The world is grappling with a set of very serious problems ranging from climate change to HIV/AIDS to a food crisis. These problems are particularly difficult because they are global, spanning governmental and organizational boundaries; stretch our organizational and technical capacity; and require coordinated response by many people. At Forum One we see our role as helping our government, non-profit, and foundation clients use the internet to respond to these kinds of problems faster, smarter, and better. One approach we are exploring is development of multisided software platforms; what Evans, Hagiu, and Schmalensee call "Invisible Engines." In short, can we do in the social sector what Microsoft Windows has done in personal computers, Sony has done with video games, or DoCoMo has done with mobile phones? Can we use software on the Internet to engage multiple stakeholders to promote more innovation, increase scale, and do it all faster?

We used this approach for a proposal in response to a request from the Conservation Fund's Forum on Children and Nature. The goal of the program is to reconnect children with nature and has implications for, at least, obesity, mental health, and conservation. We proposed development of a multi-stakeholder, multisided, online platform that would help engage all the groups potentially involved in the issue from the National Parks, to non-profit conservation groups, to children's safety experts, to commercial vendors (not just REI, but Burger King and McDonalds too). The idea is that by providing services to support the specific needs of these divergent groups we could link them together and thereby dramatically increase the scale and efficiency of response, promote innovation throughout the system, and do it at amazing speed.

The proposal was accepted into the second round of the competition. However, we decided we didn't have the internal resources to carry it out and declined to take it further. We learned that two of the implications of this approach are deep-pockets and patience -- tough for a small online strategy firm.

Nonetheless, we continue to think about these approaches and encourage others to as well. We have released the proposal, "Nature Commons: Building a shared online infrastructure to help engage children with nature," under a creative commons license as a case study and concept, hoping that it generates ideas for you. Please take a look and let me know what you think -- the document is short and reasonably clear.


Nature Commons: Building a shared online infrastructure to help engage children with nature by Forum One Communications is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.