Project Didi

Changemakers of all kinds lack a real-time analysis of the effect and impact of their actions, whether within a given market or social/violent conflict. Instead, they use intuition, qualitative methodologies and representative surveys to gauge success. This reduces the efficiency and efficacy of executed solutions resulting in the current global situation: a world divided, full of inequality, oppression and violence not able to deal with the existential crises affecting it. The issue is not a lack of effort as there are countless people and organizations working globally to tackle our most difficult challenges. Whether it’s the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in the Ukraine, global warming, gender inequality, systemic racism, toxic polarization or more, so many of us have been working hard to succeed, so why haven’t we? We believe it is not for lack of effort, but a lack of understanding of the direct impact of their actions, stifling their ability to adapt, evolve and pivot in real-time. Afterall, in a world of eight billion people fueled by a 24/7 news cycle, a global internet penetration rate of 66% and the ubiquity of social media, our reality changes from hour-to-hour, not year-to-year. Changemakers and peacebuilders need the tools that will allow them to keep pace and succeed.

We analyse big data using AI and machine learning to measure subjectivity and perception across large population groups in real-time. Subjectivity and perception, what people think and feel, are the keys to creating social change and a world at peace. Our datasets are scraped from news media, social media and political discourse, three datasets that are reflective of the populations they represent. Our analysis models are based upon tried and tested academic concepts and theories from the world of peacebuilding and conflict resolution. The classification algorithms we developed process every piece of data we collect and categorize them according to the parameters and conditions of these theories, turning these qualitative theories into quantitative tools. We are able to provide clients with a number of tools and services including our Ripeness Index ™, which allows clients to understand the macro side of their conflict. In other words, how ready are the sides to actually attempt a resolution. We also measure the impact and effect of client’s actions on the ground as they execute their theory of change, providing them a data-based analysis of their efforts. Finally, we can provide strategic advice to clients on how to strengthen and broaden their effect. Ultimately, we want to work with actors to create the conditions that lead to the cultural change and political legitimacy needed to solve the deep seeded and complex problems that face us. 

We are currently working in Israel and Palestine within the context of the current war in Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. On a macro scale, our solution serves the 14 million people who live here and the millions in their respective diasporas. Beyond us, the continuation of this conflict touches the lives of hundreds of millions of people living in the Middle East, not to mention global and regional stability. On a micro scale, entrenched conflicts prevent enacting large-scale solutions to solve all secondary issues, such as poverty, racism and health care. So long as the larger existential conflict continues, these issues cannot be solved. As we can apply our tools to these issues as well, we can serve and impact everyone as we support all of those working on these issues to generate the change they need to succeed. Israel and Palestine is our first market and conflict zone. Our solution can impact hundreds of millions more as we scale up and expand into new markets and conflicts in the Western and Developing worlds.  

Our core team is made up of Israelis who are tired of living in a country at war. We believe that peace is the only way forward and are creating the pragmatic tools to help achieve this. Living through this conflict and attempting to shape it also gives us perspective on other conflicts and how to best help those living within them to succeed in their efforts to create change. Project Didi itself is the brainchild of our CEO, Shawn, who for the last 20 years has been involved in different forms of peacebuilding in Israel, including immigrating to join grassroots peace endeavours. As we scale up we will continue to hire staff who come from the communities effected by the conflicts we are engaged in. Currently, our staff (excluding the core team) is half Muslim-Palestinian and half Jewish-Israeli. As a PeaceTech company measuring subjectivity and perception, bias is always on our mind. To mitigate our research teams, those creating our training databases, are representative and directly from the communities that they will be measuring. In addition, our clients act as an additional layer of checks and balances, helping us ensure that our output makes sense. Only by working together as partners can we solve these massively complex issues. 

We are currently gearing up for our pilot program in Israel and Palestine which will launch this summer. As we have yet to start, I selected the prototype phase. We are currently scraping news media from Israeli and Palestinian sources and running it through our conflict-relevance classification algorithm and our ripeness-model classification algorithm. Our Ripeness Index (TM) prototype is operational and providing output, but our precision and recall numbers are lower than we want, a reflection of the richness of our training databases. Our Hebrew training database is further along than our Arabic one, but our staff of five led by our head of R&D is making progress adding more examples. We are currently using only news media for our analysis and will be adding social media and political discourse once we have the funding to take on more staff. During the pilot we will work with 5-10 design partners who represent grassroots organizations, political parties and international actors in both Israel and Palestine. 

We are building an international corporation whose goal is to help create world peace. We face so many challenges and need help navigating them all. While funding is currently our biggest issue, being fully funded will not solve our problems. We are looking for support in refining our business plan and developing our scaling model. We are also looking for help networking and planning the next conflicts and markets we will enter. We will soon have technological questions to answer, such as how to relate to the open-source movement, data privacy and IP. Having more voices involved will help us make the right decisions. To put another way, we are looking for a mentor and partners who can help us succeed and see MIT Solve as a great source for this need.

We combine tried and tested qualitative academic concepts and theories with LLMs and NLP. On the surface this seems fairly obvious, but few companies or research centers are attempting this kind of work, much less actively applying it in the field. The first theory we have drawn from is Ripeness Theory, which seeks to understand the subjective perceptions of sides in a conflict. By focusing on subjectivity and perception, as opposed to truth and fact, we can measure and understand what people think and feel. For peacebuilders and changemakers, this is how they can gauge their impact as their work focuses on shaping the hearts and minds of those involved in the conflict, pushing them towards choosing resolution and peace. As much of the business world also depends on understanding what consumers think and feel, our tools can also be adapted to help them gain market share, especially when selling paradigm changing and SDG supporting products and services. Finally, the western world has been going through a crisis of public trust in the political echelon. Our solution provides a new method for constituents and politicians to understand and shape each other. Ultimately, our solution aims to work as fast as the world changes, allowing humanity to stop playing ‘catch-up’ and get ahead of the curve to start solving our issues.

Within a conflict like the Israeli-Palestinian one there are countless people and organizations, not to mention external actors like the USA, UN or EU, working to solve the conflict or an aspect of it. Their actions are based upon a theory of change they have developed. We do not believe that a lack of success in achieving peace, nor the inability to solve the connected issues of racism, poverty, and inequality equate to a failure or flaw in these theories of change. We believe the issue, and where our theory of change enters, is their lack of real-time quantitative data to measure and understand their effect as they act. For these changemakers to succeed, they need to understand if their actions are having the effect they expect and need and adapt, evolve and pivot accordingly. International actors seeking to mediate and advise are also stuck in their intuition-based, data-free approach. Within the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the international world has made numerous mistakes pushing for negotiations when they did not have broad local support (e.g. Camp David 2000) and pulling back when they did (e.g. Senator Mitchel’s appointment as Special Envoy for Middle East Peace), wasting precious political capital and human lives on these efforts. In addition, the international world has invested and donated billions of dollars to Israeli and Palestinian NGOs in the hopes of creating the grassroots change and support needed to succeed. Yet they lack a way of understanding the real-time effect of their support, much less the ability to understand when these conditions are present and the timing is right to push. Tools like our Ripeness Index ™ provide them a stop-light for peace, allowing them to understand when is the right time to invest and donate and when to push for solutions. 25 years of failed attempts to negotiate a solution, increased violence and destruction, and rampant hatred has created conditions for Palestinians and Israelis that will make turning this tragic war into peace harder than ever to accomplish as each failure cements existing preconceptions and anti-peace narratives.

Our first impact goal is to optimise, strengthen and broaden the effect of our client’s campaigns. First and foremost, success and progress will be measured through our algorithms. We will be able to see how their actions and our advice changes the society wide and demographic specific measures that we have. Our clients will be able to measure their success and progress through increased request for activities/actions, growing membership and donations, and greater interest from new demographic groups.

Our second impact goal is to shape public and political discourse. We expect to see an actual change in discourse (change in language and sentiment used by the public and politicians), which will be reflected in our measures. Here progress is best measured by monitoring a change in hawkish or contrarian politicians and both hearing and reading changes in their stances directly from them.

Our third impact goal is to generate moments of ripeness. Ripe moments signify the best possible conditions for attempting direct conflict resolution and negotiations. They are moments when public support is large and broad enough to provide political legitimacy for brave and bold acts. As we are the only ones measuring ripeness in this way our algorithms will be able to identify when these conditions exist. However, for a ripe moment to exist, views of both public and political support for action amongst the majority will be present.

Our fourth impact goal is to provide support during the resolution process. It is one thing to successfully initiate a conflict resolution process, it is another to succeed in it. By providing support to negotiators and mediators, we can help them understand what their public wants and expects from them, providing insight not only into what should be a part of the resolution agreement, but what’s needed to ensure ratification. This can only be measured in the actual success of the negotiations and the ratification of said agreement.

Our fifth impact goal is to support the efforts to create a true peace after a resolution has been adopted. Resolving a conflict will always be easier in comparison to dealing with the truth and reconciliation process and the realisation of true peace. South Africa and Northern Ireland are prime examples of this. The same tools we used to support changemakers in getting to this point can be used to help them tackle and solve the underlying issues preventing true peace. Beyond our output, we will be able to monitor progress through the various indices created by the OECD, UN (SDGs) and research centres who are monitoring issues ranging from poverty to racism and inequality to health care and happiness. 

We use large language models (LLM) to parse and analyse text. We use natural language prediction models (NLP) to categorise our data according to our analysis models. We are currently using a few-shot classification algorithm via ChatGPT to assist in creating our training databases. The methodology works, but the use of ChatGPT is a temporary solution given our funding level. We currently use a data aggregator to scrape news media data and will develop our own internal scraping API as we progress. We plan to use AI to analyse our raw data and output in five years time to expose and understand patterns of peacebuilding and conflict resolution that may have been missed by humans, developing new theories and concepts to support changemakers. Finally, our work is based on academic research which provides the framework for our models. 

Shawn, our CEO, is the only full-time employee. The other two members of the core team are working part-time until we are fully funded. Our head of R&D is in the last year of her PhD and will join full-time as the end. We have a freelance programmer doing our coding and five people working part-time on our research staff. 

Shawn established Project Didi two years ago and has been working on it since. The core team joined in January 2023. The research team was hired in February 2024.

As a PeaceTech company our goal is to be a good company that embodies the change we are trying to create. Only those living within a conflict can truly solve it and as such our researchers and advisors will always come from the communities that are affected by said conflict and issues. The unifying factor of wanting and working for change creates the basis for a welcoming and inclusive environment. In addition, our HR department’s main focus will be managing and guiding our staff, helping everyone deal with the interpersonal conflicts that arise from this kind of work. Our staff is currently made up of Jewish Israelis and Muslim residents of East Jerusalem. We plan to diversify the voices on our staff adding different types of Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Christians and Muslims. However, our biggest issue in diversifying our staff is funding. Without the ability to provide a stable work environment and salary it is extremely hard to recruit staff from diverse backgrounds who do not have the natural ability to take a pay cut and work for equity, which is the classic start-up model and how our core team is currently functioning. We are excited to face these questions and dilemmas once we have the funding to treat workers with the respect and dignity that they deserve.

We currently provide four services. The first is our Ripeness Index (TM) which will be publicly available on our website and updated daily. There will be a weekly report describing and analysing changes in relation to a given conflict. Next, we will provide clients with an in-depth view of all our measures over time. Client’s will view these measures in an interactive dashboard allowing them to highlight different measures over time. These measures will help clients plan their messaging and decide on timing for actions in a self-serve capacity. Our next service is measuring client’s impact, showing the effect over time of their actions and campaigns. Finally, we will provide clients with strategic advice on how to optimize, strengthen and broaden their effect.

Our primary market will always be oriented towards peace and conflict resolution. We will work with grassroots organizations and NGOs, local political parties, community leaders and businesses who are attempting to solve their given conflict. We will provide them the above services on a monthly service fee. We will also work with international actors seeking to mediate and advise, providing them the same services.

Our secondary market is oriented at the B2C and B2B world, helping them gain market share. Our same tools can be easily modified to help them understand whether their marketing campaigns are effective. We will add an actuator to our models, automatically initiating actions to support clients’ goals. Clients will be charged a monthly-subscription fee for these services.

Our final market is political parties. As public opinion polls and surveys struggle to provide accurate results, our subjectivity and perception measures provide insight for politicians and constituents. Through our core services we will provide access and advice to both sides of the political divide (constituents and politicians), helping each understand and shape the other. Political parties and politicians will pay a monthly fee for services.

Our work in the peace field will be internally subsidized by revenue from for-profit clients represented in our secondary markets. In addition, we will fundraise from philanthropists and international organisations to develop an internal fund to subsidise and expand our peace work. We plan to open a foundation to enable this. Finally, we will continue to turn to the investment world to fund our expansion into new countries, targeting both financial institutions whose clients seek investment portfolios that do good and VCs who understand the wave of new business opportunities our work generates. 

We are currently operating on a bootstrapped model. The majority of funds to date have been provided by our founding CEO. We have one angel investor and have also received a 0% interest cash flow loan from a family member. This runway will allow us to finish work on our pilot, which is the next step in our fundraising campaign. Our pilot will finish with a media event to create a moment of FOMO amongst investors and philanthropists. We are currently raising $1.5 million through a private offering and public funding (USAID, EU). As our overhead and turnaround time is lower than most research centres, we expect to scale up quickly in Palestine and Israel (beginning of 2025), creating the success needed to launch in Europe and the USA (2027). For the last two years our CEO has been building a network of interested VCs, foundations and philanthropists who are waiting to see the results of our pilot before investing. Over the last six months we have won two prizes (special distinction, Kluz Prize for PeaceTech and Coup de Coeur at ChangeNOW 2024) for our work which has been pre-pilot. There is a large desire for our services and all that is missing for our success is real-world expertise.