Submitted
Community-Driven Innovation

DemocracyLab

Team Leader
Mark Frischmuth
Solution overview
Our Solution
DemocracyLab
Tagline
Optimizing the connection between skilled volunteers and tech-for-good projects.
Pitch us on your solution

The biggest challenges facing our planet won’t all be profitable to solve. Both good and bad ideas with profit potential attract funding from VCs every day, but achieving impact is more challenging if the carrot of profit is absent. MIT Solve’s Global Challenges attracted 1,352 submissions, the vast majority of which won’t be funded. How can the leaders of these “failing” submissions move their projects forward?

DemocracyLab is building online infrastructure to empower the technology-for-good movement. We are creating an online hub for civic innovation that uses marketplace dynamics to allocate effort, resources, and attention. 

Our initial product seeks to optimize the connection between skilled volunteers and technology-for-good projects. Later offerings will focus on the needs of donors, citizens, and institutions.

Our project has the potential to scale globally and empower every person on earth to play a role in addressing any problem that affects them. 

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What is the problem you are solving?

Albert Einstein once said, "The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them." Today’s most significant problems are being addressed primarily by governments, using systems and tools designed hundreds of years ago. The civic technology movement is inventing new ways to improve our collective decisions and actions but is failing to achieve its potential impact.

Fast Forward, a tech nonprofit accelerator, released a report describing the chicken and egg problem plaguing the sector, stating “Many foundations will not fund a nonprofit without signs of proven impact. Tech nonprofits are unique. They must build their product before they can prove impact, and they cannot build the tech product without funding.” 

DemocracyLab interviewed numerous stakeholders about challenges and opportunities in the sector. This research indicated that the first significant barrier to success is the inefficiency of the connection between tech-for-good projects and skilled volunteers.

  • Project leaders complain that the cost of onboarding a new volunteer often exceeds the benefits of their involvement.

  • Volunteers find it difficult to discover projects that match their skills and interests, and that many civic tech projects are not organized well enough to allow them to contribute effectively.
Who are you serving?

The populations directly served by DemocracyLab today are:

  1. Professionals in the tech sector who are seeking skilled volunteer opportunities.

  2. Nonprofits and tech-for-good projects in need of the skills afforded by these volunteers. 

Since DemocracyLab’s launch in August of 2018, we have averaged 700 unique users per month and helped hundreds of people contribute thousands of hours to technology projects that advance the public good. 

DemocracyLab hosts hackathons in Seattle every two months in partnership with local civic technology groups.  These events have drawn around 500 attendees who have contributed roughly 3,500 hours of time. If valued at the rate of service of $100/hr, the hackathons alone have generated the equivalent of $350,000 of value to local tech-for-good projects through the work of skilled volunteers. 

The population served indirectly by DemocracyLab are those supported by various, independent nonprofits, government agencies, and informal collections of civic activists, all seeking to be the change they want to see in the world. DemocracyLab is striving to establish a human network via tech to tackle the most pressing issues that affect everyone.

What is your solution?

DemocracyLab is a platform connecting stakeholders in the civic technology ecosystem. Our initial iteration focuses on optimizing the connection between skilled volunteers and technology-for-good projects. Later versions will include functionality designed around the needs of donors, citizens, and institutions. 

Our proof of concept is intended to address the first hurdle tech-for-good projects face, building a product in a low resource environment.

To create our product, we focused our design efforts around the motivations and incentives of project leaders and volunteers. Project leaders need to minimize the cost of onboarding new volunteers, and attract volunteers possessing a wide range of skills. Volunteers are often driven by desires to pivot to a new career path, gain experience for their resume and add work products to their professional portfolios. Volunteers are also motivated to show their values and commitment through their actions, and by the concrete outcomes and impacts these actions generate.

The key insights we took from our research was that the design of our platform should focus on the discoverability experience for volunteers, and should nudge projects towards transparency. To aid discoverability, we created a series of filters that would allow volunteers to quickly sort through many projects to find only those that meet their specific skills and interests. 

To encourage transparency, we included prompts in our project onboarding interface asking project leaders to publicly link to their shared drive, messaging platform, code repository, and project management tools. This allows potential volunteers to thoroughly research projects before taking time away from team members who are actively working to advance the project’s goals. It also means that volunteers who join a project are further along the learning curve and are able to begin contributing more quickly.

We launched our platform in August of 2018, and decided to convene Seattle’s tech-for-good community at a hackathon to create urgency for projects and volunteers to use our platform. The hackathon attracted over 100 participants, and we decided to conduct a steady cadence of events every two months to build momentum in the community.

FareStart, a nonprofit helping Seattleites escape homelessness by training them in restaurants, conducted a pilot project in which they recruited a volunteer technical project manager to scope a project for our March hackathon (see “Final Report” in files section). The project was a success and serves as a blueprint for successfully engaging other established nonprofits.

Select only the most relevant.
  • Support communities in designing and determining solutions around critical services
  • Make government and other institutions more accountable, transparent, and responsive to citizen feedback
Where is your solution team headquartered?
Seattle, WA, USA
Our solution's stage of development:
  • Pilot
More about your solution
About your team
Your business model & funding
Partnership potential
Solution Team:
Mark Frischmuth
Mark Frischmuth
Executive Director