We spoke with Detroit’s NPR station 101.9 WDET today about Karmagora. For those interested, we thought we’d share the questions they poised and the remarks we had prepared:

Why did you start Karmagora?

Karmagora began as an expanded effort of The Social Philanthropists Foundation, a nonprofit that my colleagues and I started to engage young professionals with local nonprofits. A common issue faced by many today is the challenge of increasingly complex schedules. After being introduced to the concept of “timebanking” (spending an hour performing a service to a community organization and tracking that time online) The SPF discovered a unique way to bridge this gap between scheduling conflicts: create an open environment where people could donate their time around their schedule.  This time could be measured in units of 15 minutes, which we call Karmas, and traded between those needing help and those providing it; a system of trading IOUs, where everyone’s time is the same, regardless of the service provided.

Said another way, people volunteer to help others in their community and then donate their Karmas to an organization who could in-turn use them to receive services for which they might otherwise pay.  By opening the platform to include multiple geographic locations, users and o

pportunities, this concept has evolved as the most efficient one possible.

What does “Karmagora” mean?

Karmagora is a combination of the two words “Karma” and “Agora”.  It is inspired by the principal of exchanging favors, and “good karma” as a currency.  Agora was the heart and central marketplace in ancient Greek and described the open aspect of the online community we were creating.  Say them three-times fast and you get Karmagora.

Who is participating in Karmagora?

Karmagora is a Michigan-based initiative.  All of our research, development, volunteers and employees are here in Michigan.  Since community is such a large part of the success of Karmagora, we’re launching in our hometown of Rochester and expanding to other cities based on interest level.  The city of Rochester has been extremely excited in the concept and its strong sense of community is a perfect model to build from.  Two local nonprofits, Paint A Miracle and Dinosaur Hill Nature Preserve, have asked, along with countless citizens, to participate in the initial testing of the online community.

How does it differ from what is commonly known as timebanking?

Timebanking as it currently functions provides heavy emphasis on immediate neighbors within your city; you must live in that city to participate in that particular time bank and you cannot associate with other timebanks.  Karmagora allows access to talents and skills of all neighbors, near and far, depending on where or what you’re looking for.  This could include help moving furniture from someone across town as well as assistance from someone designing your website that lives in another state.  Timebanking also only allows individuals to access these resources; Karmagora provides civic groups and nonprofits the ability to participate and stretch their hard fundraised dollars even further by allowing volunteers to donate their time indirectly.  This “one-click” mantra removes many of the barriers that prevent people from engaging in helping others and organizations by allowing them to do it around their schedule.  Karmagora also allows for social and group affiliations.  For example, the members of a religious congregation, cause or social group could join the group for that specific institution, help one another and the organization itself, building a stronger membership and sense of community.  Since Karmagora provides such a large scale of benefits, we also provide numerous tools to help frame just who you might be asking help from by providing ratings, reviews and special badges that provide greater context into each person. The degree to which each person makes their profile or skills available is completely customizable, whether you only want to be found by someone in your neighborhood group or available to everyone in the state.

Please give specific examples of services that may be available through Karmagora:

The services are as limitless as those that participate.  Examples range from the most general, such as cooking or mowing a lawn to drafting legal documents or computer programming.  By letting the users determine the skills they offer (within reason and the law of course), this encourages the most diversity in resources and therefore the maximum value possible to those that participate.

Please give specific examples of some collateral benefits that Karmagora will provide:

Some of the most obvious would be building stronger and more self-sufficient communities.  Karmagora also empowers participants and demonstrates that everyone is valuable.  Nonprofits will gain a new and free resource to cultivate their volunteers and become more sustainable by more efficiently engaging the resources in their surrounding communities.  Many non-profits have a tough time managing volunteer resources.  Karmagora provides an efficient platform for this important effort. In a difficult economy and job-market, we’ve also heard that many service-groups plan to use Karmagora as a tool to keep individuals engaged with their community and the skills they posses.  This could also provide college students and new professionals a way to build their professional portfolio and experience while networking within the community – you never know where that next handshake can lead.

Is this a sustainable idea, and if not, what will it take to become sustainable?

Sustainability is a question of revenues meeting or exceeding costs.  This is a dilemma that every organization faces whether for- or not-for-profit.  Soliciting financial donations would directly compete with the non-profits we’re trying to help, and requiring membership dues could impact those that would benefit the most from the community. Instead, Karmagora is a for-profit organization that is free to everyone.  What will make Karmagora sustainable is a unique opportunity for local businesses to advertise online to those in their community or to those that might be interested in their product or services.  A great example would be the local supply store: they have an extremely limited advertising budget and probably don’t advertise online because the breadth of the audience is far too wide.  Through Karmagora, they could request that an ad only appear if someone living in a particular ZIP code was looking for someone to help them with some home improvement projects; a project that the person searching might need to purchase supplies to complete.  The business case for Karmagora comes after the social-good; it’s an example combining the best ideas of two very different worlds.  This provides a unique opportunity for local businesses and ensures that Karmagora is self-sustainable and provides an amazing community resource for free.

While plans for karmagora are vast, we’re focused on building it within our community of Rochester/Rochester Hills first.  That said, we’re also interested in having the citizens, local leadership, businesses and civic organizations help shape it’s development.  That means involving the very people and groups that will use and benefit from karmagora in nearly every aspect; the “built by us, for us” mentality.  We believe that this approach will help build a strong foundation for karmagora to expand and network to other communities.  Perhaps it will even be an example for others to use in their own ventures.

Our first post gathered a lot of attention and we even got the City Manager to sign up!  There will be lots of little updates to keep the community engaged with our progress and it will be interesting to interact with the readers along the way.

Patch.com

Side Note: Patch is an awesome local news website that provides micro-level journalism on the events in your city — check it out!

Although he’s still tweaking it, he’s made it accessible to everyone for FREE.  This was a theme that carried-on throughout our conversation as I gave him updates on our progress on karmagora.  The sharing of a resource for the communal-good is a building block of the karmagora community and something that most people easy embrace.  It’s something that was ingrained in us from the first time we brought bubble-gum to school: bring enough to share.

Since last June, Morana and Ring have been developing a business plan for a project designed to change the way people help one another. Karmagora is a Web-based, interactive time bank program that allows participants worldwide to deposit and withdraw credits – karmas – that represent 15 minutes of volunteer service each. Karmas are created by service and can be redeemed to receive service.

“This could be a big success,” says Ring, an accounting major from Clawson.

He and Morana, now seniors, invested so much time and energy into the project that they agreed to continue supporting it beyond their internship while founders Rob Ray, SBA (Finance) ’04, and Doug Van Slembrouck, SBA (MIS) ’01, get Karmagora in motion.

Continue reading on the OU website…

The karmagora Team got up bright and early on September 29th to mind meld with other creative minded folks at TEDxDetroit. We had a blast

“The area’s leading creators, catalysts, entrepreneurs, artists, technologists, designers, scientists, thinkers and doers gathered on Wednesday, September 29th to share what they are most passionate about — positive ideas for the world from Detroit.”

TEDx Detroit