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A Small/Big Favor & A Small/Big Experiment: The Indian Taxi Fund

I’ve been thinking more and more about scale-free networks and the possibility of leveraging social groups for bigger things. If you’ve been around Facebook for a while, you’ve probably seen the CAUSES application which is great but often times is void of the relational aspect that you would think would be apparent. They also lack any real value in connecting the real problems with real solutions, outside of “joining a cause” on Facebook. The other side of that coin are groups like Kiva, which don’t really rely on any social or relational aspects in their micro-financing, but are able to leverage small loans of $25 from individuals in a collective with other individuals. Once formed into a collective, the loan usually amounts to a $1000 or more.

The only group who is really doing this well right now, that I know of is, RelationalTithe.com. And people like Adam Walker Cleaveland have experimented with this on their site for other causes to some surprising success.

I’ve been reading Muhammad Yunus’ book Creating A World Without Poverty. Yunus was the founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh over 30 years ago. Grameen was the first of it’s kind that gave micro-loans to the world’s poor. Anyway . . . Yunus talks about social businesses, which are businesses that operate and exist for the sole purpose of alleving problems in the world. Essentially, businesses that exist for the good of the world. This is what we’ve tried to do through my business, Red Cowboy Designs. Since the Fall of last year, we have been loaning 5% of all income that comes into Red Cowboy to small businesses in the third world. While it’s still an incredibly small step, we have been able to partner with 42 small business in a really short amount of time, equipping them with the resources to go alongside their already robust confidence and creativity that has been laying dormant for so many years. Standing alongside them and beside them instead of “over them” as they launch out and begin to work for themselves and empower themselves with their ingenuity and business savy.

So I’ve been thinking about these two things alongside each other over the past couple of weeks . . . businesses that exist for the good of the world . . . and scale-free social networks. And how they might interplay and cross-pollinate each other.

And as much as I don’t believe in “providence” like this . . . I got an email from a friend of mine in India last week that led me to really ramp up towards some action. Whether it’s God pulling strings like a puppet-master or just convenient timing . . . it is weird how this opportunity for me to begin to act just happened to fall into my lap at the same time I was sketching out drawings and ideas in my moleskin.

I’m going to share all of the details tomorrow, the story of my friend Amit, and my devious master plan . . . but basically instead of going through Kiva like I have been, I’m thinking I’d like to try and be the guy that does the networking and facilitating of the fund raising and dispersement of the loan.

And here’s a quick sketch of my thinking . . .

In scale-free networks . . . you basically have “nodes” or “hubs”. You have 5 or 6 main nodes that serve as the hubs of the network. And then you have a bunch of smaller nodes underneath that. I’m also thinking that there are lot of us who aren’t comfortable giving money to the church anymore . . . or who don’t even go to church regularly anymore . . . but who would still like to give and share. I’m also thinking that there are a lot of bloggers out there who are innovative enough to see the big picture of social networks and how they have been playing themselves out on their sites over the last few years.

So what I’m thinking is a mash-up of the ideas from Relational Tithe, Kiva, blogging networks, and small businesses as social businesses.

So what I’m thinking is something along the lines of Relational Tithe and what Adam did on his blog, but scaled towards global small businesses. This may totally tank and I may be way more ambitious than I need to be . . . but I’ve been sitting and sketching and mocking-up some ideas and I’d be remiss if I didn’t test them out on you guys first.

More tomorrow . . . in the meantime . . . I’m looking for 5-6 bloggers to serve as hubs or nodes. Email me for more info or to just give me your feedback and tell me that it’s a dumb idea.

© 2008 IAmJoshBrown.