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Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#211

Post by glaive123 »

minerjoe wrote: post #150

I gave up using Federal Reserve Notes, on principal, and have dedicated my life to improving a small ranching community. By limiting my use of money to less than $100 a month (hopefully soon $0), I've had to build connections with human beings that would have not been possible otherwise. It was really eye opening to realize that the universe wants to play and it will help me in the strangest ways. I've set up a commu…

> I've set up a community computer lab entirely based on e-waste collected for free that has a print-shop, network, big screens, projectors, electronics lab, etc and organized a few hackathons to see what services we can offer to the community.

This is brilliant, why don't community organizations spring up all over to do this?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#212

Post by pkphilip »

searchableguy wrote: post #177
pkphilip wrote: post #96

Yes, we work with farmers in India - we teach them organic and natural farming and we find ways to sell their produce to customers in the cities. www.unifield.in

That's neat. I don't have experience with farms/agriculture so pardon my ignorance. Are there existing centralized communication systems to know which farmers are growing which crop in a state or country at what rate? Centralized and vertical farming doesn't work with small farmers and there are too many of them but it's hard to get them to lease the land and start your own hub afaik. With ground water depletion, lac…

We work with farmers in India. There is data on what is being grown in various areas but not fine grained enough or updated often enough for our purposes.

If you are in the US the reality of farming is very different there vs-a-vie the situation in India.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#213

Post by searchableguy »

pkphilip wrote: post #212
searchableguy wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's neat. I don't have experience with farms/agriculture so pardon my ignorance. Are there existing centralized communication systems to know which farmers are growing which crop in a state or country at what rate? Centralized and vertical farming doesn't work with small farmers and there are too many of them but it's hard to get them to lease the land and start your own hub afaik. With ground water depletion, lac…

We work with farmers in India. There is data on what is being grown in various areas but not fine grained enough or updated often enough for our purposes. If you are in the US the reality of farming is very different there vs-a-vie the situation in India.

I live in India.

> There is data on what is being grown in various areas but not fine grained enough or updated often enough for our purposes.

Right? Do you think farmers would self report that data in exchange of getting real time data from other farms? Would they care about recommendation on what to grow and pricing?

There are lot of groups for techies online and self reporting channels but I haven't found any good ones for farmers in india. Can you list them for me if you know about them?

I would love to talk more. Email is in the profile.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#214

Post by XzAeRosho »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #127
XzAeRosho wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I founded a small company in my country doing this exact same format, but for energy and energy efficiency. We have currently worked with our government and several other agencies, plus some overseas companies, and the struggles are basically the same. >The customer is mostly project based, so retention is hard. >but the technology use in many of these type of organisations, despite being heavily dependent on data, i…

We started with software only and quickly realised that our idea that others could do the implementation and consulting around the tools just didn't work. So we gradually had to set up hubs where we could provide the knowledge locally. That took quite a lot of effort. It works quite well though.

Send me an email if you ever want to do a collaboration here in Chile :) victor (at) vgr.cl

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#215

Post by gmenegatti »

aprdm wrote: post #210
g14i wrote: post #63

I also run a company [1] that primarily recruits low-income Brazilians from remote locations and teach them how to code and create data-related products. The company itself is for profit in the long run, but the first priority is to make our members grow (financially and psychologically), then generate profit for the founders. During the entire process we focus 40% of their time to study/learn about soft skills (beco…

It is worth noting that a lot of people feel that you hire people very cheap and work them to their bones with a promise of a high salary. Working on weekends and 12h a day seem to be incentivized. Some discussion here: https://github.com/frontendbr/vagas/issues/3084 and if you google for the python Brasil google groups there's a lot of bad reputation around the company.

Yes. This is true. There are some people with strong opinions about what we do, but the interesting part is that none of these people were part of our group before, they just criticize what they think we do, as they cannot criticize what we really do.

Anyway, we respect different opinions, but we are really focused on hearing the opinions of the people we already have inside our group, because they are the ones that truly understand what’s going on.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#216

Post by dhaavi »

ssss11 wrote: post #181

The top level replies here are interesting, I think, for the HN crowd. There’s some great examples of social good - helping homelessness, poor countries, the starving, the environment etc. I don’t see anything though related to digital human rights and fixing the surveillence marketing & surveilance state activites that have overcome the web. As a tech crowd i find that very intriguing. If anyone has examples of what…

One of these already commented here: Mullvad - their comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24169684

I myself started out my (now our) privacy business a little different: When Snowden revealed the surveillance machinery around the world in 2013, I got thinking about how we as a society as a whole could ever withstand such a exploitive surveillance. You'll never win against a Nation/State actor 1-on-1 head on, but evading the dragnet of nations and of surveillance capitalism is possible. BUT, this requires a minimum of technical knowledge, which many do not have.

That is the barrier we want to remove. That is our social purpose.

This has led to an amazing journey, eventually expanding to three Co-Founders and our first couple employees. The founders hold 100% of the company on won't give any control away. We still live off of public and private (social impact) funding.

We try to give away as much as we can for free, and selling premium features. Our Application Firewall and Privacy Filter, the Portmaster, is completely free and open source.

The paid add-on is a brand new privacy network, which is somewhat similar to VPN and Tor. It eventually fully removes the need to trust us as a provider.

Check it all out at: https://safing.io/

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#217

Post by craig »

jefflombardjr wrote: post #85

Plug for [name redacted]! My buddy [name redacted] is killing it! He's now on a mission to transform the landscape of the city and turn often neglected patches of grass into thriving microecosystems. [link redacted] Been an incredibly positive response so far, if anyone is interested in starting something similar we've discussed open sourcing it so others can do in their own city.

Great idea! I've just recently setup a veggie patch, I can't believe I used to pay for my greens.

From the home page "Between 1989 and 2005, the price of fruits and vegetables in the US increased by 75 percent." Is that corrected for inflation?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#218

Post by aprdm »

gmenegatti wrote: post #215
aprdm wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worth noting that a lot of people feel that you hire people very cheap and work them to their bones with a promise of a high salary. Working on weekends and 12h a day seem to be incentivized. Some discussion here: https://github.com/frontendbr/vagas/issues/3084 and if you google for the python Brasil google groups there's a lot of bad reputation around the company.

Yes. This is true. There are some people with strong opinions about what we do, but the interesting part is that none of these people were part of our group before, they just criticize what they think we do, as they cannot criticize what we really do. Anyway, we respect different opinions, but we are really focused on hearing the opinions of the people we already have inside our group, because they are the ones that…

The github issue I posted has comments from employee reviews on glassdoor.

That said I wish you the best! It is really cool that you think of your business the way you do. I just find it very important to show to the HN community how other people feel about your business as well.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#219

Post by TudorBirlea »

pbronez wrote: post #146
TudorBirlea wrote: post #137

Consider the social impact of the way digital marketing works today: it is completely based on surveillance. This creates mistrust and it is the reason conversion rates are so small. Makes people feel used. Based on my research while doing my postgrad at Cambridge, I figured out a way to scale empathy: no need for personal data, no need for intrusive technologies, no need for excessive details. Today we work on this…

> my research while doing my postgrad at Cambridge, I figured out a way to scale empathy: no need for personal data, no need for intrusive technologies, no need for excessive details. How??

My research was around "behavioural causality." The simple way to put it is: any human behaviour can be explained by a core motivation (4 of them) and driving emotion (8 of them). Just as all the music is made with just a handful of notes, the same way no matter how complex a behaviour, it's just a combination of these 2 factors. Of course it's a bit more complicated, but that's the gist of it.

Now, let's say you want to use this for advertising: if you know the equation behind the decision to adopt a product, then you can put in you ad the right copy (i.e. stimuli for the required emotion). People who are ready to switch will feel understood.

Happy to share more if it's relevant to you.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone a social entrepreneur, i.e. placing social impact above profit?

#220

Post by TudorBirlea »

andrewnc wrote: post #142
TudorBirlea wrote: post #137

Consider the social impact of the way digital marketing works today: it is completely based on surveillance. This creates mistrust and it is the reason conversion rates are so small. Makes people feel used. Based on my research while doing my postgrad at Cambridge, I figured out a way to scale empathy: no need for personal data, no need for intrusive technologies, no need for excessive details. Today we work on this…

With the main goal of surveillance free advertising? Interesting

Makes sense if you think about it: no matter how much data I have on you, I don't actually know you. I'm just a creep and the ads I point toward you make you feel creepy.

In my approach, I understand what makes people buy my product so I look for behaviour patterns that are similar but completely isolated from identities. Does this make sense?

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