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Social Economy Diaries

Social entrepreneurs in Europe can now share their story via the Social Economy Diaries, a new initiative of the Social DG GROW Unit F2 under the European Commission.

The European Commission’s Platform Social Economy Community brings together actors in the European social economy field around a range of initiatives and activities. One of the initiatives on the platform is the Social Economy Diaries.
The Social Economy Diaries is a collection of stories about the impact that the social economy has. The idea behind the initiative is to show how a resilient and regenerative form of economy is not only possible, it is in fact already a reality.

By sharing their stories, social entrepreneurs are helping to show, that it makes sense to think beyond profit. At the same time, they show that it is all kinds of people from all over the world who are working to meet some of the great challenges facing the world community.
The stories also help to give decision-makers and advocates of a sustainable economy a greater voice.

If the social entrepreneurs who write the stories give their consent, they will be shared via the Social Economy Community’s social media and a selection of the stories will also be edited and published as “open diaries” in a small online booklet, that can be downloaded, and that will also be distributed to decision-makers, citizens, opinion leaders and other entrepreneurs, as part of the European Commission’s policy activities.

The stories can be told by social entrepreneurs, partners or employees, and if you choose to share your story, you will be asked a series of questions that will help you tell and structure the story. It is e.g. questions like, where does the story take place, what impact has it had, and has it addressed a societal problem?
It takes about 20 minutes to share its story.

Pigeonly – helping inmates stay in contact with their family

Frederick Hutson is a former convict who has started the social enterprise Pigeonly, which uses IT technology to help inmates in the United States keep in touch with their friends and family.
Pigeonly is an IT platform that offers cost-saving services to inmates.
Pigeonly is basically a range of features that help families keep in touch with their loved ones, who are in jail.

Currently, it includes Fotopigeon, which allows inmates to receive hard-copy photos printed from phone, computer or tablet, and Telepigeon, which allows inmates to make cheap calls to their loved ones rather than having to make expensive long-distance calls. The telephone service, which works in the same way as Google and Skype, is a significantly cheaper alternative to what the prisons otherwise offer. Typically, a detainee pays 70 dollars a month for the 300 minutes call on the phone, that they are entitled to by law. At Pigeonly, 300 minutes on the phone costs 18 dollars.

Pigeonlys’s platform also includes a comprehensive database of inmates in 50 state prisons, enabling families to locate inmates without having to go through the databases of individual states.
The services offered may not look like much, but for the inmates they can make a big difference.
Frederick Hutson from the beginning considered the project as a business and always assumed that people would pay a few dollars to receive a photo and to be able to make cheaper phone calls. And it looks like he was right.

Today, Pigeonly has 13 employees at its Las Vegas headquarters, which is part of Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project. The project has been able to raise more than 2 million dollars in start-up capital.

Salesfigures also show that Pigeonly’s services are popular.
Fotopigeon has send more than 90.000 photos to 11.000 customers at 0.5 dollar each. And more than 30.000 customers have used Telepigeon (subscriptions are available from 5 dollars a month).
600-700 people sign up daily for Pigeonly and the company sends between 3-4.000 orders every day.
Telepigeon mediates somewhere between 2-3 million minutes a month.
The company currently (2020) has subscribers to its services in 88 countries worldwide.
Since its inception, Hutson has expanded with additional services, e.g. you can now also send letters, postcards, greeting cards and articles to inmates. Pigeonly also offers to help inmates with other types of services such as. banking services and housing offers after release.

The ideas for the services is inspired from Hutson own time in prison. It was here he experienced how difficult it is for the family to keep in touch with the inmate.
He was transferred to 8 different prisons when he was incarcerated. This often made it difficult for his family to keep track of where he was.

With Pigeonly, Hudson would like to make an effort to democratize and decentralize the criminal justice system. Among other things, he sees corporate action as a way of preventing recidivism.

By making it easier for inmates to stay in touch with their family, Pigeonly also encourages inmates to stay away from crime. And his idea is backed by research.

Observations from 40 years of research show that communication and education are the two factors that affect the percentage of recidivism the most. Isolation is one of the worst things a human being can experience.

To further enhance Pigeonly’s impact, Hudson would like to open up the platform to other companies’ products and services that can help address some of the issues and challenges in the prison system.

The important question, according to Hudson, is: What kind of people do we want to release? Someone who has lost contact with everyone they know and who has more than a 50% chance of committing crime again? Or someone who is in contact with people, who can help and support their integration back into society?

Hudson’s questions is important, because 1 in 3 people in the United States are affected by the criminal justice system. The former convicts who come out of the prison system are going to have an impact on other people, communities and tax spending. Therefore, everything else being said, it is important that the prison system supports, that it is the best possible version of these people, that returns to society again after serving their sentences.

Read more about Pigeonly at: https://pigeonly.com

Source: fastcompagny.com

The Platform Design Toolkit 2.0

The new tool has been published to assist entrepreneurs and organizations to look at business and activities, to design strategies, products and organizations “as a platform.”

As a synthesis of different definitions, developers say that platforms are scalable collaboration agreements powered by technologies: it’s not easy to differentiate between a technology, a strategy or an organization itself; at the end, everything shapes into seeing platform thinking a way to organize value creation in a particular ecosystem.

Platform thinking is a whole new way to look at organizations or processes or even a way to think how a place or a community should work — as applying platform thinking to cities or towns policies and services.

Platforms are winning because two critical technological shifts are happening: first, there is a growing potential in every individual or small enterprise, second – now it much more easy to connect and coordinate. These changes transformed the optimal shape of a company, product or strategy from the industrial “pipeline” (and bureaucracy) to the network.

It’s made of:

the Ecosystem Canvas for mapping all entities and roles in the ecosystem you are trying to mobilize;
the Entity Portrait for analyzing the entities individual context (potential, performance pressures, goals and gains sought);
the Motivations Matrix and Transactions Board to first let emerge and then consolidate the transactions engine (interactive marketplace);
the Learning Engine canvas (formerly Experience Learning canvas) to design the learning engine (the core of the platform proposition);
the Platform Experience canvas to design ecosystem journeys and business models featured in your strategy;
the Minimum Viable Platform canvas to help you design, and prototype your validation strategy.

The Platform Design Toolkit is based on the tradition of Business Modeling, Service Design Thinking and Lean Thinking (including concepts from Customer Development, the Lean Startup, the work of Lean Startup Machine on validation, etc…) and provides a unified view, optimized for Platforms and Ecosystems, of all these relevant tools and approaches.

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