Imagine a big, 3-dimensional, digital globe, on which any nonprofit or business in the world could map its operations worldwide. Each company’s shareholders, or the company itself, could enter data estimating how much money the company is investing and where it’s being spent.
Nonprofits could visualize where the needs for their services are, and what impact they, or others, are having on those issues… as well as how much it costs them to do it in different places. Funders could watch where services are drying up as the economy shrinks, and where the gaps between services and needs are greatest.
Roving digital journalists could team with both citizens and academics to tell important local and global stories, such as of how lending in one place causes changes in health, jobs, population, traditional culture, forestation, water, emissions, or waste; or how a shortage of funds in another place causes changes in literacy, poverty, homelessness, domestic violence, or entrepreneurship.
People around the world could add in stories, images, videos and other data they capture with their cell phones and send into the digital globe via SMS. The digital globe could be constantly updated in real time.
You could tap into all the world’s data and create your own, customized maps with your own data just for you and your friends to see. If you did something really cool, you could share it with others.
And there could be a big “fast forward” button. NASA, Shell, the king of Saudi Arabia and the World Health Organization could model and play with 50-year scenarios geospatially. Maybe they’d get together and bounce ideas around.
There could be a big “refresh” button, that lets you reset all the data and assumptions, or just a select few.
What would you want to do with such a toy?
This entry was originally published on the Skoll Foundation’s SocialEdge.org website on our other blog – SVT on Impact.