A modest project, part 1

[The following is excerpted from an email I sent to a select group of readers and friends about three weeks ago. I've made a little progress on it so far, but not what I'd like. Some of what I've looked at and why will be "part 2". For those who got this as email, sorry about the repeat.]

I have been noodling about a project for the past six months or so, and lately have decided to actually get off my duff and channel some energy into it. I am writing this to share some high-level ideas about what I want to do and get your feedback. I am not looking for criticisms to shoot it down, although if you see it has a fatal flaw or has already been done and I just don't know about it then I guess I do want to hear about that. What I really want is feedback - more ideas, pushing me to clarify fuzzy points, things I haven't thought of that would be cool, etc.

Think of the following as a series of presentation slides. [I have added a few additions in square brackets containing feedback received from friends.]

Matthew 6 Ministries (M6M)

What - the "elevator speech"

• Build an online community program and volunteering clearinghouse of upcoming volunteer events (event oriented, not program oriented). [Erin has also convinced me this could include local "needs" that aren't "events", such as a school letting people know there is a serious need for winter coats for the poorer students there.]
  
• Have the ability to post upcoming charity and volunteer events by city or geographic area.
• Existing models include Hope for New York (especially the calendar) - think about that for all cities across the country. c.f., Freecycle, Craigslist, Angie's List.
  [Chris has since brought my attention to Hands On Richmond and VolunteerMatch, although I really dislike the latter's need for the volunteers to register for events, but maybe that's necessary, I dunno. Anyway, I didn't see anything in VolunteerMatch much for my surrounding area, and I think mid-sized and smaller communities are where my mind's really at with this.]
• The idea is to get everyone away from "our church's community programs" to simply "the community's community programs". Trying to get churches involved in each other's community service events for the good of the Church as well as the community.
  
• Multi-faceted - should include social networking, shared calendar, feeds (of course), blogs, alerts (emergency notices, for example), search, pictures (for posting what happened at events). Build community around the community, if you get the drift.
  
• More dynamic and up-to-date than 2-1-1 and most charity/church Web sites.
• Not replacing charity/church Web sites, but supplementing them. Another way to get the word out.

Who is involved?

• Me to start.
• A few people as advisers.
• Anyone that wants to help. Someone with real Web design experience (the visual, artsy side of it) would be a big plus, since I am a programmer and my idea of Web site "design" is deciding which font to use for all the text I write. :o)
  
• Add volunteers to manage and promote cities if and as they are added. Ultimately I see the thing being managed a lot like Freecycle (local, decentralized administration).
• "Appropriate" (churches, charities/NGOs, perhaps local gov't) entities allowed to list on the site.

Who pays?

• No one to start, or me to be more precise. I am willing to invest time and some money into it, at least to get it to a point where people can look at it and see what I am talking about.
  
• I want to build as much of it on free platforms as possible. [A lot of "part 2" will deal with my quest for an appropriate platform.]
  
• If it ever went anywhere and started costing real money then I would probably seek donations if and only if I couldn't swing the costs myself.
• In no way would I ever want it to charge for the listings.

When?

• This is the first step, getting the high level direction down.
• Next step is for me to see if I can get a simple prototype up and running quickly.
• Then? Dunno. Start to promote it, I guess.

Where?

• I want to start with just a few cities. Start small, see if it "sticks".
• The Jeff City/Columbia area because so little is covered here, and that's where I am. :o)
• Maybe some mid-tier cities next. Which ones?
• Big cities last - they probably already have more info resources available anyway.

Why "Matthew 6 Ministries"?

• I am totally willing to change the name - it is just a working name for me.
• When I originally came up with the idea last year my thinking around the name was simply that I thought too many churches try to do things as "Our program for the poor" and "Our food pantry" and so on. A lot of pride in there, and seemingly of the kind the first two thirds of Matthew 6 warns specifically against.
• I had the idea that churches and charities could post events where people could come and help and people could show up and just say "Hi, I'm Jim and I am here to help!" and not give their last name or their church affiliation or whatever.
• That's my dream, but to make it all work I am sure it couldn't be run that way.
• I am open to other suggestions, but for now M6M is my working title. [And even now I am moving away from that, although I still don't have a decent replacement.]
  

Why not let the newspapers handle it?

• Bad search engines on a lot of papers.
• Dying model, dying subscription base.
• No RSS feeds for most newspapers.
• Not focused on this type of information.

Why not just use 2-1-1/United Way?

• Their sites tend to be more static - "If you want to volunteer, here are some organizations to go to and check."
• This would be oriented the other way around - "This Saturday First Baptist Church is sponsoring a work day on a Habitat house. Call this number if you want to come and help."
• Let's people "try out" volunteering - no up front commitment.
• Hopefully encourages reciprocity - "Some nice people from that church came and helped us on our event, maybe we should go help on theirs."
  

How to promote?

• Bloggers.
• Church Web sites (maybe make a condition of getting listed be requiring a link to M6M on each listing entity's Web site? Dunno - have to think that one through).
• Church bulletins, pulpit announcements, church boards.
• Any free online directories I can find and get the site in to.

How to do it? (warning - tech-speak)

• Want to use free or low-cost online services as much as possible. Google platform? Amazon's S3? Something else? This is a primary area of research.
  
• If I have to build (write code), then will probably use Linux and either Rails or Mono. There's some interesting hosting options including virtual machine hosting available. But ultimately I want to build as little as possible in terms of code and "mash up" as much as possible. The point being to get something up and running fast and to have it maintainable by mere mortals.
  
• May even want to automate some of the listings by using Google's new, free REST APIs and scraping content from local news sites and church and charity Web sites. Could be a lot of work though unless the search terms were very targeted and tuned often.

[After all of the above the reviewers and I got into a discussion about whether it should focus on Christian organizations only or allow just about anyone with a worthy cause to list. My original focus/position was I wanted this to be a way for churches to get more involved in their local communities, but I was kindly kicked out of thinking that way by multiple people and now agree it needs to be inclusive, not exclusive.

However, I don't want to have this be a VolunteerMatch clone, otherwise I would just send people to VolunteerMatch. And maybe that is still the right idea - I have no attachment that it has to be my idea and my system. I just found VolunteerMatch to feel a bit cold, centralized and "non-local" (Freecycle and Craig's List are really my two mental models for this). I didn't like that volunteers had to register to help at an event. And I found the focus at VolunteerMatch a bit..."broad". I mean, having a place where people can find how to volunteer for political causes is fine, but that's not quite what I am thinking about. And while they allow you to filter down to something like searching to help with the "Homeless and Housing" or "Hunger", which are in the drop down list not far under "Gay, Lesbian, Bi & Trans" volunteer opportunities (not that there's anything wrong with that :o), I was hoping the topics would be a bit more urgent, helping people climb up from the lowest rungs of Maslow's hierarchy.

I am not meaning to bash VolunteerMatch. It looks like it's a great service. I still haven't talked myself out of it being "the answer" and just saying "Oh, well - time to think of something else to help." It's just that I wanted my focus to be on (a) helping the local community, (b) helping with the real survival issues - hunger, homelessness, abuse and violence, addiction, illiteracy, and (c) getting Christians and churches in communities to pull together around local causes and not feel like everything has to be stamped with their "brand" or church name - trying to get us to be truly one body.

Fire away. Criticisms now accepted. With the struggles I've had trying to find what I see in my head and get even the crudest of demos going I am half thinking that it is a bad idea and the blocks are simply God saying, "Not what I want from you right now." I dunno.]