Kopernik: Crowdfunding World-Changing Design

Humanitarian three-ways, or what Polish astronomy has to with the future of civilization.

We fully endorsed Emily Pilloton’s vision that design can empower people and change the world. But there’s often a disonnect between the world-changing products and technologies that get dreamt up, and the actual ability to fund them and get them in the hands of those who need them the most.

No more. At least not if it’s up to Kopernik, a revolutionary new social platform that connects breakthrough technologies with the people and communities whose lives they will better the most, harnessing the power of crowdsourced microfunding.

The name, of course, comes from Copernicus, the Polish Renaissance astronomer who busted the geocentric model of the universe and completely changed the way people perceived the way around them — an aspirational metaphor for Kopernik‘s ambition to revolutionize how people see and understand the biggest challenges the world faces today.

From a rollable water container for women in East Timor, to self-adjustable glasses (remember those?) for refugees without access to eye clinics, to computer training for Sierra Leonean youth, Kopernik lets development groups write short proposals and submit them to the public for crowdfunding. Sort of like a humanitarian Kickstarter, which then does a three-way connect with individual supporters, technology provider companies, and the local organizations who seek those technologies.

Founded by a team of United Nations and World Bank expats, Kopernik is planning to expand beyond crowdfunding proposals and into developing their own products with DIY and open-source instructions that local communities can use to build technologies.

Because the only kind of design revolution that’s going to stick is one where grassroots empowerment lets people take ownership of the very solutions that are changing their lives.

via TBD

Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Google Groupies Galore: Goollery

What album covers have to do with shoe shopping and Renaissance paintings.

The open-source movement is among the great cultural feats of our time. And the move towards open API’s, inviting derivative, often collaborative work, is a major force driving this new paradigm. Google was arguably the pioneer there, releasing the Google Maps API in June 2005, and following up with API’s for many of their other products. More recently, the Android API has generated a number of fascinating independent developments in today’s white-hot area of augmented reality. So: How does one keep up with all the API wonderfulness out there?

Enter Goollery, a comprehensive gallery of Google-related projects from around the world.

Inviting you to browse by Google product or project date, the collection features such gems as a map of where iconic album covers were shot, to an artist who paints scenes and locations he has only experienced via Street View, to Layar, the new critically-acclaimed augmented reality browser for Android.

Among our favorites is the Tate’s mashup, which lets you explore locations depicted in artwork from the National Collection of British Art using Street View. Looking at place from a Renaissance painting and seeing it today somehow captures our cultural evolution on a multitude of levels, from the aesthetic to the social to the environmental.

Explore Goollery for more fascinating celebrations of voyeurism and the freedom to roam around in other people’s data.

We’ve got a weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.