BONDHON: A Digital Hub for Non-Profit Social Organizations

Our proposal pertains to developing a carefully-crafted, operationally-appropriate, and novel computing solution focusing small-scaled organizations voluntarily working for improving the lives of street children in Bangladesh. Several small-scale organizations, in addition to the Bangladesh Government, are working for the well being of such underprivileged communities. However, we are not aware of any research that addresses issues related to such small organizations working for street children (either in terms of challenges faced, or how to enhance their operational efficiency). To close this gap, we conducted a 15-month ethnographic study focusing on three such organizations, from which we have understood many issues. To address most of these issues specially focusing on their required fund rising, we have designed an ICT-based solution for virtual integration between the organizations, potential donors, and mass people. Our solution can enhance operational efficiency of philanthropic activities done by the small organizations working for street children in Bangladesh.

In 2015, around 1.5 million children were known live on the streets in Dhaka and this figure has been growing since then. These children have very limited access to all types of basic needs covering food, medication, education, etc. They are also prime targets of exploitation by unscrupulous members in their neighborhoods. In another context, about 31% of the total population lives below the poverty line (1.90 USD earning/day) in Bangladesh, and street children are perhaps the worst sufferers among them. It is critical that something sustainable must be done to correct this trend. According to our field-level study, small voluntary organizations working for the street children lack operational efficiency due to lack of their effective engagement with donors and mass people. Our studies done so far reveal that such an effective engagement among organizations, donors, and mass people is believed to ultimately contribute to uplifting lives of street children. We can achieve the effective engagement through an ICT-based integration at this point of time, given the recent increasing trend in technology and Internet adoption in Bangladesh. However, such an ICT-based integration is yet to be focused in the literature to the best of our knowledge.

The primary stakeholder of the platform are volunteers of organizations and donors. The ultimate beneficiary of the system are street children. It is a subtle idea that all the numerous minor organizations are working well and as a result, the lives of children are improving. However, it is a research problem that if we can make these potential organizations more strong and stable by enhancing the financial and operational efficiency, whether the lives of the children are changed. According to our ethnographic surveys, interviews we have found some basic problems addressed by them that limits their operational efficiency. We have conducted hours long interviews with our sampled five organizations couple of times in order to ideation and problem formulation. Then we found some basic problems and needs—1. Showcasing the activity 2. Donor management 3. Efficient information system management. 4. Ensuring credibility and accountability.

Our system provides an efficient way to post and comments and in larger viewers. 2. Efficient information system for volunteers, foster parents, children etc. 3. User feedback and rating system that’s ensures credibility and accountability of organizations. From donor perspective, a collection of organizations  help them tfind the suitable option for funding.

We are going to devise an ICT-based solution for bridging the gap between small voluntary organizations working for street children in Bangladesh, potential donors of such organization, and mass people. The solution will realize operational ecosystem of the small organizations and leverage ICT for blending donors and mass people within the ecosystem. The solution will present and expedite interactions among the small organizations, donors, and mass people.

Our system will be based on a software system that provides a platform for the small organizations to showcase their regular activities. Here, potential donors and mass people can follow the activities. Besides, the potential donors and mass people can interact with the small organizations through our system in a manner of crowd-sourced reporting. Such interactions will lead towards engagement among the organization, their potential donors, and mass people. The engagement will inspire more donations from the donors and mass people as well as accountability of the organizations – all through our proposed system.

Necessary software tools for developing our proposed system are now available, and our team has significant expertise on such well-adopted tools. For example, frameworks such as Spring MVC, front-end development platforms such as HTML, CSS, etc., and back-end database systems such as MySQL are now widely adopted. Our goal is to incorporate a dynamic nature to our system by carefully figuring out such best-available software tools and utilize them coherently following the Agile method of development exploiting the notion of participatory design.

We will conduct comprehensive and detailed ethnographic studies through face-to-face interviews to achieve a delicate flavor of User Centered Design (UCD), Value Sensitive Design (VSD), and Persuasive Design Model in the process of developing our system. Here, we could encounter some unique human ergonomic challenges such as "self-belongings" among the organizations, which can lead to trust issues about the proposed system and threaten its success rate. To overcome these obstacles, we will incorporate critically implicit requirements of the organizations that go beyond common state-of-the-art requirements.

We already have a fair idea about some challenges in this space, having worked for more than 15 months interacting with several such small-scaled organizations working for street children in Bangladesh. The challenges cover diversified complex rules, regulations, traditions, and visions of different organizations. Our plan is to study and overcome these challenges through performing baseline and advanced studies using sound methodologies of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

We are dealing with a research problem that includes social computing techniques to find out the actual nature of non-profit social entrepreneurship. According to the best knowledge of the author, (by rigorous study of the relevant literature), it is the first ever techno-social solution for the under-presented community. A detailed study based on strong theoretical baseline on the Human-Computer Interaction is conducted while prototyping the solution. We also conducted couple of systematic methodology to find the actual challenges and problems faced by the organizations. After completing the survey and developing the prototype, we have designed a unique solution that reflects the necessity of the all stakeholder. Our platform paves the way of improving the existing organizations but also creates a new option for social entrepreneurships.  The underneath philosophy of the solution is to create effective engagement by creating visibility and trust among the stakeholders. In near future, we do believe it can attract advertisements not from the Bangladesh but also from other countries which faces similar type of problems. This model can be applied to those countries by absorbing the similar concept but changing very little of the system. In a broader picture, BONDHON can be a country wise dynamic hub of social welfare organizations where the concerned donors and people of can get engaged and this can obviously initiate a capital investment to respective organizations in many respect.

 There are three stakeholders of the systems – volunteers, donors,
common users. Currently, there are 5 organizations which are using the
system each having on average 20 volunteers. The donors vary from
organization to organization. Common users as well as donors can give
feedback. According to Google Analytics embedded in our system, right
now, we have 20 – 30 hits on average to our live system at this initial
prototyped stage.  If we extrapolate the scenario, we hope to include
around 20 more voluntary organizations within one year and approximately
500 donors and common users (non -donors)  will be interacting through
the system. Within the next five years, we hope to go for a better and
larger plan, emerging from the prototype to a larger platform. We have a
plan to give the platform more robust and generic form. The platform
can be a unique solution for new comers to people who want to social
worker or social entrepreneur for any social need. Many organizations
working for homeless, orphanages, etc. will be included. In road of
doing so, already, among the 5 organization, one organization only deals
with orphanages having around 50 children.  In Bangladesh, it is
difficult to say the total number of street children, orphans or even or
orphanage. Nonetheless, we hope to believe that about 60% of these from
the Dhaka city will be included in our system.

We are looking for solutions that will have a transformational impact on millions of lives in Bangladesh. Use this space as an opportunity to talk about your goals and how they will help you impact more people, whether through your organization or other approaches to scale such as replication.

  About 1.5 millions, street children dwells in Dhaka city which is getting ameliorated day by. In addition to, street children related organizations, we are currently, deal with the struggling orphanages for getting donations. Obviously, the success of this solution surely have an impact on millions of lives. The primary goal for one year is to change the status of the system from prototype to established product. For next 5 years, we need to scale up the system for serving thousands of people. The system will be a platform for social good will for the people who want to contribute to a massive social problem dealing with the most vulnerable community. Different organizations facing accountability issues may be improved in an open platform inhabiting with other organizations. The inspiration to do something better than other as well as the new ones may be inspired from it. Moreover, we have a plan of integrating the system with the Zakat board of Bangladesh within this year to gain more visibility and impact.

We have gathered the proper requirements and built the prototype and now the stakeholders are using the system for making the system more robust and user centric. Within the next year it is a great challenge to reach out as many as organizations as we can. If the plans woks out after two years the system will be robust enough and gain more visibility by this time. Currently, we are dealing with the most common requirements form the organizations. Moreover, some specific requirements from the organizations are to be met in order to preserve the individuality of the organization. It will be a great challenge when the number of the increases. This problem turns into a HCI problem not a typical software development project. As stated previously, we have done ethnographic study to find the un-uttered inherent philosophy to grasp the actual challenges and requirements for the projects. Different organizations have organizational ergonomics as well as some human ergonomics that place hurdles towards the growth of the projects. Another fact to be mentioned regarding the operational challenges of large complex system. We, couple of academic researchers might not be able to operational maintenance of the large system. More people might be needed for this purpose. It is also a great challenges to gain trust among the stakeholders through the system. It also requires a significant amount of time. Another concern is about the credibility and accountability issues and how our system ensures proper exposure and donors for each organization.

The current team is capable of eradicate any technical challenges and we have started working on this. We are refactoring the system for future scalability and robustness. We are planning to involve some people for operational purpose of the system.  We are expecting huge volume of data generated by the stakeholders and therefore, we are shifting to cloud service (Amazon AWS). For handling the huge amount of hit in future, we are using clustering technique for creating multiple instance of the system using NGINX tool. Moreover, technological adoption for users  is a great challenge over the period of time. The system’s architecture is being designed in such a way that, in any case, we can modify it with less overhead according to users’ consent within a very short period of time. Apart from the technical challenges, we also faces some trust issues. While ensuring the trust between stakeholders, the system itself faces some trust issues. The current five organizations and a handful amount of donors and users are small leap regarding this aspect. We are expecting more organizations to be enlisted and gain more visibility of the system within next six month and in on one year we expect to attain a positive and significant change not only in the system level but also towards the people mind set.

Five people currently works right now. Two of them students, Three of them full time employee. Two work as a software developer and one is a faculty of public university.

The team consists of industry and academics people which is the  best combination for any R&D project. This is a techno-social solution that works need firm knowledge and hands on experience on system design and development. On the other side, it requires rigorous field work, study, survey and other research oriented tasks. Two people from the team are graduated from CSE, BUET and have these knowlege and other 2 are final year student form the same department also have these capability of research oriented tasks. Most importantly, the team leader is an associate professor the department who has years of experience in research and  conducting these types of jobs.

It is believed that there will be significant numbers of street children in low-economy countries over several decades ahead. Hence, small-scale organizations will be critically needed to serve the children in addition to the governments. Our proposed system will serve the purpose of bridging gaps between  small-scaled organizations and donors. Nonetheless, we do understand that if our system needs to live and be used for long, it is crucial to have enough funds for its future sustainability. Our expectation in this regard is to have donor funds – like for example Wikipedia, or sites like Go Fund Me. Additionally, considering our noble goals, we expect that our system will attract more organizations along with an increasing number of common citizens (e.g., donors and even college-level programmers) to be involved in enhancing our system over a long period of time.

Towards this extent, our plan is to make all project development open-source after our system attains a degree of maturity. Considering the aspect of long-term sustenance, another option is introducing relevant advertisements to create another source of funds for ensuring sustainability of our system in the future. Nonetheless,  we plan to integrate provisions for donations, Fitra, and Zakat having guidance from a Shariah Board in the future to make the system long sustaining via enabling Islamic practices. Finally, we plan to outreach many other developing and under-developed countries with our system online through presenting it as a hub for philanthropically minded people to ensure the global sustenance of our system.

The solution aims for the improvement of the non profit organizations and we are also becoming a part of them. The system is us turning towards a complex phase rapidly from prototyping phase. Therefore, we require a operational team for this. Apart form R&D, this requires a fund. Moreover, the platform itself requires publicity and we believe TigerIT can be a great medium for us to achieve this. We do believe that, our solution brings some good social impact since it gas already proved it by gathering some donations and enlisting some organizations. We can expect that TigerIT also can make this progress more rapid by helping financially and help us to form a generic platform of social philanthropic entrepreneurship.