HelpMatch Vision

Breaking news: The vision is crystallizing… We see HelpMatch as something like a combination of MySpace (for creating help projects, with project web pages, blogs, etc.), LinkedIn (for leveraging personal networks to create awareness of need, and leverage trusted relationships to avoid fraud), and Amazon/Ebay/online CtoC (for virtual catalogs of needs, donations, supply chain coordination, and so forth).

If we can make HelpMatch reach its potential, it will be a landmark of our age. The opportunity to help define and build the landmark of our age doesn’t come at one too many times in the course of a life! So, I urge, let's seize the moment!

I’ve created a HelpMatch volunteer list that is ordered according to timing of signing up. It gives early volunteers more visibility, hence incentive to volunteer early. If you decide to join the HelpMatch team, you will also be invited to join the HelpMatch Google Group.

The HelpMatch wiki will be the "nerve center" for the HelpMatch technical community.

HelpMatch Vision Background

HelpMatch will be a web-based system that will provide the ubiquitous computing engine to match help to need. It will give more people a way to help those with chronic (poverty) or acute (disaster) need in a direct, meaningful way. Specifically, the envisaged system will allow:

• individuals and organizations (such as schools, community groups, etc.) who have experienced loss through a disaster to state specific needs for donated goods and services
• individuals and organizations to offer specific forms of assistance, directly by searching registered needs, or indirectly, with the system matching needs to donation offers
• match individuals and organizations with registered general needs to individuals and organizations that have made offers to collect goods and services to meet the needs expressed
• shippers to donate services to ship goods, and individuals and groups to donate funds to pay for shipping, so that it will be an option for givers to have shipping costs paid to get their donation to its destination, with shipping labels created by the HelpMatch system.
   
• new! HelpMatch networks: sponsors will be able to set up trusted networks (e.g., employees, customers, congregation) to assure donors that members of recipient networks have been verified. Recipient networks can have a trust rating. Sponsors can also set up networks on the donor/aid side, to co-ordinate collections, raise awareness, etc.

HelpMatch will be managed by a non-profit organization that will rely on donations to supply computing infrastructure, internet services and time donated by technologists to build and run HelpMatch.

Full HelpMatch Problem Statement (needs to be updated, but it will give you something to start chewing on).

HelpMatch Networks

HelpMatch networks will become a very dynamic way to raise awareness for need, and build support for change at the network level. For example, someone who cares about what is going on in Darfur/Sudan could start up a network that concerned others could plug into to find out how they could help, find out about rallies and ways to put pressure on those who set policy, find out about aide, and so forth. HelpMatch networks will integrate the best of blogs, the best of LinkedIn, and so forth.

The Economist has an article on bankless banking through "community" networks and the Internet!  Prosper has this concept of "groups" that seems to be analogous, but different, from the HelpMatch networks concept. Group leaders tell a story to get lenders to join their group, and borrowers to borrow from them. So the idea has precedent, but it is not (yet) in place for disaster aid, plus it is architecturally very interesting—this is Web 2.0! We can stop talking about what it could be, and get on a build it!

Software people, architects and engineers, this is a big thing we can do! The idea is here and growing. Become involved. This can make a difference in the lives of those that really need it. And it can make a really big difference in your life, right now by engaging in something really important.

HelpMatch State of Play

Notes on current state and next steps.

HelpMatch Visioning Commentary

From Ruth Malan's Trace in the Sand architecture journal:

• HelpMatch Architecture
• HelpMatch Reason d'Être
• What if Someone Else Creates HelpMatch first?
• Room to Read: Could HelpMatch Help?
• Scaling Personal Networks
• HelpMatch Urgency

From Ruth Malan's Trace in the Sand blog:

• HelpMatch Call to Action
• HelpMatch Scenarios

Please join us in making HelpMatch a reality. Get involved!

"In every life there are a handful of defining moments, junctures at which you and you alone define the person you become. So much of modern literature is an elegy of regret about failing to recognize these moments or lacking the courage to grasp them. John Wood did neither."

Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm

We already have several work orders (sub-projects) that you can sign up to help on right away.

Work-In-Progress

Indianapolis Architects Community Work-In-Progress

Indianapolis Open Enrollment Software Architecture Workshop, September 2006: SAW 20060921

Coming Soon

We are busy creating an interactive way to navigate through the work products created in the Visual Architecting Process™. This work builds on a decade of creating and refining the Visual Architecting Process™, but this web instantiation has only just begun so coverage is going to be patchy for a while. If you just can't wait, the process is fully covered in our Software Architecture Workshops and partially covered in our Software Architecture Action Guide book (we still have a few chapters to go). At any rate, we are putting the Architecture Action Guide™ templates and process guidance on this site, so that architects can use these to contribute to the HelpMatch architecture.

Also coming soon: HelpMatch Architectural Requirements

See Your Contributions Here

You are invited to contribute to the Architecture of HelpMatch. We will organize and post contributions linked from this page. This is a service to mankind. And it is a service to you, when you contribute. With some 1600 visitors to this site each day, you will gain exposure and get feedback.

Changes to this Webpage

Please let Ruth Malan at Bredemeyer Consulting know if you have any suggestions for HelpMatch in general, and for this web page in particular.