PCI is a “Network Improvement Community” (NIC) focused on improving specialized Network Improvement Communities focused on improving people’s lives via the internet.

• Why? Because Personal Computing won’t save the world. It’s about Global Collaboration.

• “We don’t build it but we make it better”.

• There’s no “them” in a globally connected Internet World, it’s all “us”.

When thinking of funding an experiment/venture, we would ask those asking for funds to demonstrate that:

1.  Their experiment/venture is out to improve people’s lives, do good in a region, and has clear metrics of how these lives will be improved. There will need to be multi-dimensional metrics of performance and a feedback loop to learn based on the metrics.

2.  Their experiment/venture has cultural sensitivity, knows if what they are delivering what people need, and demonstrates they’ve walked in people’s shoes (ethnographies). We want to see proposals that are what a community needs as a co-designed solution. 

3.  Their experiment/venture has thought of unintended consequences. What is a positive benefit might also erode some other benefit in the community. This can be demonstrated both by asking the community of unintended consequences and employing “beta/red team” process to identify possible unintended impacts.

PCI will be:

(A) a Platform for proposing experiments/ventures, described below, *AND*

(B) a Reputation System for those participating to help signal and reward positive contributions to PCI.

Other groups outside of PCI could use this Reputation System to recruit/possibly hire participants for related ventures beyond just us. Some of these highly-ranked participants might be partially funded by PCI. PCI welcomes other groups and governments to co-fund our ventures too.

Re: Implementation and Monitoring, PCI’s platform for funding experiment/ventures that would that would allow:

• A “innocentive”-like space for: (1) problem-spotters to identify at the grassroots level problems that PCI could fund and thus help remedy, *AND* (2) problem-solving ventures to propose new pitches for PCI to fund based that solve these problems on the 3 criteria above. 

• A “bright spots and fail forward” space to reward existing ventures to: (3) share success stories + metrics *AND* (4) confide stories + metrics of ventures that honestly didn’t work and reward those candidly sharing these stories to inform the larger community. Those contributing stories, especially ventures that didn’t work, are given preference for future funding by PCI via the innocentive space. *We want to encourage participants to self-evaluate, learn, and improve themselves and a toolkit for them to improve themselves.*

• An open “kickstarter”-like space for: (5) the public to weigh-in on new pitches for PCI to fund *AND* (6) the public to provide on-going feedback to PCI on the ventures that PCI is funding. This participatory space would also help PCI demonstrate what it is investing in globally and the metrics associated with those ventures.

• Also: PCI would be mindful of how it stops funding an effort and lets them die, “smart contracts” for the funds. PCI should encourage experiments/ventures to self-evaluate, learn, and improve themselves. PCI is a learning community. PCI also should approach Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook non-profits and encourage them to fund/back PCI vs. their own efforts that aren’t producing that much re: results.