A digital hub for actors, initiatives, and practices

The International Platform for Social Progress promotes and upscales the best social progress initiatives worldwide.The platform will feature a database of initiatives and actors in order to provide an indexed, intersectoral and international database of changemaking project holders, organizations, networks and communities (with links and contacts). It will help identify the most active organizations, networks and communities, notably those that are new, smaller, less visible or more remote than other well-identified and recognized actors.

The platform will help matchmaking organizations with similar and/or complementary agendas. Registered actors will receive notification of possible matches for collaborations/ collaborative actions with relevant organizations.The platform will provide a mobilization tool to facilitate the emergence of coalitions of actors. The platform will help connect actors (and empower those who may have less international visibility/recognition) into the proactive construction of agile international initiatives to address social progress at various relevant scales.

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High standards of accessibility

The goal is to make it simple for contributors to upload their material, and for users to locate topics and contents. The platform incorporates the following standards :

  • Interactive, multilingual and free of charge
  • Fed by a participative production process open to all local, national and transnational initiative and project leaders, whether associative, private or public
  • Easy to use, thanks to precise referencing
  • Appraised by analysts appointed by the working groups.

Registration on the platform will be open to all. Each contributor will fill in a registration form (one per initiative). There will be three options for material collection :

  • Invited contributors, entrepreneurs, communities, grass-root organizations, networks, scholars, funders, philanthropists, policymakers upload their material, and edit them projects develop/evolve/terminate.
  • Collaborations with existing sectoral/thematic/regional existing online databases and repositories to develop an API to transfer data.
  • Human/AI-assisted recuperation and adaptation of existing data with individual contacting of contributors.

A special attention will be given to areas of action less represented in order to showcase a strong mix of contents covering the key dimensions of the social progress agenda. The platform will be available in several languages (English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Portuguese, Swahili, and Russian). Adequate software will help transform speech in video into text, translate available texts, and index the contents in the proposed languages.

Each uploaded initiative will get an ID and a timestamp to signal activity and to enhance their visibility. Contributors will be given encrypted access token to enable anonymous authentication and ePR compliance (no cookies). The IT system is  open-source and GDPR compliant.

Benefits to contributors to the platform

  • Email alerts about new initiatives/actors matching their profile (self-defined during the registration phase)
  • Comments by IPSP reviewers on their projects and/or on resources/ contacts of interest related to their activities
  • Direct interaction with other contributors through authenticated access (no individual email address will be publicly accessible)
  • Visibility gains when flagged by IPSP reviewers: (a) being featured prominently on the website, (b) receive assistance or funding to upgrade presentations, (c) being invited to present at IPSP events, etc.
  • Placing calls for collaborations on topics of interest to mobilize complementary expertise.

Benefits to the users

  • The platform will constitute an edited directory searchable with full text, structured indexes, and maps. It will be unique in its combination of content openness, expert assessment and user-friendliness.
  • As entries in the platform will be linked according to the tags their contributors have selected, users reading the description of one initiative will find links to related entries.
  • When a sufficient number of entries will be similar or cross-related, the Secretariat will produce an introductory page summarizing the common features and the specificities of these entries. These pages will eventually help form a web encyclopedia of social progress.

The initiatives flagged by the decentralized expert community will provide a valuable material for IPSP teams as they will develop their work on priority themes. They will benefit from an enlarged and diversified pool of cases and examples, with the possibility to obtain new empirical evidence, to draw sharper conclusions and recommendations as well as to develop new impactful narratives.