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I should be thinking about hierarchically nanostructured materials, but instead I’m thinking about ways to make our world a little better.  The following post might be a little unstructured, but I wanted to put it out there for your thoughts.

Erik and I started the umbrella movement a few years back as an experiment in social good.  The concept was straightforward: we bought a ton of umbrellas, labeled them with a sticker that read “you’ve got the movement, pass it on”, and handed out these umbrellas in the pouring Boston rain.  Our working thesis was that everyone appreciates a little good will, especially when a sudden unexpected turn for the worse arrives, and that this good will could be passed on with a multiplicative effect.  Sort of like “Pay it forward” the movie, but not Haley Joel Osment.  In addition to encouraging good will we were curious to see the network effect and how far these umbrellas would be distributed.

It didn’t work very well.  The umbrellas tended to fall apart and extra ones were cumbersome to carry around.   Maybe our optimism was misplaced and people really thought “Hey sweet free umbrella.  Now I don’t have to spend $10 for a $1.95 umbrella that the guy on the corner is selling them for.”  I don’t think this is true.  I believe people are generally altruistic and desire to aid their fellows.

So what was the problem?  There were too many obstacles in the way; high friction slowing down the network of good will.  That and maybe the umbrella recipients weren’t primed to be altruistic.  Maybe they had to be home for dinner.

Thinking about twitter recently, I’m increasingly buying into the fact that as a platform, it has a serious potential to change the way we communicate.  It’s social, viral, and it addresses our decreasing attention spans.  I think buried within the network is an enormous opportunity to create social good and I’m trying to think of the best way to exploit this.

A simple concept is the idea of “doing a good twit daily” (borrowed from the Scout’s phrase “Do a good turn daily”).  Needy groups or people could send twits to a twit-bot requesting volunteer help, some extra food, etc. and indicating location and time.   Recipients of the twit could then reply indicating how they can help.  It’s simple, it primes people for altruism, and it leverages a huge network.  You could build a bunch of add-ons: AI to allow for twits which are local or within a certain type of volunteering or a database to help groups manage their volunteers.