Code for San Francisco has weekly meetings in downtown San Francisco at Code for America hq. Newcomers can pitch their civic related projects in hopes of finding support from volunteers who attend. This is my pitch for Voices of Humanity.
Project Name: Voices-of-Humanity SDGs for SF
Problem Description: The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are meant to be implemented at the city level as well as nationally and globally. Voices of Humanity (aka VoH) is an action oriented social media platform designed with the SDGs in mind. This project aims to make Voices of Humanity the communication tool of choice for the inevitable city hall, business, ngo coalition that will implement the Sustainable Development Goals in San Francisco.
The 17 SDGs with 169 targets and 232 numerical indicators are an awesome set of goals that were adopted unanimously by the nations in 2015. They include gender equality, climate change, ending poverty and hunger, better health and education, good jobs, greater income equality, and much more. SDG 11 specifically aims for inclusive, safe, sustainable and resilient cities. Because these issues are intertwined, the SDGs must be addressed as a package as well as one-by-one. We can expect that San Francisco will move to adopt the SDGs as goals for itself, very likely within the next two or three years. Our project is ahead of the curve, but not by much.
Voices of Humanity is a Ruby-on-Rails prototype up and running on the web at voh.intermix.org. The free open-source code is available at github. VoH implements "collective voices" overall and also broken out by online community of interest and geographic level. The highest rated messages posted in each online community (on topics of the participants’ own choosing) are taken as the collective voice of that community. The collective voices of Women, Men, Youth, Experience and Wisdom build gender and age equality into the process.
The plan is for each of the 17 SDGs to have its own VoH community and sub-communities. A bottom up networking feature will enable communication within and between the SDGs. We will be able to get down to the details where change actually happens and at the same time maintain helpful exchanges between the SDGs and an overall holistic view of our progress on the SDGs as a package.
Looking down the road, if we can get our project adopted here in San Francisco, we will have an excellent chance of going national and global.
Needs: We will begin today with a conversation about feasibility and a demo of VoH. If the decision is to go ahead, we will need at least a design team, UX expertise, SF data expertise, an outreach team, and Ruby-on-Rails / javascript expertise. To the extent possible we want women to take team leadership positions. The team leads will together form the project core leadership. All are welcome to help with the planning.
Current Project Lead: Roger Eaton
Project Links:
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https://voh.intermix.org -- the working prototype
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https://voh.intermix.org/items/2601/view - latest major outline of VoH directions
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http://voicesofhumanity.org -- blog and possibilities
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http://www.intermix.org/cci.htm - 501(c)(3) CA nonprofit that funds VoH development
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http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html AGPL license for VoH
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https://github.com/VoicesOfHumanity/InterMix - VoH source code
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https://docs.google.com/document/d/15Z13tEfX7z7VBxYjWqAZHR38vxWNv_0_rM8QFq1GzzU/view - itemized Roadmap for VoH development
#sdgs
