Spark

Dec 30, 2010   //   by markhsmith   //   Consulting, NGO 2.0  //  Comments Off

Click on the image to view the Spark presentation

One of the first  Univicity projects was to create the Spark Humanitarian Suite presentation in partnership with World Vision International. The goal of “Spark” was to capture the high-level requirements for a modern Humanitarian IT System and explain it to a diverse audience using multi-media in 10 minutes.  The Spark presentation covers fundraising to field-management for a typical international NGO.

The purpose of the presentation was to stimulate (“spark”) the conversation amongst Humanitarian organizations to collaboratively build Humanitarian IT systems that would enable NGO’s to move beyond their current circa-1980 field operations systems.

You can watch the Spark presentation by clicking here, then pressing the play button at the bottom of the opening display.

The Spark presentation has three components:

  1. A brief problem statement. What is wrong with the current Humanitarian IT systems today?
  2. A story. An overview of the proposed technology told from the perspective of a child in India who loses her family during a Tsunami, but over the course of 15-years, helps transform her community.
  3. The technology. A brief overview of each part of the proposed Spark system.
We believe the Spark presentation succeeded in creating a dialog. However, and over time, we believe NGO’s will adopt new technology. However, NGO’s are not motivated by increases in productivity the way that for-profit companies are. Since the 1980′s for profit companies have evolved their IT systems 5-10 times.  In that same period. Humanitarian field-side operations have stagnated in the 80′s. The most common tool is paper-based systems–perhaps a spreadsheet at best.
In the Spark diagram below, all systems are integrated with the social networking platform (1).

bus-architecture

The SPARK architecture of consists of seven integrated systems, which are used by Donors, NGO’s and Community Leaders to collaboratively design, monitor/implement, and evaluate humanitarian projects worldwide.  SPARK is designed to be a Cloud Computing application and will be deployed in partnership with a global Cloud Services vendor. SPARK will also be released with 3rdparty applications designed to take advantage of the SPARK architecture.

1.       Social networking platform.  All other systems are integrated on top of the social networking platform through well-defined API’s.

2.       e-Commerce system

3.       Project Manager & Experience Library.

4.       Donor system

5.       The Program Design System

6.       The Field Monitoring System

7.       Project Evaluation system.

These seven SPARK systems work together to exponentially enhance the capacity and efficiency of donors, NGO’s and community leaders to collaboratively transform poor communities into self-sustaining communities.

The (L) Learning Management System is an add-on module.

Univicity is working with independent software developers to assemble and integrate the entire suite.

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