Seven I School students are among the finalists in the 2011 CITRIS Big Ideas competition. The competition recognizes the best student ideas using information technology to address a major societal challenge; $45,000 in cash prizes will be distributed to the contest winners.
The finalists include initiatives to benefit Indian college students, Latin American coffee growers, and aspiring IT laborers among India's villages and slums.
Edumile (edumile.org) is an integrated trust & support-based peer-to-peer system supporting aspiring college students in India. It uses microlending for affordable loans to students, provides a peer-to-peer network for support and mentoring, and helps connect graduates with potential employers. The Edumile team includes second-year MIMS students Satish Polisetti and Sean Carey and first-year MIMS student Ankita Goyal, along with colleagues in business, finance, economics, and computer science.
From Crop to Cup assists rural smallholder farmers with mobile information-management tools to help them gain access to credit, specialty markets, and fair trade or organic certification. Initially, the project is focusing on coffee growers in Latin America; the team is developing partnerships with Root Capital, a nonprofit social investment fund financing grassroots businesses in developing countries, and CEPCO, a coffee cooperative in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Fair trade and organic certification can open lucrative markets for the growers, but the certification process requires detailed information and documentation; "From Crop to Cup" is developing easy-to-use mobile apps for grower cooperatives to collect and manage the data necessary for certification. Improved data and documentation can also help cooperatives obtain affordable credit, by lowering the bank's due-diligence costs and helping the bank manage risk; access to credit is crucial for the growers' economic viability, allowing them to invest in their farms and improve their yield and efficiency. The same information can open the door to market to specialty roasters, who want to be able to demonstrate to their customers who they're buying from and how much they're paying.
The "From Crop to Cup" team includes I School master's student Ariel Chait, along with teammates from business and public policy.
MobileWorks (fairtradework.com) aims to open up India’s burgeoning outsourcing industry to impoverished groups who are currently being left behind. The project takes advantage of India’s widespread mobile phone usage to send outsourced data-entry jobs to the mobile phones of India’s villagers and slum residents, providing them fair trade wages. MobileWorks is an outsourcing solution that is more cost efficient, scalable, and accurate than existing solutions; it also provides an employment opportunity for the underemployed to earn a supplemental income
The MobileWorks team has already deployed a working prototype for in-field testing, and the preliminary responses are encouraging. The team includes I School students Prayag Narula, David Rolnitzky, & Philipp Gutheim, along with Berkeley industrial engineering graduate student Anand Kulkarni.
Both Edumile and MobileWorks originated in the School of Information's "Social Enterprise using ICTs for International Development" course last Fall, which trained students to create social enterprises for rural developing regions, using information and communication technologies.
All finalists will present their ideas at a poster session on Thursday, April 14, in the Kvamme Atrium, on the 3rd floor of Sutardja Dai Hall. The "Big Ideas" competition is sponsored by CITRIS, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.
