Jim’s 2024 Update

The world is going crazy for AI, and as the sector’s longest-term AI leader I’m staying very busy helping non-technical leaders understand what the latest tech can and (mostly) cannot do! In addition to the AI work inside our growing social enterprises Aselo and Terraso, we have also launched a new data governance movement, the Better Deal for Data. I can’t imagine more important work than helping the social sector use software and data for impact through our open source projects and field leadership work.

The Better Deal for Data

Over the last year, we started looking closely at data and the social sector, and we were surprised that there are no widely agreed-upon standards for data use in the social sector. Organizations and their leadership want to do the right thing, but it is hard to know what the right thing is. Inspired by the open source and Creative Commons movements, we launched the Better Deal for Data at the Skoll World Forum in April and I gave our first keynote about it at Good Tech Fest in May.

The Better Deal features eight simple commitments about data being collected, such as promising to not sell the data to data brokers and using the data primarily to benefit the people (and organizations) represented in the data. So far, we’ve received a tremendously powerful response from our fellow practitioners, who want a simple set of promises to keep which will increase the public’s trust in data collection. And, we think it will be essential to creating more representative datasets for training the socially responsible AI tools of the future!

We’re building a coalition of like-minded people who share our belief in the need for a Better Deal for Data. You can sign up on the Better Deal website right now. We hope to have version 1 of the Better Deal ready for use in 2025.

Aselo

We are thrilled to announce that additional helplines in Canada, Singapore, and New Zealand have adopted Aselo in the last year. Over 500,000 people have been assisted using Aselo since our launch. With our new helplines on board, and expanded communications channels, we are on track to exceed one million next year.

We’ve added new features to support the needs of our latest helplines including a resource database, support for external call conferencing, extended case management functionality, and much more. We had a big push this year to add more tools for helplines to manage the challenge of repeat callers, who can chew up as much as a third of the time of counsellors. By building Aselo as an open source platform, every one of the new features we created is shared for free with all fifteen-plus of our national helpline partners.

We also have a spirit of solidarity when it comes to creating tech solutions. We want to ensure the same technology is available to all of the world, while we also work on the unique challenges of the developing world. One breakthrough this year was launching a “magic box” in Zambia to improve telephone calls in countries where connectivity doesn’t support voice calls over the Internet. The Aselo Connector keeps telephone calls on the local national networks (which work well just about everywhere) while keeping the advantages of a cloud-based crisis response platform. We are also proud to mention that Safe Online (one of Aselo’s major funders) has recently featured Lifeline Childline Zambia and Aselo in a powerful three minute video!

Terraso

Our Terraso software for local leaders and smallholder farmers continues to expand and grow. We just launched a major new app in the Terraso toolkit, the Land Potential Knowledge System (LandPKS). We were entrusted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture with an open source reboot of LandPKS, a leading app for soil identification used around the world. Soil identification is foundational to good farming and ranching practices, and we’re working with experts to provide critical decision support tools to smallholders especially in Africa.

Terraso continues to improve, with a focus on story maps, our most popular feature. By combining different kinds of maps with expanded data layers, we’re providing a powerful tool to help communities tell their own stories more effectively.

And of course, data themes are ever-present in regenerative ag and climate adaptation work. We’ve made it easier for landscapes to use Terraso as a data collection repository for landscape claims which are becoming critical to supply chain actors using platforms such as LandScale to make ethical sourcing decisions.

Building Tech for Good

My career’s passion project has been to see technology used effectively to benefit all of humanity, not just the richest 10%. Beyond our day job of building and supporting software platforms, we also seek to support the wider nonprofit sector in using technology more effectively.

In addition to launching the Better Deal for Data as our flagship field building project, I’ve also had a blast with our other efforts to help nonprofit leaders with tech. You can get a sense of this with my AI Treasure Map, to assist the social sector to figure out how to use AI (check out the map, which features robotic stochastic parrots!).