eff orts

24 MACHINES

New ideas for the use of drones in humanitarian and environmental contexts are being rapidly developed. Although this trend is positive, it must be accompanied by appropriate guidelines. The question of what happens to the data collected and what it may be used for remains to be clarifi ed, particularly in relation to private individuals. Many promising ideas are being developed that require open-source access to footage gathered by drones following natural disasters.

CONCLUSION

MACHINES 25

SYRIA AIRLIFT PROJECTRoughly 22 million people live in Syria, but almost half of them currently rely on humanitarian aid due to the civil war. Because the situation is also very diffi cult for aid workers, the Syrian Air-lift Project wants to use drones to send medication, water, and food to those aff ected.

26 MACHINES

Operating from the Turkish border, the idea is for the drones to transport packag-es weighing up to fi ve kilograms to Syria. The American initiators of the project believe that every package helps. Ideally, 100 packages would be sent per night. To reach this goal, the project is training Syr-ians who want to help their fellow citizens.

Currently, there is a lack of political and fi nancial support and foreign aid partners to help realise the project, although crowd-funding on Indiegogo was a great success, and the large international response means that the fi rst fl ights will soon be possible.

www.syriaairlift.org

MACHINES 27

DRONE ADVENTURESThe non-profi t organisation Drone Adventures was founded in 2013 by Adam Klaptocz in Laus-anne. Adam’s mission: to show the world that drones can be valuable helpers for good causes. On his website, he writes that “we see drones as a powerful and exciting tool that can be used to make the world a better place”. Drone Adventures particularly wants to help in the areas of environmental conservation, humanitarian aid and cultural preservation, as well as with search-and-rescue operations following disasters.

28 MACHINES

Drone Adventures works closely with oth-er organisations, activists, businesses, and private individuals. Upon request, they pro-vide consulting and drone loans for their various projects. So far they have helped map the disaster area following Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and supplied images to aid organisations for the coordi-nation of their relief eff orts. In Fukushima, they examined the nuclear-aff ected area around the reactors with the aid of their drones to support reconstruction eff orts,

while in the Namibian desert they are helping determine the population of endan-gered animal species.

Best practice: they make the data they col-lect accessible on an open-source platform so that as many people as possible can use it for the common good.

www.droneadventures.org

MACHINES 29

BIO CARBON ENGINEERINGPlanting trees with drones, and a billion within a year at that – that is the ambitious goal of the team behind the Bio Carbon Engineering project. How can this be achieved?

30 MACHINES

Their drones will soon fl y over potentially suitable areas and create 3D maps. Then, they will scatter small containers over the most promising areas containing fertilised seeds as well as nutrients and moisture gel. In this way, they claim, 36,000 trees can be planted every day in a way that is cheap-er than planting by hand. After planting, drones will continue to monitor the germi-nating seeds and deliver further nutrients when necessary to ensure their healthy

growth. Soon, the team from Bio Carbon Engineering will deploy their drones for the reforestation of a plantation in South Africa. In October, the creators presented their project to the UN in New York as part of the adoption of the UN’s development goals. The response was huge – further de-ployments are planned.

www.biocarbonengineering.com

MACHINES 31

HOW 3D PRINTERS SAVE RHINOCEROSES BY FREDY GAREIS

Man destroys what nature creates: Many animal species face the threat of extinction. In African countries, poachers are slaughtering rhinoceroses because in other parts of the world the powder attained from the pulverising of their horns promises to in-crease virility and to create a resistance to cancer. Luckily, increasing technological advances are creating new ways to stop poachers, and to save rhinoceroses and oth-er wildlife from extinction.

32 MACHINES

In a bar high above the hustle and bustle of the Vietnamese city of Saigon, four men in suits are seated around a table. They are each holding something they call the “Mil-lionaires’ Drink”. The exclusive ingredient is supposed to bring on a cocaine-like rush, make you immune to hang-overs, have an aphrodisiac eff ect, and be able to cure can-cer. This ingredient had travelled 10,000 km before landing in the drinks of these Vietnamese high earners. The ingredient is rhinoceros horn powder.

Drugs, weapons, human traffi cking. These are the top 3 black markets right now. In 4th place comes the trade of illegal animal products such as ivory and rhinoceros horn. This is a 20 billion US dollar market that has exploded over the last few years and is attracting more and more participants due to its enormous profi tability. Plus: Animals cannot press criminal charges.

In the early 90’s one kilogram of rhinoceros horn cost between 250 and 500 US dollars; now the price has sky-rocketed to 70,000 US dollars. Why this drastic increase? In traditional Chinese medicine rhinoceros horn powder has been used to lower fevers and ease liver troubles for years now. The price of this costly item only went through the roof after a rumour got out in 2008 that a Vietnamese politician used it to cure himself of cancer. The powder turned into a luxury item and a party novelty, in a soci-ety that is constantly increasing its wealth, but at the same time, heavily regulated when it comes to luxury products.

While rich people chug down rhinoceros horn drinks in far-away Asia, rhinoceros-es in the southern parts of Africa bleed to death, because poachers kick them to the curb once they have their horns. Rangers are all too willing to accept bribes. How can we get this situation under control when the bait is easy money? This is happen-ing in areas that are as large as they’re are uncontrollable.

It goes without saying that we need some enlightenment here. But before we will have gotten a chance to successfully get this through the head of mankind, rhinoceroses will be long gone.

What is the solution, high tech? Well, it’s a promising approach. A number of initia-tives, start-ups and technical innovations are attempting to save these large animals from extinction.

Pembient – Rhinoceros horns from a 3D printertMatthew Marcus and George Bonaci have a radical approach: They want to turn the market for rhinoceros horns on its head entirely, by fl ooding it with cheap horn alternatives and thus compromise the poachers’ margins and render ranger bribes obsolete. For one, the founders of the “Pembient” start-up want to pass horns along to distributors, who, in turn, will put them on the market; but they also want to pass them directly on to African communi-ties that are part of the chain revenues.

MACHINES 33

But let’s back up for a second. What ex-actly are these cheap horn alternatives and where do they come from? Marcus (software) and Bonaci (genetics) have successfully cracked the keratin protein’s genetic code. Keratin is a major component in rhinoceros horn. They are now able to replicate a horn using a 3D printer; their goal is to fl ood the market with synthetic horns as soon as possible (2016).

Bonaci, wearing a pink Polo shirt and shorts, with a part in his hair, promises that his start-up can produce these horns at an eighth of their current, exorbitant cost. This means that we no longer have to wait around for long-winded politicians to stand up for environmental and animal protec-tion; instead, the market itself will secure the survival of rhinoceroses.

Many are already aware of this combi-nation of market and animal protection. Celebrities are tweeting about Pembient; Bonaci posted to a very popular AmA (Ask me Anything) on Reddit, and the start-up has been fast-tracked to the Business Accel-erator Program Indiebio in San Francisco: the company is currently trying to save

the world of the rhinoceros from within its laboratories.

If all goes well, Pembient will try to extend its mission to other causes such as ivory. The fact is: the genetic make-up of a rhi-noceros horn is closer to that of a hoof, whereas the genetic make-up of a tusk is much closer to that of a tooth, and there-fore quite a bit more complex.

At this stage, the prototype of a labora-tory horn is so authentic-looking that it would be very expensive indeed for doubt-ers to try and tell them apart. And since the product itself is illegal anyway and has no offi cial documentation, Pembient feels quite safe.

WearablesThe common black rhinoceros weighs around 1,350 kg, and can reach a speed of up to 55 km/h. Therefore, a machine that records the movements of this ani-mal would have to be able to handle a lot. Intel is currently teaming up with Afri-can partners to work on precisely this. In South Africa, there is a test model that has a motherboard the size of a credit card:

34 MACHINES

It holds storage, includes a processor and has 3G capabilities. The entire unit comes in a rhino foot strap made of Kevlar and is strapped on while the rhino is uncon-cious. At the same time, researchers insert a RFID chip into the horn. Should the foot strap detect that the distance between the two is growing, i.e. a poacher is stealing the horn, the mini-computer ranger alerts a he-licopter or a drone.

This model is currently being tested on fi ve rhinos. Down the road, the model will also be able to check vital functions such as heightened stress levels.

AlgorithmResearchers at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies in the US are completely committed to the cool power of mathematics. This line of thinking created the “Anti-Poaching En-gine”, a system that puts together satellite images to combine data from drones and predictive analytics, images that indicate poacher attacks and movements, as well

as the paths animals take, all this one day ahead of time.

The “Engine” is based on an algorithm used by military forces in Irac and Afghanistan to predict the use of IEDs (Improvised Ex-plosive Devices).

DronesThe Lindberg Foundation has what is called the Airshepherd, a fl ying drone equipped with software from the University of Mary-land that is programmed to watch over the vaster African Savanna. There are two ad-ditional cameras, one for day-time and an infra-red one for night-time, both transmit live images to the head offi ces.

The poachers’ job is much easier at night. No team, no matter how large, could over-see an area as large as Thuringia, let alone in the dark. However, ever since people have been combining their eff orts with drones and algorithms, robbery-slayings of rhinoceroses in testing sites have dropped to practically zero.

MACHINES 35

The digital age and the digital revolution are posing new and challenging questions for civil society. Lucy Bernholz, co-founder of the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University, is trying to fi nd answers. In this interview Lucy explains why nonprofi ts should be thinking much harder about data, and how a new website helps them to do so.

LUCY BERNHOLZ

INTERVIEW WITH

Lucy Bernholz is a policy wonk, a leading thinker on “the future of good” and co-founder of the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University.

36 MACHINES

Why should civil society organisa-tions be thinking about things like digital infrastructures and internet governance?

Well let’s think about what civil society ac-tually means. Civil society is a place where people privately come together to do some-thing that benefi ts other people. But since there are basically no unsurveilled spaces on the internet, this private association part is now very tricky. Yes, you can use Tor or PGP or blackphones to carve out those spaces, but it doesn’t really solve the problem – after all civil society isn’t sup-posed to be available only to the few who know how to use Tor.

So it’s about how organisations pro-tect sensitive data?

Yes, but it’s also broader than that. Even apart from how they use data in their own work, civil society’s responsibility to the framing of how digital tools work in our lives writ large is enormous. It’s absolute-ly a set of policy issues and practices that demands a voice outside that purely com-mercial interest and purely government interest.In the US at least, there has been a suc-cessful but very small set of civil society organisations focussed on digital policy issues. But what’s been amazing is how in-capable they have been at bringing the rest of the non-profi t sector along with them. The rest of the non-profi ts simply do not understand that these basic issues of net

neutrality, broadband access, encryption are actually existentially important for civil society.

So more concretely, what obligations do civil society organisations have with regard to data?

There are three main principles. The fi rst is consent. Very few of our interactions with commercially provided digital services really give the power of choice to the indi-vidual: nobody reads the terms of service, you’re never really given the opportunity to opt in, at most you can opt out. Civil society groups, by contrast, should default to person-centred consent: the individual’s rights come fi rst.The second principle is minimum viable data collection. The organisation should do everything it has to in order to protect the privacy of individuals, and in most cases that will mean: don’t collect what you can’t protect. That doesn’t mean you can’t collect anything, but it does mean you have to be very creative in the data management and protection practices that you use. The third principle is openness. In civil society your purpose for existing is to pro-duce a public benefi t, and so you should assume that you’re going to open up any information that you collect. And this prin-ciple comes both at the beginning and the end, because if you assume from the be-ginning that you’re going to open up then you’ll behave throughout with more atten-tion to consent and privacy.

“ IF WE WANT CIVIL SOCIETY TO STILL EXIST IN THE DIGITAL WORLD…”

MACHINES 37

The problem with the principle of data minimisation is that sometimes data can be useful in ways you nev-er expected when you collected it. So doesn’t it in fact make sense to collect as much as possible?

That might be logical if you’re a well-re-sourced enterprise that has the human capacity to make sense of large datasets plus the IT infrastructure to at least pay lip-service to protecting it, and if your core mission is to somehow monetise the data you have. So then – maybe. But the thing is, most non-profi ts meet none of that cri-teria. They serve some public mission other than monetising data, and moreover they absolutely cannot protect this stuff . The evangelists for big data have been very persuasive that data is an asset. But data is a huge liability as well – as Sony and Ash-ley Madison and the US Offi ce of Personnel Management have recently been fi nding out. So if you can’t cover this liability, sim-ply collecting as much data as you can is like saying you’re going to take on as much debt as you can and somewhere down the road fi gure out how best to pay it back. It’s a cost-benefi t analysis that refuses to look at the cost side. So I think that the whole mindset presents a narrative that the non-profi t sector needs to push back on.

How can people actually translate these principles into practical action?

Good question – and we set up the digi-talimpact.io precisely to answer it. Social organisations can use it to get over the initial “oh my god, I don’t know where to go from here”, and they can download documents and templates for the kind of policies they need.My work at the Packard Foundation was the genesis of the Digital Impact project. I was in this privileged role at a very well re-sourced foundation. They started to engage with all of these questions and, to their

great credit, instead of saying “this is really important so let’s make our grantees solve it”, they focussed internally and really tried to get their own house in order.Out of that we developed a set of educa-tional materials to help people working in the sector understand the concepts and how it intersects with their work. But what we also developed – and this is what is dis-tinctive about the Digital Impact website – are these templates for data policies for people to download.And these are structured in such a way that you can’t just white out somebody else’s name and put in your own. You actually have to read them, so that you’re actually beginning to grapple a little bit with ques-tions like: Well how does this organisation feel about privacy? How do we feel about openness? How do we address issues of consent?

What do you hope digitalimpact.io will achieve in the long term?

Two things. Firstly, we hope organisations will make the step from “we’ve written this policy” to asking “okay, how do we actually implement this?”. They’ll seek their peers and start sharing, so that the sector starts to unite around new practices through ex-isting networks.Secondly we hope they’ll start to think: “Hey, the laws that underpin this stuff matter to us. We have a stake in the game about these policy issues.” And that brings us back to issues of governance, and the need for civil society en toto to recognise that its entire existence depends on certain privileges in the analogue world that don’t exist in the same way in the digital world – and so if we want civil society to still exist in the digital world, we’d better get busy changing the digital world to protect them.

Ben Mason was asking the questions.

38 MACHINES

MACHINES 39

40 MONEY

MONEYOne can literally put money to good any time, especially for the common good. But goodness has no production value in our economy. How then can we redistribute money in a manner that is more fair? The trend of fi nancial inclusion gives the poorest people among us important access to the fi nancial system thanks to hand-banking, at least for the time being. NGO’s are applying economic principles more and more, and are turning themselves into social enterprises. Large fi rms wish to distinguish themselves by doing social deeds, but are sleeping through the digital CSR trend. And in Finland, people are using parasitic algorithms in order to profi t from ultra-commercial transactions for those in need. Welcome to the world of good money.

MONEY 41

FINANCIAL INCLUSION

A digital fi nancial system makes it cheap and easy to manage money. In virtual bank accounts, the money sits on a server as ones and zeroes, and can be moved to and fro with a simple click. Many poor households across the world, by contrast, work in a cash economy, laboriously moving around physical assets in the form of cash, jewellery and livestock. Worldwide, around 2.5 billion people are not integrated into the fi nancial system. That is now changing thanks to mobile telephone access. In recent years millions of people have gained access to a fi nancial system that was previously closed off to them.

BY FRANZISKA KREISCHE

42 MONEY

Many mobile providers in poor countries are making mobile payment via SMS pos-sible, off ering micro-loans, insurance and even savings accounts. The fi nancial in-clusion of poor sections of the population indirectly contributes to sustainable eco-nomic growth – the more people who are integrated into the fi nancial circulation of a country, the stronger the national economy. If this process is designed in a responsible way, new opportunities are opened up for many people.

For Lucia Njelekele from Tanzania, the credit on her mobile phone is just as valuable as the chickens with which she earns her living. With her telephone, she monitors the current market price of the chickens and makes contact via SMS in order to sell them. The money she gets for them also goes onto her mobile. Lucia pays her electricity and water bills to the local utility company in the same way. Just recently, she took out an insurance policy on her chickens. Should they fall victim to disease or illness, she’ll be compensat-ed. And she is thinking about taking out a small loan in order to build a new stall and to purchase more chickens – to assess her creditworthiness, the credit company checks her mobile data. Lucia shows that doing business and paying without cash does not require the complicated process of opening a bank-account. Instead, a mobile phone and a SIM card will do the job.

The “Cash-Digital Divide”, and why Peruvians hold a pollada

Only 24 per cent of adults in Sub-Saha-ran Africa, and 33 per cent in Asia, have a conventional bank-account. Cash governs their world. Until now, this “cash-digital divide” has presented poor households with various problems: for them, carrying out simple fi nancial transactions is high-risk and expensive. That begins with the

question of where they can safely store their money. Transport is another problem. Since they can’t simply transfer their mon-ey, they send it through private networks or courier it – a slow and insecure method. Having cash also makes saving psycho-logically diffi cult: often, social networks of neighbours, friends and family can be demanding. In the case of unexpected fi -nancial setbacks, those aff ected often turn to those closest to them for fi nancial sup-port: in Peru, families organise their own “pollada” for this, a kind of fundraising event where they invite relatives and neigh-bours to a chicken dinner and ask them for help. In Kenya, similar festivities are known as “chamas”, and in Ghana, as “sou-sou”. Anyone whose savings are within arm’s reach under their mattress is natural-ly obliged to hand over a part of it.

But it is not just for the so-called “un-banked” that fi nancial circumstances pose a challenge. It is also expensive and risky for banks and providers to interact with them: they have to build expensive infrastructure in order to store, transport or invest their money. Since there is no (digital) fi nancial history for people without bank accounts, banks cannot make any kind of assessment of their fi nancial habits. So they are usu-ally assessed as high-risk and refused an account, making it impossible for them to make use of further services like loans or insurance policies.

How the cash-digital divide can be overcome, step by step: the M-Pesa success model

Eight years ago Safaricom become the fi rst mobile provider in Kenya to introduce its mobile payment system M-Pesa, bridging the cash-digital divide in the process. The model has been a huge success: every day around 17 million Kenyans use the service, transferring around 20 million euros in

MONEY 43

the process. By now, there are 255 simi-lar mobile payment systems in existence in 88 countries; and the number is rising. When M-Pesa was introduced in Kenya, users were able to turn their cash into elec-tronically managed credit on their mobile phone. For this, all they had to do was fi nd an M-Pesa agent. These days they are all over the place – every small grocery shop where prepaid cards for mobile phones were previously sold can get a licence to be an M-Pesa dealer.

Following the success of M-Pesa, mobile providers in other developing countries have developed similar services. According to a study from the international industrial association of GSMA mobile providers, they are now available in around 60 per cent of countries:

In Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and In-donesia, it is even possible now to carry out money transfers across diff erent pro-viders’ systems – overturning what until now has been the monopoly position of some providers, like M-Pesa in Kenya. Fu-elled by new regulatory frameworks, the

mobile fi nancial services sector as a whole expanded signifi cantly in 2014. In Colom-bia, India, Kenya and Liberia, for example, reforms were passed which benefi tted these bankless money transfers. Now, in 47 out of 89 markets, both banks and non-banks can off er mobile money services. In 16 countries, there are actually more mobile money accounts than now traditional bank accounts. In December 2014, it was cal-culated that there were 103 million active mobile money accounts worldwide. As the graphic below makes clear, the region of Sub-Saharan Africa represents the largest market:

In fact, in East-African states, every second mobile telephone contract has a mobile money account attached to it – with Ken-ya leading the way. On the other hand, in 54 countries there is still no comparable money transfer system. Two thirds of these countries have fewer than 10 million in-habitants. In small markets, it is not worth the investment for mobile providers, and to date, government subsidies have not been forthcoming.

Vierstufi ges Modell der fi nanziellen Inklusion, wie es die Bill und Melinda Gates Stiftung vorschlägt.

The welfare impact channels of digital fi nancial system

Enhanced fi nancial services

Connections to institutions

Connections to peers

Basic account

Access customized savings, credit, and insurance services

Reduce cost of utility linkagesReduce cost of government payments

Distribute risks over wider informal networksReceive immediate payment in emergencies

Build lump sums for investmentSelf-insure against shocks

Digital Financial Platform

44 MONEY

Digital fi nancial inclusion is carried out in various steps, which in turn depend on various structural prerequisites. In a study from the Gates Foundation, these prereq-uisites were vividly described by way of a four-tiered model:

For the fi rst tier, the necessary communi-cations infrastructure has to already be in place. In many African countries, that is already the case: in 2012, there were 710 million active mobile telephone users; in 2016, it is expected that the billion mark will be broken. The results of the GSMA study show that many countries are al-ready well on their way towards tier three: alongside mobile money accounts, there are also off ers for mobile insurance, savings accounts and micro-credit, which are being taken on by many mobile users.

Mobile Money Accounts: all the things that can now be done via SMS

The eff ects of digital fi nancial inclusion can’t be judged only by the services on of-fer, but above all by how, and how widely, they are used. To fi nd out how mobile mon-ey accounts change the everyday life of poor households, the Gates Foundation carried out a survey with M-Pesa users. It revealed that to begin with, mobile payments seem to strengthen the informal safety nets of poor households. Those questioned were better able to overcome negative events such as illness or job loss, without having to dip into their regular household income. Women indicated that through using M-Pe-sa they were able to gain more equal control over their money with respect to their hus-bands, since they can manage it in their own account without unauthorised access.

Laut einer Studie der internationalen Industrievereinigung der GSMA-Mobilfunkanbieter gibt es inzwischen in circa 60 Prozent der Länder mobile Bezahlsysteme.

Number of live mobile money services for the unbanked by country (Dec. 2014)

ONE MOBILE MONEY SERVICE TWO MOBILE MONEY SERVICES THREE OR MORE MOBILE MONEY SERVICES

INTEROPERABLE MARKETS

MONEY 45

Because increasingly pensions can be paid via mobile money accounts the cost and the time it takes to make payments are re-duced, for both the recipients and for the pension funds. In India, the government is reported to have saved up to 22 billion US-dollars as a result. A similar increase has also been recorded in remittances from abroad. Nowadays, these can also be carried out mobile, and with fees of four dollars per 100 dollars, this is far cheap-er than service providers such as Western Union or Moneygram.

Group Savings Accounts and Mobile Credit is on the Increase

In addition to the mobile money accounts on off er, further services off ered by mobile providers facilitate the connection of poor households to credit providers, savings plans and insurance policies. Above all, saving is on the rise. More than half of all accounts show a positive balance of at least ten dollars:

Currently, ten million mobile savings accounts are registered worldwide. In re-sponse to the saving activities of its users, M-Pesa has created the savings account service M-Shwari. Airtel Weza from Airtel Uganda, on the other hand, is designed for women’s savings groups. The model is par-ticularly secure, since in order to withdraw money, three diff erent PINs are required, and all members are informed via SMS.

Digital infrastructure does not automatical-ly lead to savings, but through automatic transfers and reminder functions, it can help overcome psychological barriers to saving.

Mobile Credit

However, at the same time, the range of mobile credit services has grown (world-wide by 50 per cent). For the approval of loans, many services use the digital foot-print of their mobile users. For example the social organisation First Access in Tanzania has developed an algorithm that checks the creditworthiness of small business owners based on their mobile phone data. Opin-ions on this sort of credit approval process are divided, since the process still lacks transparency, as do most traditional credit ratings.

The Indian mobile banking system from Ekgaon also aims to democratise access to important fi nancial services. The open source software contains an App which can get micro-loans to where they’re needed within seconds.

People who make a lot of phone calls receive better coverage

The administration and costs of provid-ing insurance policies to poor, unbanked households used to be prohibitively high for most providers. This meant poor people weren’t protected from a range of emergen-cies. The new mobile services on off er aim to improve this situation. Mobile compa-nies have now developed over 100 services for various types of insurance.

In Bangladesh, for example, Nirvoy off ers each user free life insurance as soon as they begin using a certain amount of telephone credit ($3.23US/month). Kenyan farm-ers can protect their harvest from weather damage by purchasing an insurance policy along with the seeds and registering their mobile number. The harvest insurance Kili-mo Salama then automatically sends an automated payment via M-Pesa if the crop is damaged either by too much or too little

46 MONEY

Number of live mobile insurance services (Dez. 2014)

100

40

53

70

90

100

75

50

25

0 PRE 2011 2011 2012 2013 2014

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA EAST ASIA & PACIFIC SOUTH ASIA LATIN AMERICA & THE CARIBBEAN

To Opportunities and Risks

rain. Together with the Swedish company Bima, Tigo off ers the Tigo Bima micro-in-surance policy in Ghana and Tanzania, which can be registered when buying a SIM card. In this case as well, the amount that is paid out is relative to the monthly prepaid credit that is used. Changamka (Swahili for ‘get active’) also makes it pos-sible for millions of Kenyans who have previously been excluded from the health insurance system to gain access to funda-mental health care. Payments are made via M-Pesa.

MONEY 47

Risks:

• The expansion of mobile fi nancial services is depen-dent upon government regulations and licences.

• Access to loans becomes simpler through fi nancial inclusion – including for those who are not able to estimate themselves whether or not they will be able to pay off the credit. Without adequate consultation, there is a risk of debt overload.

• Without adequate laws and controls, mobile provid-ers could act irresponsibly with digital data of their users.

• Mobile providers could exploit their monopoly po-sition in the mobile money market in countries that do not have pre-established regulations on interop-erability, by, for example, raising transaction fees arbitrarily.

Opportunities:

• Financial inclusion means a chance at participating in formal fi nancial life and thus represents a step towards liberation from poverty. Financial inclusion promotes the stability of a country: savers and inves-tors exhibit more consistent fi nancial habits in times of crisis.

• Informal economic sectors are formalised. Illegal fi -nancial channels dry up.

• Mobile payments strengthen the safety nets of im-poverished households.

• Simple access to the mobile money system combats gender and other social inequalities in the fi nancial system.

48 MONEY

In more than half of all developing markets, mobile providers are off ering a range of services to integrate their users into the fi nancial market. Supply and demand is growing above all in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Countries with smaller populations, such as Pacifi c nations, are left empty-handed. However, since it is not worth the investment for the providers. Increasing interoperability between the individual money transfer systems in some countries is a very promising development. This can help to break up monopolies, opening up a competitive environment in which innovative ideas can fl ou-rish. Following the success of mobile money transfers in developing countries, Apple, Pay-Pal and Vodafone are now also off ering the ability to pay via mobile telephone in Europe and the USA. In these cases, it is mainly aimed at peer-to-peer payments between friends, but also in restaurants or at parking meters. However it is not expected that similar market growth will be achieved, given the strong, pre-existing levels of fi nancial inclusion and the availability of other payment methods (such as credit cards). But the introduction of a model which fi rst gained a profi le on the Kenyan market represents a fascinating example of so-called “reverse innovation”.

CONCLUSION

MONEY 49

AIRTEL WEZAIn 2014, The Grameen Foundation and Airtel, one of the leading mobile providers in Uganda, have developed the group savings account Airtel Weza. It is an account that requires three dif-ferent PINs to be entered by diff erent group members before a withdrawal can be made. So as to be sure that some individual members cannot conspire against the others, an SMS notifi ca-tion is sent to all of the members when a withdrawal is made.

50 MONEY

A similar system was already available of-fl ine. Instead of a physical safe-deposit box, the account is now digital. The three PINs replace the three locks which had previous-ly secured the safe-deposit box. At this point, the service is only available in Kamuli, but expansion to other provinces in Uganda is planned.

Airtel Weza is targeted primarily at women who belong to a savings group, and who

simply want to securely store their mon-ey. In addition, it also stimulates the local economy – in one study, over 40 per cent of the women questioned reported that through having a mobile phone, they had gained access to a range of income-gener-ating opportunities which had previously been out of their reach.

www.grameenfoundation.org/introducing-airtel-weza-uganda

MONEY 51

EKGAONFor people with low incomes in rural areas, mobile technologies open up new possibilities for them to manage their money. Previously, banks were hardly an option for them, and if they were, they were tedious, laborious and expensive, since the poor infrastructure caused higher transaction costs. For this reason, over 60 per cent of the population in rural India has no bank account. The mobile banking system from Ekgaon (similar to that of M-Pesa) wants to change that, and to democratise access to important fi nancial businesses such as micro-loans or pen-sion payments.

52 MONEY

The open source software contains, for ex-ample, an App which can get micro-loans to where they’re needed within seconds – and with a sophisticated identifi cation system (virtual fi ngerprint or signature), it also makes the path of the money trace-able. This creates increased transparency and faster micro-fi nancing for people who desperately need the money. Loan en-quiries, credit grants and transfers are executed with a simple SMS. To prevent ex-cessive borrowing, Ekgaon has set up a free

SMS information service for farmers, which sends them important information about price changes in agriculture and is intended to serve as a basis for making decisions on borrowing (this is also how Reuters Market Light works). The founder of Ekgaon, Vi-jay Pratap Singh Aditya, is also an Ashoka Fellow – because his company is a model social business.

www.ekgaon.com

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KILIMO SALAMAKilimo Salama means “secure crop”, and is committed to helping Kenyan smallholder farmers to protect their grain crops from extreme weather conditions such as droughts and fl oods. What is special about it is that the insurance policies can be taken out for fi ve per cent of the buying price of the seeds. So the farmers don’t have to carry out complicated negotiations with insur-ance dealers. The payment process is also tailored to the farmers’ circumstances: they can pay conveniently via M-Pesa with their mobile.

54 MONEY

If the insurance policy is valid and the farmer is registered as a customer, nu-merous solar-powered weather stations monitor the climate conditions in their re-gion. If there is too much or too little rain, the farmer automatically receives a pay-ment via M-Pesa, which compensates them for the cost of their seeds.

Kilimo Salama also uses a series of inno-vations, sparing themselves administrative overheads; monitoring visits, damage as-sessments and tedious bills. This makes insurance more aff ordable for small

farmers who only manage a few fi elds: in 2010, 11,000 farmers were already insured in this way.

Besides this, the project promotes sustain-ability: the data from the weather stations is evaluated to gather knowledge about regional weather trends. With this data, which can be disseminated via SMS, the farmers can better prepare themselves for climatic developments, and plan their crops accordingly.

www.kilimosalama.wordpress.com

MONEY 55

BIGWIG MONEY: DIGITAL TRENDS IN CORPORATE COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENTBY THERESA FILIPOVIC

For many companies the notion of taking social responsibility has been a central strategic component for years. More and more employees and customers want to know what the repercussions of trade are for society and for the environment. They don’t just want to be informed; they want to have an infl uence and to be included in the discussion. This is why companies are increasingly shifting their CSR practices to the internet, allowing for more transparency and participation.

56 MONEY

Barely anybody knows whether or to what extent a business is socially involved: A survey by the European Commission re-vealed that only 62% of interviewees thought themselves to be suffi ciently in-formed as to corporate social responsibility measures taken by companies today. That’s because this kind of involvement is not outlined in the one place where everyone dwells: on the internet. The consequence: during the CSR Online Awards 2014, where CSR measures of the 100 largest public fi rms in Europe were evaluated, one fourth of businesses were not considered be-cause they provided no information online whatsoever. But on the other hand: bet-terplace.org helps companies handle their community involvement digitally and in a transparent manner. There are digital pro-grams and initiatives that creatively ended up working for organizations and business-es. The following examples list the best of the digital CSRs.

Employee digital interfaces: After the earthquake in Nepal in the spring of 2015, the SAP called upon its fi rm’s internal network to raise money for the victims of the earthquake. The SAP Solidarity Fund placed its profi le on betterplace.org, and SAP employees were able to raise over 125,000 Euros; employees were able to fol-low the progress of their fundraising eff orts with ease. The fi rst 100,000 Euros were raised within the fi rst week. The company’s network and the fundraising website were joined together which is how the company was able to get involved in such an uncom-plicated manner.

www.betterplace.org/de/projects/28655-wir-helfen-nepal(we’re helping Nepal)

MONEY 57

Mobilising via social media: Vodafone started a fascinating live fund-raiser in 2014. They called it “#spenden” (donate), and the company donated one Euro per hashtag toward specifi c social projects. The eff ort was supported by nine YouTube bloggers, in just a few hours the #spenden hashtag was all over Twitter and other social networks, and within 24 hours the 100,000 Euros provided by Vodafone were put to use. Once again, the execution was uncomplicated and the distribution of funds transparent, thanks to betterplace.org’s interface. The operation went so well, that it was nominated for the German Prize for Online Communication in 2015.

www.hashtagspenden.de

Transparent and traceable reporting: Thanks to its Kiezheld fundraiser FC St. Pauli was able to provide hundreds of Eu-ros to social projects, within only a few days. The football club doubled whatever funds were raised up to a total of 10,000 Euros (a procedure known as a matching funds), and, thanks to the community, was able to make a diff erence with twice as much money. The participating proj-ects were able to benefi t from this support long-term. All participating projects were introduced and all donation fl ows tracked on betterplace.org’s affi liated web page, in

a transparent manner.

www.betterplace.org/de/matching-funds/9-fc-st-pauli

Examples like this show: that when a com-pany can successfully, quickly and easily mobilize its target group, via social media channels or via the company’s internal net-work, it can benefi t in a variety of ways. The fact that employees and customers were able to participate, comment and spread the word only served to strength-en the company’s involvement. Ideally, coverage of the company’s social involve-ment should be publicized on Facebook and Twitter, and be well-featured in the company’s annual report, if not in a report of its own. SAP is a good example of this: The company publishes an annual report that includes “all aspects of our fi nancial, social and environmental achievements”. The so-called “Integrated Report” comes in the form of a web page that uses digital storytelling. Employees can share their ex-periences with the company’s community involvement in short videos, giving them a personal touch and a face. betterplace.org is Germany’s largest online fundrais-ing platform, and has created various online formats for companies who are in-creasingly asking for advice and technical support in order to make their community

58 MONEY

involvement more visible and more feasible online. One such format is the Involvement Portal, a website based on the company’s corporate design, that enables customers and employees to raise funds for better-place projects. In this capacity companies are able to not only post information re-garding their community involvement, but can give interested parties a chance to join in. Thus, CSR based digitalisation increases the visibility of a company’s corporate giv-ing. Widespread availability of information

and relatively unlimited public access to discussions on how a company is behav-ing can also mean that companies have to diff erentiate themselves from the criti-cisms of their stakeholders. This not only makes it harder for companies to practice greenwashing, but also presents an enor-mous opportunity for businesses to spark up a conversation with its customers and the public in order to foster better mutual understanding.

MONEY 59

THE DIGITAL ROBIN HOOD BY LENNART LABERENZ

A cooperative from Finland shadows the fi nancial transactions of successful investors using a data mining software called “Parasite”. Free of ethical or moral dilemmas, the Robin Hood Minor Asset Management Cooperative’s algorithm imitates their best strategies, and even invests in arms company stocks. Any earnings are invested in projects to assist the poor. A comrade tries to explain.

60 MONEY

At the age of 15, I knew that my grandfa-ther invested in stocks. My grandfather was an engineer, and he kept his stock market activities a secret. He used to disappear into his home offi ce and close the doors. He would put check marks in the news-paper next to companies whose stocks he had purchased, just like my grandmother put check marks next to the television pro-grams she wanted to see in the TV Guide. My grandfather gruffl y said to me, almost as if I had caught him red-handed: “This is something you don’t understand yet”.

One year later I won a stock market game at the bank where kids could use fake mon-ey to do some speculating of their own, against the back drop of the real stock mar-ket. The stock that, to my own surprise, allowed me to surpass my fellow players rose the day before the game ended. I real-ly don’t understand this yet, I thought.

“I made my fi rst million in 2007”, says Ak-seli Virtanen off -the-cuff , while handing his suitcase over for a security inspection. Vir-tanen, a glasses-wearing economist, small in size, a little hectic in his gestures, wears his hair with no discernible haircut or co-louring. His fl ight from Helsinki to Rio de Janeiro via Paris is boarding, when Vir-tanen mentions that he lost his fi rst million soon after that. A banking crisis. We take

our seats, and Virtanen affi rms that he still swears by the method, an algorithm behind it all. A few months later he registered his method as a company in the Finnish com-mercial register under number 247/6214-9, The Robin Hood Minor Asset Management Cooperative.

Robin Hood stood up aristocrats and greedy clergymen in their carriages and shared their wealth with the poor. In terms of minor asset cooperatives, Sherwood For-est respresents the global world of fi nance, what we know as the stock exchanges of the world. But this data mining software doesn’t stand people up, doesn’t wave swords around or shoot people in the leg with a bow and arrow. You have to imag-ine Virtanens men sitting in treetops and observing, as the world’s most successful investors cavort beneath them.

Akseli Virtanen refers to his Robin Hood as a simulacrum, a representation of some-thing. Basically, the cooperative copies the production means of major businesses on the market. Four years after that fl ight to Rio those businesses have added up. The algorithm, referred to by Virtanen as the parasite, watches over 100 million transac-tions in the US stock exchanges. It watches over 14,000 stock prices and 20,000 insti-tutions that deal with a volume of over 100

MONEY 61

million a piece. Parasite destills 20 to 30 of these stocks and stock movements, while the cooperative takes its time.

Robin Hood can do without an investment banker risk management department, net-worked analysts and decision makers. The software closely tracks decisions, compares similarities and deviations, evaluates inten-sity and weighting. Robin Hood wanders into the institution. Mimesis. Then comes the statement that sums it all up, to say the least: “We pay taxes on all the instruments that we use to observe the movements of the fi nancial oligarchy.” The Data Min-ing Program imitates the most successful strategies, and Robin Hood recharges the project with a political perspective that goes beyond profi t-promising stock market strategies. This didn’t sound that compli-cated, so shortly after our fl ight to Rio I invested in a few cooperative shares.

It turns out, it’s not easy to reduce the stock market and political principles to a common denominator: The cooperative acts like a classic hedge fund, investing in accordance with specifi c success criteria, and adhering to no specifi c code of ethics. The comrades do not object when stock brokers place bets involving Greece, nor do they refrain from investing in arms

company stocks, if the earnings seem promising.

This is where the Robin Hood attitude comes in, states Finnish philosopher Juha Varto, who also participates in the coopera-tive. He refers to the “attitude of a warrior, excluding any individual, personal or col-lective message.” Robin Hood handled his aff airs free of ethics or morals, where the only guideline was the experiment itself.” Therfore, the ethical subject and risk go hand in hand, welcoming challenges and inviting confl ict, especially in the commu-nity. “Our code of ethics”, writes Varto, “is more about the fi ght and politics than it is about being polite and responsible, doing what is considered acceptable or avoiding crossing the line.

”In other words, the cooperative does not care to appear explicitly moralistic: “The production of ethics”, Akseli Virtanen says in a lecture at the 2012 Documenta ex-hibition in Kassel, “has become a crucial method in restricting our possibilities. We make no promises to do “good”, but rather wish to break free from this form of con-trol.” Our actions were not always a result of good intentions, if you know what I mean.

62 MONEY

The internal organization of the coopera-tive diff ers from your typical hedge fund: Each comrade chooses his own sliding scale under which to register stock earnings, and what portion to allot to each fund, which, in turn, funds projects; then everyone takes a democratic vote. Projects must be long-term, and fi t into a precise climate. They must be aligned with a commons way of thinking. Robin Hood has supported to the following projects: a radio station that was battling a goldmine in Northern Greece, a cooperative in Catalonia, a hub in Rio. All three projects mobilised neighbours, com-rades, people who wanted to participate. These projects bring groups together, work with high schools, off er spaces, workshops, platforms for dissent. They off er the prom-ise of change.

The Robin Hood Cooperative refers to it-self as the precariat of hedge funds: The cooperative unites people who are only marginally represented in the fi nance in-dustry, who operate on the outskirts, and who are passive and form their own entity. In the US, the fi nancial industry represents 8.4% of the Gross Domestic Product, and 40% of all business earnings. In the UK, it represents a staggering 12% of the GDP; they have 14 times more bankers than here in Germany. Robin Hood peruses the fi nance industry in order to bundle the cap-ital of those who earn a living beyond the fi nancial sector, in hopes that they might benefi t from it. Up until recently, there were roughly 700 comrades, who had de-posited just over 650,000 Euros. That’s not a lot. “We needed to switch gears”, says Ak-seli Virtanen. The concept of a cooperative that mirrors an industrial society had gone on too long; the precariat-type campaign had gone on too long. “We wanted to put together a hedge fund in Finland”, Virtanen laughs, “a country that imposes some of the highest taxes!”

Meanwhile, Virtanen and his family have moved to the outskirts of Silicon Valley,

where he is now a bearded man, to the extent nature will allow. Even the decent returns from Parasite can no longer sup-port Robin Hood comrades. Virtanen was not getting any closer to his self-set goal of redefi ning the fi nancial industry. “It was great to have achieved so much. The concept of fi nancial industry knowledge appropriation works. But now we have to rethink the idea and do things diff erently.”

This change in direction involves use of the blockchain, the public ledger of all Bitcoin transactions to date. Blockchain is a sort of account statement that is saved on many data processors in a decentralised manner. The advantage is that transactions do not require verifi cation via a central authori-ty, such as a bank. Also, withdrawals can only be manipulated under due expendi-ture. Furthermore, blockchain off ers the option of direct communication between data processors and computer chips, the basis for smart contracts: If someone does not pay his rent, he may not be able to un-lock his front door with his smart key. But this would make credit card fees for fl ight bookings obsolete; if you want to make a transfer, you can do so within seconds, pay transfer fees of a fraction of a cent, and no longer be dependent on fi nancial institu-tions and their administration. Of course, banks are hiring lobbyists to fi ght block-chain, while they simultaneously research how to implement blockchain to benefi t themselves. Robin Hood is making an as-sumption that doesn’t look too pretty at fi rst glance: that nowadays there really is no place outside the fi nance industry. We are connecting more and more private sec-tors to markets, opening up our cars and our homes, meeting up via Uber or AirBnB, marketing ourselves on LinkedIn, com-municating via ad-infested inboxes, and advertising our private lives on Facebook. All these platforms consists of businesses that cash in at minimal cost. This is about to change: Robin Hood wants to apply the cooperative mindset to the virtual world,

MONEY 63

and create a platform that belongs to the participants themselves. They would like us to play lead characters in the fi nancial world, not just be used as props.

Thanks to blockchain, comrades can be their own fi nanciers and creditors, dis-cuss their own projects, take on their own organising and stand on two legs in the fi nancial and political realm. There are de-signs for an app that comrades can use to exchange information, where strategies and investment objectives can be tested with the algorithm, and where gut feelings can be scrutinised with the use of data. At the same time, political projects can continue to thrive.

Once Akseli Virtanen gets down to the heart of his motivation, you see that Robin

Hood believes to have found something entirely new, by bringing social networks, investment banking and political organi-sation together. “It feels like the internet has been invented all over again”, rejoices Virtanen, never tiring of the “re-engineer-ing of the fi nancial industry” topic: Not long ago, he founded Robin Hood Services, a mixture of social networks and the stock market. Virtanen promises us a concept that far surpasses Instagram-type networks that promote having, being and showing: A platform named PeerHood will connect the world of fi nance and politics with so-cial networks. The intention is to take stock market speculation one step further for comrades and customers, to a place no one could have foreseen: “It’s going to be fun”, says Virtanen, “Fun!”

64 MONEY

MONEY 65

NON-PROFIT OR FOR-PROFIT: WHICH IS THE BEST MODEL FOR A SOCIAL START-UP? BY STEPHAN PETERS

People who think about founding their own start-up are not always chasing large profi ts. Some people just want to live in a better world. Which business model lends itself best to this idea: a classic non-profi t organisation or a social business (either for-profi t or non-profi t)? Either way, future founders should consider the following points when making their decision.

66 MONEY

One important question still remains un-aswered: How do for-profi t and non-profi t organisations (NPOs) diff er from one an-other? Non-profi t organisations are not driven by a profi t generating goal. Their goals are much more society, culture and science oriented, as stated in their charters. NPOs mean to close the provisions gap be-tween market and state (which is why you often hear people referring to the “third sector”). This occurs when the market does not provide the goods demanded, because they are not profi table or not politically desirable, as is often the case with public services such as safety or environmental protection, and when the state is not up to the task either. That’s when NPOs have to step into the breach, with well-known caus-es such as HIV prevention, art museums or the transportation of disabled people.

Social businesses base themselves on a foundation of innovative and scalable solu-tions. Ashoka.org puts it this way: “Just as entrepreneurs change the face of business, social entrepreneurs act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities missed by others to improve systems, in-vent new approaches, and create solutions

to change society for the better.” Unlike classic NPO’s, this one is more focused on free enterprise. Social enterprises are not bound to a non-profi t model, but can take the form of “traditional businesses”, and still maintain their purpose to fi nd solu-tions to social problems. Another important distinction from commercial enterprises is that earnings are not distributed among capital investors in the form of dividends, but are reinvested into the organisa-tion. There are famous examples of this in micro-fi nance banks and self-fi nanced training or health programs.

One big diff erence between a non-prof-it and a for-profi t organisation is in its fi nancing. Therefore, the fi rst step of choosing a fi nancial plan is crucial, before moving on to what type of organisation it should be. How can we fi nance the idea (long-term)?

Non-profi ts continuously rely on donations and grants, if they are not state support-ed. This means that a portion of the work week is always dedicated to fi nding and keeping members who are willing to chip in, or at least to getting donations. Never

Source: http://www.social-business-stiftung.org/stiftung-defi nition.html

NON-Profit

Social and/or environmental goals.

Continuous reliance on donations and/or grans.

Money has a life-cycle, a purpose. Donations have

to be raised over and over again.

SOCIAL BUSINESS

Social and/or environmental goals under one condition:

cost recovery business.

Profits are re-invested or are invested into other

social businesses.

Money is part of an ongoing cycle: single, double, triple,

multiple.

PROFIT-ORIENTED BUSINESSES

Goal:

Profit maximising

Cost recovery

Business

Earnings are not used in a sustainable manner, but are distributed among owners

and managers.

MONEY 67

underestimate this eff ort, even when it al-lows for more cross-fi nancing freedom. But you also do not necessarily have to make money directly from the purpose. There is a big advantage with so-called “meiotic” goods, where social demand trumps pri-vate demand, such as with workshops for the disabled, cultural institutions or crime prevention projects. A successful initiative can generate a “social return”, but using it to make money is tougher. This requires cross-fi nancing in order to survive, either by means of government subsidies or pri-vate grants.

In the realm of for-profi t social business-es, the fi rst year can often be fi nanced by private investors, incubators, banks or en-dowment funds. Unlike NPOs, however, they usually have to shoot for self-refi -nancing as a medium-term goal. Frank Hoff mann, founder of the social business Discovering Hands, has this to say: “The most challenging part of running a social business is the fi nancing.” You have to sell at least a portion of your purposeful capac-ities on the market (or to the government, as was the case with Social Bonds). better-place.org, Germany’s largest fundraising platform, is mostly funded by its own CSR eff orts, which they off er to businesses in order to be able to off er the same services to social organisations for free. Greener-ation in Indonesia gets most of its money from the whole-sale business: They off er endless grocery shopping bags with their logo on them, in an attempt to ban plastic bags. Reuters Market Light is an agricul-tural information service, where Indian farmers can use cell phones to keep current on the latest developments in farming. This service costs farmers 90 cents a month; the costs are covered thanks to the just over one million subscribers.

Both types of fi nancing have pros and cons: A social business is more subject to market laws. The product must meet cus-tomer requirements, and is only protected

under specifi c conditions (because the fo-cus is a good cause). Jon Carson, CEO of BiddingForGood, states: “For-profi t social enterprises are also required to deliver a superior product or service, because if you don‘t, you have no revenue”. This requires both an economic approach and innovative capabilities in order to remain competi-tive. Classic NPOs are not subject to this, however they do have to invest a lot of time in fundraising. A NPO that is better at fundraising but not so good at fulfi lling its social purpose can be economically more successful than a NPO that does better work but is terrible at fundraising. This can be tragic since the deciding criteria for success was supposed to be social impact.

Social businesses that have chosen to ap-ply a for-profi t model can take on investors who are interested in fi nancial revenues from which they receive a portion. This makes the search for investors signifi cantly easier. Then again, non-profi t social busi-nesses have the advantage of not having to deal with two competing metrics: economic earnings and content goal. Nobel Prize win-ner Muhammad Yunus says that often in these situations the monetary aspect wins, because we are so used to measuring fi nan-cial success and have precise metrics for this purpose, whereas the social benefi t is much harder to determine.

The list of fi nancial possibilities is longer: There are loans, credit, crowd fi nanc-ing, support programs, contests, diff erent forms of equity capital and external cap-ital (thanks to incubators and business angels). These diff erent fi nancing options can also be combined, to create varying fi nancing chains: for example, in the be-ginning phase, friends and family help with fi nancing, then you enter contests or use incubators during the fi rst growth phase, before the business model kicks in and carries the social business long-term. A note on legal requirements and hurdles: The term “non-profi t organisation” does

68 MONEY

not exist outright in German legislature. You have to fi nd the right legal entity for your NPO. The focus is therefore on wheth-er your organisation was founded as an association, foundation, cooperative or corporation (non-profi t Ltd. or non-profi t Inc.). These last two are especially suitable for a social business, where you can forgo the “non-profi t” aspect, legally speaking. You may come across hybrid variations, such as a registered association that is also a limited company or, more often, a public company.

In order to found an association you need at least seven members, who uphold the purpose of the association under a joint statute. Members are responsible for all association activities. An association is therefore more culture oriented than an economic enterprise. Where founda-tions and limited liability companies are

concerned, on the other hand, the founders primarily focus their support on fi nancial subsidies, which need not coincide with the content of the entities’ activities.

From a legal perspective a non-profi t limit-ed company is not a special type of limited company. It tends to combine the clas-sic legal form of a limited company with tax-privileged corporate activity, to cover the non-profi t aspect. It also allows for more fl exibility of control than a founda-tion or an association, since the association structure requires more members (for voting purposes) than it does company shareholders or managers. Additionally, in a limited company, shareholders have more fi nancial involvement, which often leads to greater social involvement. They are, after all, dependent on the economic success of the company. Then there are the more typical commercial duties involving

Source: https://www.kfw.de/PDF/Download-Center/Konzernthemen/Research/PDF-Dokumente-Stu-dien-und-Materialien/Social-Entrepreneurship-in-Deutschland-LF.pdf

52

bis

1990

1981

–199

0

1991

–200

0

2001

–201

1

181821

9

bis

1990

1981

–199

0

1991

–200

0

2001

–201

110 10

2626

54

bis

1990

1981

–199

0

1991

–200

0

2001

–201

1

73

15

21

bis

1990

1981

–199

0

1991

–200

0

2001

–201

1

29

11

2626

34

Association Ltd. Cooperative Foundation

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

Organisation founding year according to legal status in % (WZB study, Priller et al- 2012,16) l Data bases: Organisations today 2011; n = 2,978)

MONEY 69

inventory accounts, balance sheets and profi t and loss statements. Depending on the size, there may be additional auditing duties. There is still the option of creating a foundation. Limited companies must have a minimum share capital of 25,000 Euros (entrepreneurial companies with limited liability only require a minimum of one Euro), whereas the stipulated capital for starting a foundation is signifi cantly higher (except for dependent foundations), since it is intended to fi nance non-profi t deeds in the long-run. A foundation’s cause has to remain “in perpetuity” (with the excep-tion of non-perpetual donations) since it is aligned with the will of the benefactor, and cannot be altered, like the purpose of a lim-ited company can.

A word about the public impact and cul-ture-based opinions of NPOs and social businesses: Fundraising organisations rely on the goodwill of donors. In order to reach the organisation’s goal you have to main-tain relationships: with sponsors, business partners and even donors. Research has yet to provide us with any reliable data on how an association can raise more funds due

to its legal entity than a non-profi t limited company can. We can at least assume that a non-profi t limited company is more like-ly to be rejected by older smaller donors due to its entrepreneurial activities (and related profi ts). Businesses with potentially large donors or business partners can ap-preciate both this aspect and the presumed entrepreneurial professionalism that goes hand in hand with the label of “social busi-ness”. The same could be true for products, when supporters come in the form of cus-tomers rather than donors, and have high expectations as to how these products will perform.

Socially speaking, the expectations as to how social problems will be solved are clear. In Germany, the role of the welfare state is an important one, and is backed by large welfare organisations. Caritas (a registered association) has approximate-ly 600,000 employees, and is Germany’s largest employer under private law. The average citizen therefore expects a lot from the government and from welfare. The idea of the social business is no novelty (one need only think of Friedrich Wilhelm

70 MONEY

Raiff eisen or Adolph Kolping in the 19th century); nevertheless, it rarely received any social recognition for years. Thanks to Muhammad Yunus winning the Nobel Prize in 2006, to whom we attribute the current defi nition of the social business, the entrepreneurial approaches of the social business have gained wide acceptance. In Germany alone, there are between 40,000 and 70,000 social businesses as of April 2013.

Social businesses have been recognized for a while now in developing countries and remained free of profi t seeking biases. In Japan and South Africa, for example, NPOs are few and far between. The reason being that, for one, establishing an NPO is sig-nifi cantly more complicated, and second, because entrepreneurship is regarded as just as benefi cial when it comes to social issues. Social businesses take on a whole new meaning because government aid is hard to come by. We are witnessing some-thing similar in the US (and lately also in the UK) where the government is signifi -cantly restricting its welfare network. The government’s goal is to bridge the gap with

social businesses by initiating programs to help strengthen civil society (with the Social Innovation Program in the US and Big Society in the UK), and promoting social business incubators such as Y-Com-binator in the US. Things are diff erent in Egypt, where the government imposes ex-tremely strict requirements on those who wish to launch a NPO, and only gives the green light to projects that are politically safe such as providing slum kids with ed-ucation; In Estonia the decision between non-profi t or for-profi t is characterised by a lack of ideology, and depends entirely on the start-up funding available. Therefore, it is important to always view the business model selection within the context of a na-tion’s culture. So, which start-up can best improve the world we live in, a non-profi t or a for-profi t? In summary, it is not an easy decision; one must consider the type of fi nancing (including capital resources), the actual cost and the potential revenues, the choice of legal structure, the longevity of the cause, and the social expectations. Associations, foundations and cooperatives no longer have a monopoly on fundraising for social causes.

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They are pretty practical, those smart phones. In the evening, you can comment on an idea real quick. You can keep working. But hasn‘t the work day already ended? Yes, but ... and there you have it: digitalisation not only manages to blur conceptual lines, but also allows us to work without them, in a geographic sense; this was explained to us by a digital nomad we interviewed. There are also rumours going around that companies operate based on a competence-based hierarchy, without a boss. Hey, what about automation? Is it threatening our employment? Not necessarily, says Dr. Kucklick. Well then, let‘s get to work.

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Up until recently the title “La Boss” graced my business cards: I was not only on betterplace’s executive board, but also the founder and director of the betterplace lab. Now I am on the su-pervisory board and stay in the wings as the betterplace lab team’s “godmother”. But no one fi lled my position, because we developed into a self-organising team, that gets by without tradi-tional management. The new boss of betterplace is not a boss at all. The new boss is the team.

BY JOANA BREIDENBACH

THE BOSS IS NO BOSS AT ALL

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Our transformation began one year ago. After eight years of working for betterplace I needed a change; I wanted to contin-ue working for betterplace, but not for 16 hours a day. But who would take over my assignments? Founder charisma and net-working are irreplaceable, as it turns out.

That’s when my friend Dennis introduced me to the book “Re-Inventing Organisa-tions”. It gives examples of non-profi t and for-profi t organisations that follow an orga-nization model known as self-management and competence-based hierarchy. The au-thor, Frederic Laloux, classifi es previous management models by colour and thinks of them as evolutionary stages. He refers to the newest stage of development as “teal”. In this model, organisations function with-out bosses or managers. It appoints project managers only. Each employee is basically allowed to make his own decisions, and can, for example, decide on which projects to take on, and how much to be paid for them. It is key here that the person who is appointed decision maker has the most skill for that particular decision. If the graphic designer thinks that the company should buy a specifi c software, his co-workers trust that he knows what he’s talking about.

The graphic designer is the best person to assess that situation. But don’t worry: There are confl ict and escalation processes that everyone has to adhere to. The graphic designer can’t just order his own personal off set-printer for his business cards.

This model was thrilling to me, because it didn’t propagate egalitarian, non-hierar-chical organisations in which each decision involves an endless search for consensus, and where all parties have equal say. This may be the humanitarian thing to do, but it can bring people to the edge of sanity, be-cause so little ends up being accomplished, and there is a constant risk that everyone has to agree on the smallest common de-nominator. In teal organisations, however, each team member operates in an organisa-tional, responsible and mostly autonomous manner, and therefore is given the most room to unleash their potential. At the same time, everyone is asked to consider the organisation as a whole, and to align himself with the common goal. This double goal of letting individuals shine as well as serve the group is a quite an art form. And, as we learned last year, it can be mastered.

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Thus, we began the “team transformer process” with the help of a coach. The het-erogeneity of the group, which, up until now, I had held in my sight like a “fi xed star”, soon became apparent; in terms of inspiration, marketing and networking, all eyes were on me. I talked straight, mo-tivated and warned about weak points. Relationships between individual co-work-ers were inconsistent and sometimes weak.

A competence-based hierarchy, however, requires not just autonomy, but a strong sense of “we”. We gradually worked toward mutual understanding. We developed a mutual trust that had never before been so pronounced. We got to know each other as people who have varying needs, strengths and weaknesses. We gauged limits and ad-dressed confl icts more openly and more constructively. Our team turned into a self-organising organism.

My role in our teal organisation became that of a space-giving moderator. I kept an eye on communication standards, and made sure that the varying and inevitably confl icting perspectives of the team could co-exist, and that objections were tolerated, rather than prematurely removed.

In order to ensure that project managers didn’t just retreat into their underground dungeons we assigned various “overviewing roles”. One person kept an eye on fi nances. Another took on team spirit, and made sure that newly started projects were aligned with the overall strategy.

Despite all the processes we have put in place, we still sometimes feel unsure. What if a customer wants to complain to a super-visor, but there isn’t one?

What if an employee ends up burning the candle at both ends? How do we explain our organisational structure to the outside world in three sentences? How can we align formal structures, in which someone is ultimately responsible, with a compe-tence-based hierarchy?

The successes of the past few months fi ll us with optimism: The team is growing. It has developed new products that I never would have come up with. We have new custom-ers and contracts. A valuable employee, who originally only wanted to stay for a short while, is now entering his third year with us. Morale is very high, even though everyone works hard and puts a lot of time

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in. This, in turn, is good for betterplace’s vision: We want to make the world a tiny bit better and more worth living for many people.

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Work, leisure... is there still a diff erence between the two? Smart phones and digital com-munication never take time off ; even at the dinner table you’ll hear a device go ping! Technology has made us more productive than ever. So, when do we have time to take a deep breath? Again, technology will fi x it: Apps build a digital wall around our work to pro-tect us from it. But doesn’t everything just keep moving regardless? An essay on us, the marching ants.

BY FREDY GAREISAND LENNART LABERENZ

LIQUIDLEISURE

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A while back, Italian philosopher Anto-nio Negri and US literary theorist Michael Hardt wrote down their observations on postmodernism. They noted that “the unique rules of capitalist production condi-tions [...], that were created because of and in tandem with the factory [...], were left behind in order to better penetrate and de-fi ne shareholder relationships; in this sense we are referring to the need to view present society as a social factory”. Even if the term factory seems antiquated nowadays, in the light of legions of freelancers, creative types and the self-employed, the disappearance of the beloved workplace and the precise work schedule is one of the defi ning char-acteristics of a post-industrial society.

But what Negri and Hardt fail to mention is that the factory was a central fi gure in the industrial era on either side of the line between Western capitalism and Soviet socialism. Substantiated by a protestant code of ethics on this side or by a socialist conscience over there, hard work and disci-pline were the virtues that made the worker shine and into which he was coerced. Long before industrialisation, Martin Luther de-clared that obedience and industriousness

were the most important duties of the Christian, since hard work brought us clos-er to God: The hard-earned paradise, gain and recovery from life lay on the other side of the gates to heaven. The French Revolu-tion and its icon who rose from the dead, Napoleon Bonaparte, defi ned loafers as the antithesis of their own cause; in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche noted that “work is in-creasingly gaining a good conscience to its side: the predisposition toward joy involves a ‘need for recuperation’, and is starting to feel ashamed of itself.”

On the fl ip side of work and in the shadow of industry walls, the idea of leisure only took up little real estate. Karl Marx referred to it as disposable time, that was only of interest to entrepreneurs when “hoards of unemployed people” were lacking in man-power. Otherwise the capital ran the risk of overrunning “not only the moral but also physical limitations of the work day. Time devoted to growth, development and main-taining one’s health is taking over. It is a theft of time, demanding the consumption of fresh air and sun light. [...] Sound sleep for collection, renewal and refreshment of vitality reduces it to so many hours of

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motionlessness is as essential in the revival of an absolutely exhausted organism.”

Laziness was frowned upon by protestants and during the revolution, and it took a long time for leisure time to become ac-cepted as part of industrialism; even when it did, it was only as a work-dependent variable. Leisure time was meant for spiri-tual and physical maintenance, for personal manpower replenishing purposes. The welfare state solidifi ed the walls around the factory, and fi rmly supported the idea of regeneration. Between the mid 1800’s and World War One the work week was reduced from 80 to 55 hours in Germany, making the average workday approximate-ly 10 hours. Government employees had been enjoying a legal right to time off since 1873; slowly people began to think about applying this same principle to other work-ers and employees: in the interwar years, leave time was included in the labour con-tract, but not always respected. Time off and leisure time were not considered to be a single block until after the war. Unions fought for work-free Saturdays much lat-er on; not until 1956 did we see posters of children crying: “On Saturdays my daddy belongs to me!”

That didn’t last long. Leisure time research-er Horst Opaschowski notes that free time is diminishing. Nowadays, we work more than ever; at least, if we look at the past 50 years. Technical advances that were supposed to alleviate our work load have done quite the opposite: For the past three decades, the world of labour, says Opa-schowski, has been characterised by an “unprecedented labour intensifi cation”.

Leisure time was able to escape through the holes in the porous factory walls: it turned to liquid. Today, we see the long arm of the job and of freelance employment reach far into our leisure time, colonising le-thargic hours, leisure and free play; smart phones make sure we are reachable, emails

demand responses, and the workplace has become arbitrary, yet universal. Our world is unravelling, and being rebuilt into se-quences of tasks which we must use to earn money. These sequences are piling up, and chasing off any leisure time we may have had.

Additionally, we tend to professionalise our free time: We’ll network while hang-ing out at the bar on Friday nights, we’ll create contacts at weekend fairs, on the golf course and during active holidays with work colleagues. The crumbling of factory walls also tore with it the time stamp clock, and now it is up to us to draw the line be-tween work and leisure. Leisure time is evaporating, just like a liquid.

We keep getting more productive, we ac-complish more in less work time, and we use every spare minute we have to occupy ourselves with work. The market for so-called “productivity” apps like Evernote, Pocket, Swipes, Humin or Boxer, is gi-gantic. Analysts are predicting a market volume of 58 billion US Dollars in 2016 alone.

At the same time, there is a market for apps that are supposed to create distrac-tions for stressed-out digital beings. These apps are supposed to temporarily relieve us from increased productivity, and interrupt extreme cases of multitasking. These are attempts to repair our dysfunctional atten-tiveness by blocking our working memory to save us from overheating.

Then there are anti-procrastination apps that are supposed to help us re-focus, and get our behinds off the couch. We are sup-posed to expedite our projects and end them, regardless of whether they are per-sonal or professional: We can fi nally write that novel, or so we are promised. Or write down that concept for our boss.

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SelfControl, for example, shuts down all social media for a previously determined amount of time. Once activated, there is no deactivating the app. That should give you a clear conscience. The next level up is an app called Freedom, that shuts down the internet altogether. Time Out gives you reminders that taking breaks at regular intervals increases productivity, and Con-centrate groups tools that are useful for a certain task, or ones that are not. If you put it in “writing” mode it deactivates email, Twitter and other distractions all at once.

The result is suitable for our era: We want to be more productive. But is it reasonable to keep working more and more? The big question in light of this increasing intensity in the work place is: Who is benefi ting from this increased productivity? We’ve actually known for a while that the higher the work load, the lower the productivity. In surveys, offi ce workers indicate that that 15 of their weekly 45 hours of work go to waste. That number is probably, as is usually the case, much higher and unknown. What shines bright, however, is employers’ demand for more hours worked. German workers put in the most overtime compared to the rest of Europe: 47.3 per year. And only 20 of those hours were compensated.

At least nowadays there are ways to not be bound to our desks like slaves: If we ac-complish more in less time, we can aff ord more open spaces. Higher productivity could potentially enable us to spend less time at work, and more time away from work. To quote Friedrich Nietzsche once more: “He who does not get to keep at least two thirds of his day to himself is a slave”. Goethe also tends to look at the glass as half empty: “Unconditional productiveness, of whatever kind, ultimately bankrupts the soul”.

What we need is to appreciate and praise idleness, which is not the easiest thing to do when you have a background in

protestantism; but it is feasible, as proves the success of 38-year-old American au-thor Tim Ferriss’s 2007 book “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”. He was rejected by 25 publishers, before the 26th one made it into a bestseller that will soon be translat-ed into 35 languages, and that has been on the New York Times bestseller list for four years.

This book is a guide: How to escape the society-imposed trap of a life plan; how to turn to art; how to spend all day reading a book, watching fi lms and refl ecting. This requires an escape from the 9-5, says Fer-riss, and a launching of one’s own business that can be run from wherever you like.

Ferriss refers to this as his “muse”, and demonstrates how one can organise one-self as a self-employed person and end up working less. And still get more done.

Work then takes the form a single money maker, and a way to provide oneself with a decent, mobile and fl exible life, and a way

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to leave behind all thoughts of a life-long commitment to a company or a job one doesn’t like. Since this supposed money maker is scalable and fl exible, like making a product that once assembled can be sold all over the world, it allows for more leisure time, fi nally.

You can take Ferriss however you like. Critics accuse him of simply being a good marketing person. But many of his prin-ciples are valid in terms of working more effi ciently, which, one could counter-ar-gue, allows one to help oneself to a greater piece of the leisure-time pie, guilt-free. For example, one should focus on the most important 20% of the work load. Ferriss refers to this as “Pareto’s Law”. It’s not a matter of being active. It’s a matter of be-ing proactive. Digital technology allows us to automate repetitive tasks. This would also mean that we would say good-bye to defi ning ourselves through work, and make an even harder change: letting go of the need to win the competition of who carries the biggest workload. British historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s quote still stands, precisely because we are unwilling to do this: “Work expands so as to fi ll the time

available for its completion. No matter how extensive it actually is.”The antithesis would truly be a sight to behold: less work, more money, more disposable hours and days. The term “time free from” could turn into “time free for”: We could converse more, drink more wine. We could travel more, make more love, refl ect more. We change our perspective things, and change all that we see. If we see leisure time as the antithesis of work, as the focus of a life plan, it would become the resource through which we emancipate ourselves. This way, it wouldn’t just be a privilege, but would become the requirement needed in order to surpass Luther and industrial capitalism. Leisure time would continue to be liquid, but we would build digitally-enhanced walls to keep it in. And someday, our holidays would no longer resemble a photo-graph by Massimo Vitali: Uniform masses assembled at the beach, equipped with parasols, an experience captured through a tiny window of time, which is all our work will allow. Liquid leisure could release the steam from the pressure cooker.

A fi nal thought: Surely, Tim Ferriss spent more than four hours a week on marketing

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his book. But, I suppose one shouldn’t take everything literally. What does that leave us with? It’s really never been easier to escape the factory society, and have tons of time off . But at the same time, it’s hard to pull off .

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CHRISTOPH KUCKKLICK

INTERVIEW WITH

Christoph Kucklick, 1963, is a doctor of sociology and the editor-in-chief of GEO Magazine. As an author, he has written articles for DIE ZEIT, brand eins and Capital. His dissertation “The Immoral Gender” was published by Suhrkamp. Kucklick lives in Berlin and Hamburg.

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Mr. Kucklick, you suggest we no lon-ger refer to individuals, but rather to singularities. What is the diff erence?

Digitalisation means fi rst and foremost: We, ourselves, and the society we live in are being measured in a new way. Our bod-ies, communications, relationships, nature, politics, economics; – thanks to digital technology and sensors, everything has become more refi ned, higher resolution, more analysed and more evaluated than ever. One of the results is that previously invisible diff erences are surfacing. Doctors can measure the diff erences between dia-betes patients to such an extent that many are starting to wonder if there is still such a thing as one “common” illness called di-abetes; my diabetes isn’t even close to your diabetes. That is precisely what is hap-pening to us “individuals”: We are being assessed in so many diff erent ways now, on social networks, through location data, behavioural profi les, etc. that we are being radically singled out and are becoming vis-ible in a new way through our singularity. We are turning into singularities, as op-posed to remaining individuals in our era, a more vague term.

This is what they are up to at “So-ciometric Solutions” in Boston: Business advisors are equipping com-pany employees with sensors in order to measure their communications. What for?

They are putting together precise and high-ly individualised, what I would refer to as singularised, communication profi les of individual employees, with their consent and under privacy protection. The goal is to fi nd new reference points as to what actual-ly happens in a company. Up until now, we only had a vague idea of who was commu-nicating with whom. The precision involved in Sociometric Solutions measurements is truly a novelty. It also grants us a new per-spective on communication in a company. The result is astounding: The rule imposed by managers that employees should be working instead of chatting is counter-pro-ductive. The results show that chatting is work, and moves it along. These supposed “cold” technical measuring methods appar-ently help improve human aspects of the job. This is why the company has changed its name to “Humanyze”.

We are witnessing a continuous distribution of sensors and increasing data masses, resulting in an ever more precise measuring of the world, due to technological ad-vancement. This is the phenomenon that distinguishes Dr. Christoph Kucklick in his book “The Granular Society”. The GEO Magazine author and editor-in-chief opens up about how work is measured, co-evolution with machines, and a narcissistic aff ront to mankind.

“ INTELLIGENT TEAMS MADE UP OF BOTH PEOPLE AND MACHINES ARE THE FUTURE”

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Do data points objectify our often warped human perception?

Absolutely. The measurements, however, are not objective. It would be wrong to as-sume that we have fi nally found the one true measurement. These measurements only show what we can see when we apply the respective technologies. And that turns out to be something entirely diff erent from what we have seen so far. But we must not confuse that with an ultimate truth.

In your book, you write that we need to learn to align our behaviour with intelligent machines: What do you mean by that?

There is an unfortunate turn of phrase in the current debate. Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates claim that we will end up being enslaved by machines. This is based on the notion of a fi ght for survival: it’s either us or the intelligent machines. I fi nd the idea to be utterly false. There is no fi ght, there is only a cooperation. We are entering into the era of the co-evolution of intelligent machines and intelligent human beings. It is our job to facilitate this co-evolution as best we can. Human beings who learn to co-operate with machines stand the best chances. A chess example: Ever since “Deep Blue” beat the then reigning chess champion, Gary Kasparow, in 1997, most people assume that computers make better chess champions. But this is not true: The best chess games our now played by teams comprised of human beings and machines; the machines calculate and the human be-ings estimate which program to rely on in which game situation, and how to combine diff erent programs with one another. This is increasingly going to be the case in all areas of life. Intelligent teams made up of people and machines are the future.

Machines also alleviate our work load. Or take it off our hands completely. They write articles on stock market

activity or weekend sports news, with-out anyone knowing that these texts were written by machines. Does this result in more time to write really interesting articles, or in more jour-nalists on the dole?

When I refer to the impending phase of co-operation, I don’t mean for that to be taken too idyllically. To a large extent, machines are going to take work from us. At the same time, we will create more jobs, but there are going to be some signifi cant revolu-tions. During the industrial revolution, 90% of jobs were eradicated in a relatively short time; we are facing similar circumstances. My prognosis, however, is that we will be creative enough to design new jobs.

You write about a race against tech-nology, which mankind could lose, because our computers’ ability to per-form calculations is ever increasing, which could make certain creative or educated people obsolete. Are you afraid that your next book will write an algorithm? Determine style param-eter, subject matter, scope, target audience and hit enter?

I’m assuming that will happen. I just couldn’t say when. Also, I don’t know how we would label what has been written by a human being and what by a machine. Maybe the diff erence won’t matter so much in the future. Nowadays, we don’t care if a plane is being fl own by a machine or by a human being; we usually hope for a ma-chine because they have lower error ratios. Maybe someday we will say the same thing about texts.

Do you think we overestimate human individuality?

Let’s just say there is something dis-comforting about digitalisation: We are discovering that we are more predictable than we thought. We have a subjective

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experience of inner richness and high com-plexity, which is wonderful. However, when you observe our fi ne-grain and digital be-haviour from the outside, we come across as very predictable beings. It is easy to predict what we will be talking about and with whom we will get together. We’re not as secretive as we think, and it doesn’t take much to mathematically deduce many of our behavioural tendencies. What a terrible and narcissistic insult to hurl at mankind! Our reaction will most likely be to try and be more secretive, which will have an inter-esting social impact.

If algorithms are making more and more decisions for mankind, how important is understanding how com-puters and algorithms work?

This question is challenging in two ways: Since we do not know whether certain al-gorithms are fair or even legal, we have to lay them out in a more transparent and comprehensible way. In this sense, we need new institutions. One idea would be to ap-point assessors, who prepare reports on company algorithms for the public, without giving away any company secrets. Secondly, we have to consider ethics: For example, if we own self-driving cars, we have to tell the cars ahead of time what to do in the event of a collision. In a worst case scenar-io, should the car run over a child or an elderly man? This means that we have to

politically agree on ethics regarding life and death; this has not been necessary in hu-man history so far, because we have always delegated ethical decisions to the individ-ual person. This isn’t going to work with machines, though; we will need to make decisions before we begin using them, which will put tremendous pressure on our government: They have to decide what can-not be decided. These types of questions are likely to overburden us and put us un-der more stress, which is why I refer to this time in history as “the Age of Machine-re-lated Stress”.

How open-minded are you, when it comes to machines? Would you allow a software to interview you?

Yes, of course, if the software asked in-telligent questions. They have something similar in call centres, where people have increasingly applicable automated conver-sations, without the callers even noticing. We have to get used to the fact that it is be-coming more and more diffi cult to reliably diff erentiate between man and machine. This places more importance on the ques-tion “who the heck are we?”

An interview conducted by Dennis Buchmann

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RICO REINHOLD

INTERVIEW WITH

Rico Reinhold, age 37, is a free-lance art director and graphic designer with over 15 years of pro-fessional experience in the fi eld. He conceptualizes and designs brands, logos, illustrations, ad campaigns and websites. One of his customers is the betterplace lab.

Rico, what countries have you visited over the last three months?

Australia, which is where I have a more or less permanent address. Then I was in Indonesia, namely in Java and Bali. Then I went to Hungary, but I only visited Buda-pest, then Germany, Spain, Italy, New York City, and right now I’m in Columbia.

Does it matter whether you work from Bali, Brooklyn or Bogota, as long as you get a good internet connection with your laptop?

No, it doesn’t, and it actually works won-derfully: I use various cloud services such as Mega, Dropbox or Google Drive, so that I don’t lose any important client informa-tion should my computer get damaged or should the hard drive crash.

Does being abroad motivate you? Does the unfamiliar environment fos-ter creativity? What do you like about working in foreign countries?

I fi nd changing surroundings to be thrill-ing; having fl exible hours is a great way to reconcile fun activities and work, and I fi nd that the lack of a routine allows me

to fl ourish. Clients love the fact that we can use time diff erences to our advantage. It is wonderful to visit friends all over the world, and to be able to stay in touch in this way, and even collaborate with them. I love learning new languages, speaking them and making cultural observations.

When I’m exposed to that much input, I come up with new ideas all the time. I re-ally enjoy having a job to do in another

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Digital nomads are people who move around and use digital technology in order to be able to work in any place that has internet access, in other words practically any-where on Earth. Our in-house graphic designer, Rico Reinhold, was just working on an illustration over in Columbia for our next trend, when we asked him if he consid-ers himself to be a travel junkie, whether he ever gets a moment’s rest, and what his girlfriend thinks of all this.

“ THE ONLY TIME I’M OFF-LINE IS IF I AM IN THE JUNGLE OR IN THE DESERT”

country. When I’m a tourist I always feel like I’m not fully engaged. I’m just staring, drinking and taking photos... I’d rather have a little job to do at the same time as getting to know the country and city I’m in. I prefer this combination! Maybe I’m just one of those restless types who always wants to go somewhere else.

Do you sometimes miss having a daily routine or a local routine? What an-noys you about working abroad?

A slow wifi connection annoys me the most, followed by uncomfortable chairs and stools in cafés or hostels. Oh, and of course, having to lug around my equipment: My back pack fi lls up quickly and is usually over the weight limit for overhead luggage because I carry a laptop, cables, a charger, hard drives, graphic tablets, headphones, cameras, and so on. I only miss a routine when it comes to sports and fi tness, but often times I can take care of that on-site

as well. It is easier to get into a healthy food routine when you have a permanent address.

Your girlfriend often joins you, but she doesn’t have work to do. Does it cause a confl ict if you have holiday plans, but then you get an assignment?

Yes, that happens now and then, but we’re fl exible and willing to compromise, so we get it all done. I have a tendency to priori-tise because work has to come before fun. Discipline is important, especially when your customers trust you so much.

Do you ever go off -line, in order to separate work from leisure?

I’m only ever off -line if I have to spend a couple of days in the jungle or in the des-ert. In that case I give people notice ahead of time. Other than that I try to keep com-munications brief and fl uent, and try to

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stick to time lines. Work ethic, honesty and transparency are very important to me. Work, leisure and travel go hand in hand for me; it’s fun to work on a new project, and there is always time to answer emails or draw an illustration, whether I’m in an offi ce, at the gate or in a hammock.

What’s your next destination?

I’ll be travelling up the Caribbean coast of Columbia, then taking a sail boat to Panama, and then staying in a tree house community in Costa Rica. We’ll see if I get good internet access there.

An interview conducted by Dennis Buchmann

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92 LONGING

LONGING Goodness gracious, this is all happening so fast! Well, that’s how technological progress feels, anyway. For years now, we in our betterplace lab have been contemplating where this will all lead in terms of trends. We checked to see which of our theories from back then were correct. After all, they are the heart of our work, and our companion in our longing for impact; but it’s so hard to prove impact. Joana, the founder of the betterplace lab, optimistically ponders the deeper purpose of our think-and-do tank. On a diff erent note, a dead serious one, refugees long for a life of freedom. We are discovering how digital technologies can help in this trend, and interview Jean Peters on his successful campaign “Fluchthelfer.in” (Escape Helper). This isn’t even necessary for virtual citizens of a digital Estonia: In the Cloud freedom is limitless. Sigh.

LONGING 93

DIGITAL REFUGEE ASSISTANCE

In September 2015 approximately 10,000 refugees per day arrived in Germany. Almost every single one brought a cell phone or a smart phone with them: after all, their usefulness cannot be beaten. Refugees don’t just use them to stay in touch with friends and relatives, they use them to plan their escape. Helpers on the other side could barely do their jobs without digital media. Websites and apps for apartment and job placement are the perfect tools to help ref-ugees obtain important information, and help them integrate. Refugee assistance is becoming more and more digital.

BY KATHLEEN ZIEMANN

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“Our cell phones and batteries are the most important thing on our journey. They are even more important than food”, 32-year-old Syrer Wael told online magazine qz.com not long ago. In September 2015, he arrived on the Island of Kos. His cell phone survived the journey, wrapped in a water-proof bag. During his escape he kept checking his location via GPS, and sending photos to his family. When he arrived in Greece, he took a selfi e.

Refugees can use apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Maps and Viber to coordinate with refugee helpers and other refugees, keep track of their geographic location and update fami-ly members. During the escape itself, a functioning cell phone can save lives. In the event of distress at sea, boat passen-gers can get help via the NGO Borderline Europe Alarmphone. Katharina Kessler, a volunteer and activist for Alarmphone told Reset.org in an interview: “On some of the shorter distances, such as between Turkey and Greece, we get cell phone re-ception and can receive cell phone calls from these regions. People in distress at sea call the Alarmphone’s central number. The calls are then forwarded to the respec-tive parties.” The GPS tracking system on a smart phone can come in handy too. Aid organisations report news from WhatsApp regarding GPS data, which helps them save refugees in trouble. Humanitarian organ-isations recognize the importance of cell phones and the internet for refugees. The International Red Cross, for example, has distributed thousands of solar-operated cell phone chargers in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria.

Refugee agencies of the UN have given out 33,000 SIM cards to refugees in Jordan. Another example is Hungary, where the Civil Society and Technology Project pro-vides a digital infrastructure by equipping its volunteers with WLAN transmitters in backpacks, so that they can meet up with refugees at designated assembly points (train stations, etc.) and off er them access to a network called “Free Wifi , no YouTube please”. Kate Foyer, director of the project, told newscientist.com: “Communication is one of our basic needs, which is why the internet should always be available to people”. In Germany, Freifunk pro-vides internet for refugees. When people have access to the internet they can make plans and keep informed. Refugees can post which border crossings are still open, for example, or at what points people are stuck, using Facebook groups.

Smart phones are the new fl yers: the city of Witten an der Ruhr has an app that pro-vides refugees with important information. The Witten 2 app answers questions in German, English, French and Arabic, ques-tions such as: Where can I take a language class? Where can I get something to eat? Where can I fi nd cheap clothes and furni-ture? Many people can use this app thanks to the free WLAN all over Witten. On the fi rst day, over 100 people used the app. The success of it is getting around: the city of Dresden is now working on a comparable app.

Many of these digital ideas stem from stu-dents and individuals. There is an online platform called “Flüchtlinge Willkommen”

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To Opportunities and Risks

(Welcome Refugees) where refugees and people who have a spare room can regis-ter – and often receive monetary help from the community, and it’s all perfectly legal. Thanks to this initiative designed by Berlin students, 140 people across Germany have already found a place to stay. “Workeer” is the fi rst digital job placement service for refugees. This is another online platform that was invented by students. There is even a university specifi cally for refugees. At Kiron University, refugees can study for free and all the way up to a Bachelor’s De-gree, without having graduated from high school and even without proper documen-tation. The crowdfunding campaign for this project is going swimmingly.

At the same time, the digital network is helpful to volunteers. Many groups that help refugees upon their arrival are or-ganising themselves via social networks. “Flüchtlingshilfe Bremen” (Bremen Refu-gee Help), for example, posts lists of items people need for their individual accommo-dations on Facebook, which helps them distribute material donations in a reason-able manner. “We said let’s just do this”, Christian, one of the founders of the Face-book page, told n-tv in an interview. “This launched a Tsunami.

We could never have even imagined it. People actually drove to the specifi ed ac-commodations and delivered items that were needed. The distribution aspect is working much better.” Meanwhile, the site has over 19,000 fans and reaches over 100,000 people. This can also be done without Facebook, though. The project “wohindamit.org” (where does this go?) in-volves using an online databank as well as Google Maps to fi nd the right place for ma-terial donations.

It’s interesting that with all these initiatives and ideas, traditional charitable organi-sations (Caritas, Diakonie, etc.) don’t use social networks as much, but would rather use their own homepage as an informa-tion channel. This leads to tension between long-established aids and newer volunteers. It’s not easy to agree on things without a common communications channel.

Even though newer volunteers mean well, they do not have any experience in dealing with crisis situations, or lack the appro-priate training, which makes this issue particularly important.

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Risks:

• Refugees can only benefi t from online platforms if they know about them. Not all projects manage to fi nd the appropriate channels and spread the word of what they have to off er.

• Tensions can arise between enthusiastic Facebook volunteers and traditional, experienced aid organi-sations, if the two parties do not communicate with each other and cannot get their off ers to coincide.

• An app doesn’t automatically provide better integra-tion. Communities and authorities must not rest on their digital laurels, but should continue to develop more provisions.

Opportunities:

• Smart phones and internet access can save lives in an escape situation: If you know what your location is thanks to a GPS system, you can get help and warn others or even reunite with them.

• The contact between volunteers and refugees is faster and more direct thanks to digital structure. Slow-paced authorities or charitable organisations can be circumvented.

• Volunteers can coordinate for free and effi ciently thanks to social networks.

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Thanks to the internet, refugees and volunteers can fi nd each other with more ease, and skip having to wait around for slow-paced authorities or sluggish charity organisations to respond. The smart phone can help open doors in terms of integration, because it can lead to fast and direct access to accommodations, jobs and education. Furthermore, it is clear that universally available digital tools such as Facebook make community involvement more effi cient, and can get help on the right track. What would be more desirable in this situation is more openness on the part of charitable orga-nisations in light of such tools, to ensure we do not lose any young and enthusiastic volun-teers, or forgo the effi cient organising of our eff ort.

CONCLUSION

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GHERBTNAOne of the main causes of the increase of refugees over the past few years is the civil war in Syria. According to UNHCR data, almost four million people had escaped the country by the end of 2014. The number of people added to that in 2015 is unknown. Many of these individuals seek asylum in Turkey.

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One such individual is Mojahed Akil. The web designer fl ed Syria for Turkey in 2011. First he had to gather his bearings. What rules do people seeking asylum have to fol-low? Where do you fi nd an apartment or a job? How do you open a bank account?

In order to share any answers with others, Mojahed Akil and friends developed the app Gherbtna (Arabic for exile, loneliness). Gherbtna gives Syrian refugees in Turkey access to important information that can help them settle down in a country that is foreign to them. It off ers a job forum with tips on how to apply, information on higher learning institutions and news on refugee settlement areas.

This is helpful too: Updates on which bor-der crossings are currently open. News of the app has spread like wild fi re among refugees, and the app has become very pop-ular. Turkey has taken on approximately 1.7 million Syrian people, 230,000 of which live in emergency camps. Mojahed Akil is able to reach them with Gherbtna because the UNHCR provides internet in the ref-ugee camps. The app does not yield any returns yet, but Mojahed Akil is searching for investors in order to scale Gherbtna and thus help refugees worldwide.

www.8rbtna.com

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OTVORENA MREŽA’S WIFI BACKPACKEver since Hungary put up a fence along the border of Serbia, one of the latest ways for refu-gees to fl ee Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan is through Croatia. Many refugees are stuck there, and are being provided with water, food and medication. Another basic need is: the internet. Thanks to the internet people can fi nd out when what border is open, which way to Europe is currently the best, and how friends and family are doing.

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While the Red Cross is busy providing ref-ugees with health care, Otvorena mreža provides free wifi . Volunteers of the organ-isation that translates to “Open Network” run along the border with hotspots in their backpacks. The backpacks say in big letters “Free Wifi ”. Refugees briefl y stand next to volunteers and do the stuff they need to do online. Otvorena mreža’s slogan is “More Internet For All!” The or-ganisation also alerts telecommunications

businesses and local authorities when a new broadcasting tower is needed, due to network overload. The organisation was founded in 2009, is funded by do-nations, and is now planning on posting instructions online as to how to build your own wifi backpack, which is good for the future.

www.otvorenamreza.org

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WORKEERFinding work is one of the biggest challenges for refugees. They do not have the necessary net-work connections for fi nding jobs and getting a work permit is practically impossible without a job off er. That’s why students David Jacob and Philipp Kühn (photo below) designed the online job fo-rum “workeer” as their communications design graduation project for their bachelor’s program.

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The idea is simple: Employers upload their job offers, and refugees post their profiles and applications. Then the two come together, and ideally, establish a working relationship. Even if the au-thorities still have to grant certain work permits this is an important first step in connecting employers with job appli-cants. The workeer forum also provides

refugees with apprenticeships. Initiatives that support refugees then also have a central platform on which to refer people in this important job market. Following the successful beta version launch, the 1.0 version of workeer is now going to be released.

www.workeer.de

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JEAN PETERS

INTERVIEW WITH

Jean, refugees usually have to make an arduous journey on foot into Eu-rope. Any person who picks up a refugee and gives them a ride is liable to prosecution. With its Fluchthelfer.in campaign the Peng! Collective has gotten a lot of public attention with regards to the issue of illegal help. What digital channels are you using?

Of course, we put up a website for the campaign, produced videos, we sent out emails and publicised everything on Face-book and Twitter. Digital communication channels are practical, aff ordable and do not take up a lot of time. But they are worthless if they do not have good content. And the internet is only one tool among many. If the power were to go out, we would still be able to spread our message with fl yers, provided the message is good enough. A deciding factor for the success

of the campaign was people’s ability to empathise. Fluchthelfer.in helped you re-alize that there is a way out, that there are options of helping people, even if that help only consists of a donation toward legal help.

So, your activities on the street, like awarding the cross of merit, those are part of your content plan?

Defi nitely. This is all part of our concept of tactical media. At fi rst, the novelty is enough for a story, people write about it, but then journalists need something new. So, we put on a nice performance and bam! A new article. We cause waves of attention by portioning relevant content. The cross of merit was an important part of legitimising escape services: Refugee helpers from East Germany were awarded the cross of merit and former helpers gathered in front of the

Many people wish they could help refugees, but they don’t dare. Jean Peters from Peng! Collective tackles the problem of longing via the Fluchhelfer.in campaign. In this interview, she talks about portioned content, legal grey zones and the fear of failure.

“ WE NEED ZOMBIES WHO ARE CAPABLE OF EMPATHY TO RISE UP OUT OF THEIR GRAVES!”

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Brandenburg Gate in order to speak out about helping refugees.

A video, a website, social media: How do you get people to actually help?

We provide legal support and give people concrete advice and show them tricks that take their fears away, because helping ref-ugees can mean ten years in jail. We also pay legal and administrative fi nes, etc. Businesses have attorneys who handle grey areas at work. Why doesn’t civil society do the same? There are plenty of lawyers with principles, who would be glad to help for free, as long as it’s for a legitimate cause. We try to lead by example. The timing has

to be right; people wanted to help and it happened to be holiday time. Even the con-servative media was on our side and added to the momentum. We were inundated with questions from people as to how they could help with their cars. And that was truly as-tounding, because falsifying passports and getting people over here from Syria is no small feat.

A campaign is supposed to draw at-tention to a specifi c topic and steer communication in a specifi c direction. How do you plan something like that?

Emotionally it’s a bit chaotic, but the basis for it all is the idea behind the campaign. If

Jean Peters is Peng! Collective’s care taker. After a successful career in Hollywood she decided to begin a new life in Berlin, and has been working for Shell, Google, Vattenfall, the EU and as of late the Secret Services.

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it’s a good one you can write it on a card-board sign, and someone will take a picture of it and post it on Twitter. The backbone of fl uchthelfer.in consists of an entire year of research, a team of good people, who know the problem well, who have helped refugees themselves and been on this path themselves. You can only give advice if you really know what you’re talking about. We start by talking to newspapers and oth-er news sources. Decent journalists are sophisticated, so you have to handle the sit-uation well. You get them to pay attention. They can fi nd out new information, they are investigators, they know what they are doing.

You’re all professionals, but still, when you plan a new campaign, what is your emotional state before show time?

Things get heated, we feel a fear of failure, we never have enough capacities despite

ages of planning, we get extremely excited, almost obsessed, and everything starts to spin. But since we’re all friends, we trust each other tremendously, which is a foun-dation you just can’t do without.

What is Peng! Collective’s vision? What does your collective long for?

Let me answer that with a statement: No-body can get around taking an extreme political stance in an informed society. There’s the surveillance and oppression of undocumented people, there’s the destruc-tion of our environment... not taking any action is also an extreme position. This is why society should turn radicalising into something positive, lay all institutional fears aside, and release the handbrake in order to be able to react legitimately. Peo-ple tend to try and maintain the status quo. But if everyone did that things would just get worse. Institutions are dismantling civil society at the moment, so we’re just trying

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is a campaign that was started by Peng! Collective in 2015, in order to help refugees on their way to Europe and after their arrival. If you take refugees across the border in your car and apply the advice and tricks on the website, you have a decent chance of avoiding a run-in with the law. How do I avoid causing suspicion in terms of immigrant smuggling? What happens to the refugees once they get dropped off ? Start with a brand new SIM card, a cell phone and a German fl ag sticker that can be spotted from a side mirror and serves as camoufl age. In case of emergency Peng! Collective has lawyers whose services are paid for by donations (18,000 Euros to date). We put up posters with photos of refugees, and gave out the European cross of merit in front of the Brandenburg Gate, which got us plenty of attention. The campaign has allowed us to take almost 600 refugee-related actions already.

FLUCHTHELFER.IN

to sharpen their teeth. Our goal is to pull society up out of its lethargy. Society is like a zombie, agreed, but we still need loving zombies who are capable of empathy to rise up out of their graves!

An interview conducted by Dennis Buchmann

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LONGING FOR THE ORACLE BY KATHLEEN ZIEMANN

For over three years now, we have been predicting digital trends for our social sec-tor. We have come up with theories as to which new phenomena, that up until now have been isolated incidents, we will see more of over the next few years. One year ago, the big event format for public welfare programming was the hackathon. Two years ago we speculated that in the future people wouldn’t just donate their money, but also their data. In 2012, we forecasted that online fundraising would make direct mail superfl uous.

Now that we have reached the present, we ask ourselves: Were our theories correct? Here’s a eg! check on six of our theories from the past.

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OUR THEORIES FROM 2012Selling with heart (cause related marketing): “The internet will have even greater meaning with regards to cause re-lated marketing measures in the future. Social media shows great potential. The trend of selling with heart continues to grow, because nowadays it has become the norm for businesses to use social responsi-bility to distinguish themselves.”

Correct: From Ikea to smoothie mak-er Innocent to Volvic: Nearly every large company has already begun some kind of fundraising activity, or will have by Christmas at the latest. None of these fundraising campaigns would exist without Facebook, Twitter and other social media. However, few campaigns are successful because very few companies show exactly how much money was raised and what was accomplished with it.

Online fundraising: “Up until this point the main source of fundraising organisa-tions to collect donations has been via the postal services. Since letters can get expen-sive, approximately one third of all funds raised end up going back into the fundrais-ing industry. But the internet is likely to switch things up in the fundraising sector, and make direct mail superfl uous.”

Incorrect: 20% of donors still use letters to mail in their donations. The donation letter therefore takes an undefeated second place (most donations come in the form of memberships). However, its impor-tance is decreasing. The growth that online fundraising has undergone shows that the internet is becoming the most used dona-tion channel in the medium-run. This being said, online donations only make up about 5% of all funds raised in Germany, and seem to be stuck there. This trend, there-fore, still remains to be seen.

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2013Data donating: “In the future, we won’t just be donating money, time and things, but also data. Each one of us can donate his or her data directly. Either that, or companies that store people’s data (such as Facebook or Google) donate them for a good cause. Social involvement still means mostly donating money, items or time (honorary position). But down the road, donating data will become an additional pillar of support.”

Correct: We wrote it back then: “If data is the ‘blood of the internet’, as European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding put it, how come there is no such thing as a data donating service?” The app goodni-ty.com provides this service in Germany. Users can off er up their data for market re-search, and thus make a monthly 50 Euro donation. So, we were onto something. It will be a fascinating to watch though, since the number of examples for the data donat-ing trend is still quite small.

Direct feedback: "Cell phones give one strength. Cell phones give recipients of aid programs a voice, especially in develop-ing countries. In the future, benefi ciaries will play a more active role in the whole development cooperation; they will better articulate and prioritise their needs, man-age ongoing projects and participate in evaluating results."

Incorrect: The pioneers of development cooperation are still talking about direct feedback via digital technologies. Howev-er, this trend has not been implemented yet. Many aid organisations conduct inter-views with aid recipients before the project has even begun. But ongoing evaluations via text message? Sadly, that is still only a dream.

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2014Shareconomy: “Ownership is out. More and more people are fostering a share-conomy by sharing things, places and knowledge, and by using the internet. This trend comes from a change in social con-scientiousness. Everyone is talking about sustainability; dwindling sources of ener-gy and raw materials are forcing us to use resources more effi ciently in order to un-burden the environment.”

Correct and incorrect: It is correct that the term shareconomy has received tre-mendous recognition thanks to platforms such as Airbnb or Uber. However, the business models of these fi nancially sound companies have nothing to do with the original concept of fair sharing. They sim-ply serve to commercialize private property. Shareconomy itself has actually benefi ted from the hype surrounding the term. We are seeing more and more neighbourhood platforms such as Polly & Bob, platforms that are bringing back mutual lending and borrowing, precisely because it’s all about sharing and not about having money.

Hackathons: “Hackathons have been around since the early 2000s. They are showing up more and more in the social sector as well. Activists, NGO representa-tives and public institutions are generating ideas on the matter, and challenging hack-athon participants. Programmers, designers and experts have been invited to pitch in and are quickly developing an app, soft-ware or other technical solutions.”

Incorrect: Social ideas have not caught the hackathon fever, except for in a few cases such as the Coding da Vinci museum hackathon. The reason may be that pro-grammers are in demand in Germany, and are overwhelmed by hackathon requests. By the time NGOs got the idea to get in-volved in hackathons the trend had already passed. Hackathons are not a thing of the past yet, as the Berlin refugee hackathon in October 2015 demonstrated.

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WE BECAME MORE CRITICAL AS TIME WENT BY BY JOANA BREIDENBACH

Who among us has not looked up at the night sky, taken in the awe-inspiring vastness of the universe and pondered what life is truly worth? Who hasn‘t wondered what impact one person can have on the course of things? On the atrocities of ISIS, natural disasters, poverty, sickness and discrimination? One‘s own eff orts barely seem to have any more signifi cance than a fl yspeck. Keep your head up: The following deeply perso-nal refl ection on the longing for impact illustrates that it‘s not about fl ies at all.

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Eight years ago, the betterplace.org plat-form was but a small idea inside the heads of a few people. Today it has evolved into a kind of community involvement high-way that over 15,000 projects use to raise funds online and that has allowed hun-dreds of thousands of people to raise over 25 million Euros to date. Since I wanted to understand and explore the repercussions of digital technology on social involve-ment I founded the betterplace lab shortly thereafter. This was at a time when no one combined the words “digital” and “social”, with the exception of my colleague Dennis Buchmann, who coined the phrase “digital social innovation”.

The term struck a chord, and now en-tire conferences, studies and EU subsidy programs have been dedicated to it. The betterplace lab now consists of a team of ten people, and is working on a large trans-parency project in conjunction with clarat and 21 additional workers. Our trendra-dar platform encompasses over 700 case studies on digital social innovation. Our lab around the world allows us to conduct worldwide research on how environments emerge where digital technologies can im-prove our quality of life.

However, the fate of innovation is such that it either dissipates too quickly due to a lack of implementation, or it becomes so main-stream that think tanks can no longer use it to score points. That’s why our goals with the betterplace lab and our desired impact is constantly changing.

During the fi rst few years our goal was mainly to make German people more aware of the fact that digitalisation not only has eff ects on the economy (eBay, Amazon) and daily communications (email, Face-book), but also on society as a whole and on “doing good”. We were like truffl e pigs, uncovering one cool digital social innova-tion after another, and presenting them to the public. Our message was: “People, use

digital technology toward a better world!” But as time went on we became more crit-ical. We now analyse objections to and requirements of digital trends more intent-ly, and are no longer allowing ourselves to be lulled into complacency by hype.

This is how I came to scrutinise the trend of “social innovation labs”, “impact hubs” and the whole social movement of the post-it scene via a popular blog post ap-proximately one year ago. A Dutch meta study on new think and do tanks was “un-able to fi nd any evidence to support that they actually contributed to lasting system-atic social change”. Their reasons seemed plausible: For one, in many cases social innovators were fuelled by “solutionism” and were seeking simple solutions to highly complex interdependent social problems. They also tended to be politically naive and were inadvertently supporting existing power structures instead of questioning them.

There were times when even I had doubts about our mission: Where was the ground-braking change? Where was the disruption, that an established, virtuous so-cial system required? A clever fundraising app, a new innovation contest, yet another foundation on Twitter, was that all?

Today, I am convinced that I was searching for impact in the wrong place. We're not changing the social sector via single plat-forms or apps, but rather by infl uencing the awareness of citizens, social initiatives, businesses and politicians step by step, and thus their actions. Within the last eight years (betterplace.org) and the last fi ve years (betterplace lab) things have changed for the better.

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My top 4 list of disruptive forces:

1. Nowadays it’s understood: social initia-tives raise funds online and report their eff orts in a more direct and authentic manner. Crowdfunding and online fundraising are disruptive in that they fi nancially empower a new group of social-ly oriented project initiators, especially in smaller initiatives that would normally not stand a chance in today’s fi nancing envi-ronment. At the same time, platforms such as Indigogo, Kickstarter, betterplace and startnext bring donations closer to social projects and allow for new participation.

2. Another new development is that many of today’s initiatives no longer seek a non-profi t legal structure, but rather form a loose group that comes together to take specifi c actions. These network organ-isations put together trips and events for people in the refugee center of Ber-lin-Wilmersdorf, sort of like a Facebook group. Thanks to online communication tools, collaboration is much easier now-adays. After an earthquake thousands of digital volunteers classify satellite images on their screens in order for on-site help-ers to get to the locations with the most damage fastest. Humanitarian aid turns into a dynamic system, in which amateur volunteers play just as much of a role as experts, drone fl yers and satellite analysts.

3. It is of utmost importance that many of the new digital social movements are truly global. In the past, “global” of-ten meant that organisations were active in Europe and North America. Today’s

collaboration sites (social impact hubs, etc.) and innovation contests (Making all Voices Count, etc.), social entrepreneur sponsors (Ashoka, etc.) and technolog-ical platforms (Github, etc.) are just as available to people in Brazil as to people in Ghana or Indonesia. This is import-ant because we don’t just have people in Washington, London and Berlin making decisions on what “development” means in other economically weaker countries.

4. My fourth favourite has not yet reached its full potential. I am quite certain that digital feedback loops between NGOs and receivers of support, or between social organisations and donors are extremely useful in improving programs, or rede-signing them altogether.

So, technology will fi x it then? No. There are too many “ICT4D”, “social tech” or “4good” initiatives with good intentions who never got past the gate. Kentaro Toyamas, author of “Geek Heresy”, gets to the point with his theory: Digital tech-nology can strengthen potential in terms of talent and intentions. Technological projects that succeed are those that al-low motivated people to collaborate with capable aid organisations and willing recipients.

This is often the case with pilots since they hand pick their own innovators. But when a certain technology is supposed to be taxied to a standstill for unmotivat-ed target groups (such as failing schools, dysfunctional districts, etc.) it usually falls through. That’s because its impact

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depends on the participation of enthu-siastic people. Toyamas emphasises the importance of the human factor in the success of a technological innovation. When I think about the impact the bet-terplace lab can have, that’s my starting off point. The betterplace lab is all of the following:

A networker: Connecting people from diff erent backgrounds (from organisations, businesses, politics and society in general) with one another, so that they can learn from one another and understand each other’s perspective. The betterplace lab is meant to serve as a transmission device for innovation, and allow good ideas to quickly spread (which is why we are going international).

An inspirer: One of my intellectual role models, cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, talks about the “capacity to as-pire” as being the most important drive for change. What he is referring to is the ca-pacity to expand human horizons. Showing them what is possible. My understanding of the betterplace lab’s trend research is that it allows us to broaden the horizons of so-cial agents.

An advisor: In the betterplace lab we try to resist the urge to categorise things in black and white, and invite openness and decision makers who value shades of grey.

A study like “Big Data for the Common Good” (a collaboration with the Vodafone Institute) takes on important socio-politi-cal questions such as as ”what price do we want to pay for transparency, safety and effi ciency?”, and presents decision makers with various goods and values to be eval-uated, and which they can design their policies.

A role model: I want the betterplace lab and its team to be a role model in terms of the attitude of being unprejudiced in the face of innovation, wherever possible. Try-ing to understand before judging (the noble creed of cultural anthropologists, of which I am one). Combining serious issues with en-tertainment. And placing the matter before self-interest.

My eff orts may not be worth more than a fl yspeck when looking up at the starry sky. But that’s not the point. The point is that I can contribute to the here and now, or as author Steve Johnson calls it, “the adjacent possible”. I can have a lot more impact than a fl y with its excrements. What is the most wonderful impact I can think of? That people become inspired by the betterplace lab’s work to follow their own creative urg-es, and become more idiosyncratic, braver and more human.

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HEALTHCARE INSTEAD OF LIFESTYLE – HOW THE INTERNET OF THINGS ALLOWS FOR MORE AUTONOMY FOR THE ELDERLY BY FREDY GAREIS

The current technology lingo we are forced to use in our daily lives is replete with terms that most people over 65 cannot comprehend: snap-chat, Whatsapp, browser, Android and internet of things. The latter is one that is of great signifi cance to the el-derly because it could lead to more autonomy in their old age.

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Germany is a safe and prosperous country, but it is also ageing rapidly. In 1950, only one in ten citizens was over the age of 65, whereas now it’s one in fi ve. It is estimated that by 2050, one in three citizens will be over the age of 65. We are right in the mid-dle of a demographic change. However, our buildings are not designed to accommo-date this change. They were built in a time when the term “generational compatibility” was yet irrelevant. Only approximately one to two percent of homes can be deemed age-appropriate.

According to a survey, 90% of seniors wish to spend their twilight years at home. In tandem with a demographic change, we are experiencing a technological change; this change can make the dream of seniors to remain in their homes and remain in-dependent, instead of being cast into a retirement home, a reality.

Over the past few years, this booming market has come up with a number of ap-plications that refl ect this change. One of the pioneering experiments is an app called “PAUL” (personal assistant for assisted living). Over a period of three years re-searchers at the Kaiserslautern University

tested how smart apps can make the life of seniors easier. “Smart Home” is the new term coming out of everyone’s mouths, one that promises us a future in which refriger-ators automatically order more milk when running low, and in which the washing machine starts up when electricity is the cheapest. One important aspect of this for people over the age of 65 is what’s known as AAL, or Ambient Assisted Living, i.e. en-vironmentally supported living.

“PAUL” is an example of this environ-mentally supported living: “Paul” turns off appliances, alerts you when windows have been left open, and notifi es care givers and relatives in the event of an emergency. The options are nearly endless as to how we can off er household assistance to seniors; the main focus is comfort and safety. There are stove tops that turns themselves off , elec-tronic reminders to take medications and specialised carpets that register a fall.

This technology is not only meant to im-prove the lives of seniors themselves, but also unburden doctors, care givers and most importantly, relatives. Over 70% of those in need of care are being provid-ed for by their relatives, and these kind

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Every second counts

Whenever a driver on the road hears sirens wailing, he knows that he has to pull over: Ev-ery second counts in a cardiac arrest; the sooner CPR is performed the greater the chances are for survival. But sometimes, no matter how fast emergency services arrive, it's too late. Emergency physician Dr. Ralf Stroop wanted things to be diff erent, and therefore he came up with the idea for a "Mobile Saviour" volunteers who are experienced in emergency mat-ters, such as doctors, nurses and paramedics can sign up. If someone places an emergency call to 999, these volunteers are located, notifi ed and directed to the emergency site. Thus more victims receive help faster, and more lives can be saved.

of multiple stresses often cause people to burn out.

Ever since the “PAUL” testing was con-ducted, a slew of new apps and devices have been developed by collaborating universities and businesses, apps that are promoting progress in both home and apartment. Then there’s the international project called “CARE4BALANCE”. C4B op-erates via an intelligent dashboard system which indicates the status and context of its participants. It sounds complicated, but it’s really quite simple: C4B connects seniors, care takers and relatives with each other via their smart phones or tablets. What an improvement to communication and coor-dination in the fi eld of care!

Another example is the personal assistant “CONFIDENCE”, for people who suff er from dementia. This app, developed by the Salzburg Research Association is meant to help dementia patients remain mobile and active for longer. Support begins in the home: The app reminds patients to take their medication, gives tips on what to wear according to the weather, gives directions to and reminds them of upcoming appoint-ments, and includes an SOS function: If the patient in question is lost, a previously chosen contact person is notifi ed, and ei-ther that person or the patient is navigated home via a maps app. Care personnel can also interact with the person receiving care

via a web-based interface, and enter ap-pointments and reminders and so on, that are then indicated on the smart phone.

The project known as “SAMDY” is an intel-ligent combination of sensors installed in the home and the bed. The AAL system de-veloped by the Fraunhofer Alliance records sensor data such as pulse and sleeping pat-terns, processes data and forwards results to care personnel. Care facilities are thus able to take note of events occurring in the care personnel’s absence and can evaluate the situation. Slight changes to the patient’s health are recorded immediately, instead of when it is too late.

Of course, operating these systems has to be simple and intuitive: what 65-year-old wants to sit around reading endless instructions manuals? This new simplic-ity, as seen in recent years with all apps from Airbnb to Tinder, could really benefi t seniors.

Whereas the “Smart Home” concept focus-es more on effi ciency and comfort, seniors need safety, control and, ultimately, more autonomy. The Internet of Things is not just the next hype, but an actual promise to safety and sanctity for millions of people.

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UNBELIEVABLE: THE STATE THE CLOUD BY MEDJE PRAHM

The Estonian e-Residency is probably the cure for climate change: Those who are virtual citizens of the Baltic country no longer need to travel for business. Geograph-ic constraints are becoming obsolete thanks to the digital boundlessness made in Estonia.

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Our identities are largely shaped by the fact that we are a member of a country. This is where we grew up, learned cultural and so-cial rules, and discovered who we are.

The European Union and African Union, off er even stronger connections with which we can identify. Internet and digital in-novations have allowed us to perceive the world as borderless.

When collaborating with my colleague it is irrelevant whether she is sitting right next to me or in South Africa. What matters is having good internet access. It defi nitely makes no diff erence what nationality we are in this networked world. Digitalisation

bridges the distance between us, both spa-tially and ideally.

Estonia noticed that too (a snap shot of the lovely capital of Tallinn), when it started off ering foreigners digital identity cards toward the end of 2014. The goal of this e-residency initiative was and is to off er non-Europeans easier access to economic dealings within the EU. Once registered applicants receive a passport, a so-called electronic ID that allows them to open virtual bank accounts in Estonia, start up businesses, implement electronic signatures and, of course, pay taxes, all without leav-ing their homeland. There is a huge need for this service because without this type of

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ID it is only possible to do business in the EU on location, which is time-consuming and expensive.

Estonian people have been using digital IDs for over a decade now, and they save tons of data on them and use them on a daily basis: for visits to the doctor, online elections, and fi ling their taxes.

The initiators of the e-residency did not anticipate the following: One third of appli-cants for digital Estonian citizenship have no economic interest. They simply want-ed to have a virtual residency additionally somewhere, so that they have an affi liation with more than one country or society. They long for freedom, for something big-ger than the nation state. The e-residency gives them the opportunity to feel indepen-dent from their homeland. Being a virtual Estonian makes that possible.

Now Estonia is taking the e-residency one step further toward global citizenship: This tiny country wants to store all gathered and saved data on both actual and virtual residence in a cloud server, and grant them

independence from Estonian territory.

The background to this concept is quite serious. Estonia was the victim of a cyber attack in 2007, and is now upping its se-curity measures due to increasing Russian activities in neighbouring countries. But even in the worst case imaginable to Es-tonian security-oriented politicians, their country being invaded, all data on their citizens, from taxes fi les to medical records, would be safe in the cloud.

Virtual Estonians could also continue run-ning their businesses long-distance, being world citizens of the virtual system. A state that really exists and has steadfast borders is no longer required in this context. Theo-retically every single person on Earth could become an Estonian, without the state it-self having a designated geographic area or piece of land.

This not only shakes things up in terms of what we know of as a state: up until now we have always defi ned it as a solid nation-al territory with a specifi c people. It also gives us license to question borders and to

124 LONGING

give this notion of a virtual global commu-nity a real basis.

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SPECIAL PRICE FOR YOU, MY FRIEND!Robots, drones, artifi cial intelligence. And that‘s not all that‘s headed our way in terms of high tech! Our way? Most of the people who inhabit this Earth consider themselves lucky to even be able to aff ord low tech. Our portraits of electronics sales people in Ghana‘s capital Accra illustra-te who is currently selling it: Photos: Lennart Laberenz

Emmanuel: specializing in refrigerators.

Richard: repairs loudspeakers.

126 PHOTO SERIES

Emmanuel and Sallifu: plug sockets.

Oseitutu, cables, plug, sockets.

PHOTO SERIES 127

Richard: Mainly headphones, but also shavers.

Daniel and his friend in front of his do-mestic technology and electronics shop.

Richard: specialises in pocket calculators.

128 PHOTO SERIES

Maxwell: Radios.

Leo: Phones and accessories. Jacob: Phones.

PHOTO SERIES 129

DISCLAIMER

Publisher:gut.org non-profi t public company betterplace labSchlesische Straße 26 (street address)10997 Berlin trendradar.org

Editor:Dennis Buchmann

Proofi ng:Christina Wegener

Art direction: Saint Elmo’s

Printing:Gebr. Klingenberg & Rompel in Hamburg GmbH

Picture Credits:Waspmote: LibeliumFredy Gareis: Manolo TySyria Airlift: Syria Airlift

betterplace lab Trendradar 2016

130 DISCLAIMER

SPONSORS

www.saint-elmos.com

betterplace.org and the betterplace lab have been sponsored by SAP as a strategic partner for the last several years now. This software company not only supports us fi nancially but also with its expertise. We, in turn, support SAP as best we can digitally and socially with their corporate social responsibility program. SAP SE is one of the leading software com-panies and supports fi rms of all sizes and sectors in remaining profi table, continuously adapting and sustaining long-term growth. From the back offi ce to the boardroom, from the warehouse to the shelf, from the desktop to the mobile terminal, SAP places people and organisations in a position to be able to collaborate more effi ciently, and to utilise business information more eff ectively than the competition. SAP has over 296,000 clients who are able to better achieve their goals thanks to SAP applications and services.

www.sap.com

The BMW Foundation brings people from diff erent sectors, cultures and nations together in order to make advances in business innovation, foster a global dialogue, and empower decision makers to conduct responsible business dealings. We are confi dent that we can undo barriers between state, economy and society, and allow the community to benefi t from a creative variety that comes from a collaboration that crosses national borders.

www.bmw-stiftung.de

DISCLAIMER 131

THE BETTERPLACE LAB – WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE DO

In more and more corners of the world people are successfully using digital technologies such as websites, apps and mobile services in order to solve social problems: from social organisa-tions in Kenya to charities in India to activists in Brazil. The betterplace lab is Germany’s fi rst digital social research institute; we analyse such innovations and outline up and coming trends on the trend radar. We sometimes work from an offi ce in Berlin, sometimes from an Indian rickshaw while conducting fi eld research. Furthermore, the betterplace lab conducts insightful studies, gives inspiring lectures and organises the coolest conference right on the intersection of innovation and common good, known as the betterplace labtogether. Our background: The betterplace lab “think and do tank” was established in 2010 and is a part of the non-profi t public company gut.org, who also operate betterplace.org, Germany’s largest online fundraising platform. Read about us on betterplace-lab.org

132 BETTERPLACE LAB

Examples of those we have inspired with our workshops and presentations

• Volkswagen: A talk about digital innovations for the common good

• Otto: Workshop on current issues in the social sector

• Telekom: Lecture on the lab’s new organisational structures

• The Millicom Foundation: Storytelling and impact measurement workshops for CRS country leaders

• The Chancellor’s Offi ce: International Germany Forum: “What is important to people – innovation and community”

• Kirchentag 2015 (church conven-tion): With Chancellor Merkel on the panel discussing “Digital and clever? How we design economics and society”

Examples of those we have helped acquire new knowledge with our studies

• GIZ/ BMZ: How the Internet of Things can improve lives.

• Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Innovation reports: How communications technologies improve lives

• Mozilla Foundation: International study on data transparency and privacy on the part of NGOs

• Vodafone: The political guide to handling Big Data

• The German Donations Market: No one analyses it better than us

trendradar online

On our website you will fi nd additional hot digital social trends such as hundreds of innovations that you can fi lter according to subject matter, and compare in terms of trend factors. Plus, you can use our analyses on the most relevant subject matters directly for your own work. Take a look: trendradar.org

betterplace labtogether

This year isn’t even over yet, and we’re already planning for 2016 – with a slight buzz from this year’s success: The coolest conference on digital social themes just keeps getting better...

May we pull you up on stage as a partner or a sponsor?

Join the good side of the internetand work with us

+49 30 76764488–46lab@betterplace.org

@betterplacelab

BETTERPLACE LAB 133

OUR WRITERS

Fredy Gareis

He was born in Alma-Ata and grew up in Motor City Rüsselsheim. He paid his dues as a janitor, taxi driver and bartender. He was obviously destined to end up in journalism. He ended up getting a degree in American Studies from the German School of Journalism in Munich. He has been a freelance reporter for print, radio and TV since 2007. Fredy Gareis currently lives in Berlin and has written two books: “Tel Aviv- Berlin. Stories of 1001 Streets” & “100 Grams of Vodka. A Historical Investigation in Russia.” www.fredygareis.com

Dennis Buchmann

Dennis Buchmann has a degree in biology, a Masters in public policy and a graduate of the German School of Journalism. He is the cre-ator of the magazine “Humanglobaler Zufall” (human-global coincidences) and was its edi-tor-in-chief. Dennis has been the betterplace lab’s creative editor for years, giving both edi-torial and conceptual input. He also gives meat a face with his website “MeineKleineFarm.org” (my little farm).

Angela Ullrich

Angela Ullrich has a PhD in economics and studied at the University of Cologne as well as the London School of Economics. She also works as a free-lance university lecturer and analyst in Berlin. She conducts regular analyses of the German donations market for the bet-terplace lab and supervises the NGO-Meter, an online fundraising benchmark.

Joana Breidenbach

Joana Breidenbach holds a PhD in cultural an-thropology, and has written a number of books on the cultural impact of globilisation, migration and tourism. She co-founded betterplace.org, founded the betterplace lab and is a member of the supervisory board of gut.org.

Ben Mason

Ben leads international projects for the better-place lab, where he also works on Big and Open Data projects, internet governance and edits English content. He also speaks pretty good German. Ben studied philosophy and German at Oxford University.

Lennart Laberenz

Lennart Laberenz (*1976) lives in Berlin.

134 OUR WRITERS

Theresa Filipovic

Theresa Filipovic supervises betterplace.org’s business cooperation. Her team ensures that businesses successfully use diff erent online fundraising formats. Her former occupation was project manager for digital products in the pub-lishing world.

Medje Prahm

Medje Prahm has a Masters in arts in philosophy and economics, and holds the betterplace lab’s network organisation together as its Interior Min-ister. Alongside betterplace labtogether and the annual Think Tank conference, she is involved in social impact measurement, leadership issues and the world of “Arbeiten 4.0”(working 4.0). Before joining the lab Medje worked with the “stiftung neue verantwortung” (new responsibility foun-dation) as well as the BMW foundation, Herbert Quandt.

Kathleen Ziemann

Kathleen Ziemann is a cultural scientist. As a student and later a graduate of the European University Viadrina she researched how dig-ital communication infl uences language and identity. She is into all forms of social media communication, and has been the betterplace lab’s trend researcher and editor since 2012.

Franziska Kreische

Franziska Kreische graduated with an MA in peace and confl ict studies, and wants to uncov-er how digital technologies can help promote peace. After completing her Masters, she moved to Uganda and worked on various development projects. She contributes to the lab’s studies and reports, coordinates online communication and distribution of publications.

Stephan Peters

Stephan Peters has a degree in linguistics and communication science. He previously worked as a copywriter for ad agencies and as a research associate for the excellence cluster “Languages of Emotion”. Now he’s with the betterplace lab and takes care of our marketing.

OUR WRITERS 135

ISBN 978-3-00-051141-7

2016

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