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About MIPAA

Member's thought

Sunil thinks that Mipaa should have a similar agenda like that of an Internet community.

He pointed five main points to explore: 1) the communication 2) the business of advocacy 3) the Knowledge sharing and management 4) the corporation/collaboration 5) the commerce.

1) On communication it has to bee clear how communication works among the members and with the rest of the world.

2) On business of Advocacy, he feels that to communicate something, to create opinion or sale opinion, you need values and statements from your platform.

He feels that a good platform is a balance of community interaction and business/commercial activities.

He feels that the Mipaa platform has to respond to all this points.

He feels that it will take different stages to develop the platform.

Two points for him are crucial:

•  The knowledge sharing and management

He feels that the sharing of information is a crucial point. He thinks that there should be some rules in how sharing the information in a competitive field like Architecture. Those rules should make people more confident in sharing. He feels also that is important have a form of respect for the knowledge that every member has.

He propose two models to achieve this practically; or you have a donor agency that pays the members to share information, so you have somebody paying money, or a mechanism in which if you submit a document you can download one document (or for one you get five, something like that), if the document is accepted by the moderator.

Anyway he prefers the solution with money transition, because paying you feel the value of it.

The other point is how to judge one document if it has to be accepted. What is its value and how can we compare two different documents. So there has to be from the platform a process of reciprocal understanding to find a methodology of evaluation, to give standard to the materials collected. He refers to Draft norms for enhancing credibility in the voluntary sector in India by The Credibility Alliance core group.

•  About collaboration he pointed the fact that people doesn't start to work together automatically. There is the need for a push role from the promoter. He feels that human resources (in terms of bringing people to work together) have to have priority respect to the technology (web site implementation) that is just a way to help people working better together.

•  About commerce he pointed three web site to study as key studies, where you have a group of people, registered members of a platform, that all together make a business plane.

•  Developmentspace.com (GlobalGiving.com) enables individuals, companies, and other groups to find and support high quality grassroots social and economic development projects around the world. Donors have the option of directly communicating with the extraordinary social entrepreneurs who run these projects and can receive reports and updates directly from the field. GlobalGiving is available to public users and it can also be customized to the needs of corporate employee giving programs, financial institutions, foundations, and affinity groups.

•  Ryze.com

Ryze helps people make connections and grow their networks. You can network to grow your business, build your career and life, find a job and make sales. Or just keep in touch with friends. Members get a free networking-oriented home page and can send messages to other members. They can also join special Networks related to their industry, interests or location. More than 200 organizations host Networks on Ryze to help their members interact with each other and grow their organizations.

•  Digitaldividend.org

Our goal is to identify and promote sustainable solutions for bridging the global digital divide—catalyzing large-scale use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to create social and economic "dividends" in poor communities throughout the developing world. We provide information services, including Clearinghouse project data and analysis, full-length business case studies, news alerts, and strategy consulting to help:

Companies provide critical information, tools, and services to poor communities throughout the developing world--profitably
Development agencies implement bottom-up strategies for improving the effectiveness of their services, and for providing services more sustainably
Grassroots NGOs and entrepreneurs identify and refine promising business models as well as locate sources of funding and other support they need to go to scale

He thinks that by charging the transaction for knowledge in the platform to outsiders, you show the seriousness of it, you give value to your service and people will trust it. He is also aware that at the moment in India there is not a real demand for Appropriate Architecture even if it is or could be cheaper than normal practices; so it is difficult to ask knowledge on it to be charged.

The first step is to reach the people and to do this it is important speak a language that people could understand. It has to be a language for general public. It has to be in an appropriate form. The second point is to reach the hierarchy groups, and to do this it is important have a strong advocacy that shows the force of the group.