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Grassroots… An Open Source Project

So in an effort catch up on my blogging, I’ll risk being a little spammy here. :)

Easily the biggest thing on my plate lately has been Grassroots. It’s a project I’ve been working on for my friends over at One Mission, which quickly became a labor of love.

Grassroots is a social giving portal. It’s an open source project (currently under a GPLv3 license, eventually MIT as well) that will enable a non-profit to crowd-source their giving efforts. It’s similar to what charity:water has through mycharitywater.org, but Grassroots will be different in a couple significant ways.

• Grassroots is agnostic to the type of work the charity is doing. You could be building houses, wells, soup kitchens, cat farms, etc.
• Grassroots has the ability to work across multiple project types (e.g. - the charity could be building houses and wells, allowing users to create campaigns for either type of project).
• While giving is important to Grassroots, we’re also working on driving involvement through serving the local community. There’s an expectation that the person(s) receiving the benefit of being campaigned for are serving in their communities (e.g. - a family living in the Mexican barrios is a candidate for having a house built for them. While they wait for their turn in line, they will serve their community by helping to build houses for their neighbors). Additionally, in a future release, we’ll be creating means for the campaigner to pledge serving hours. This notion of serving will allow the project to scale internationally across many communities.
• Grassroots will connect people to people. There will be an actual connection to the people the campaigners and donors will be aiding. If you donate or campaign, the organization running the project will be able to update their users with information (GPS coords, pictures, videos, etc) about the people they’re serving.

That’s pretty much the gist of it. :)

Right now I’m leading the effort. There are just two of us. So if you’d like to get involved, head on over to GitHub and dig through the source code.