Together with colleagues John Cleveland and Pete Plastrik, the founders of two amazing change networks in urban sustainability (John) and social innovation (Pete), I’ve been working on a concept called the Social Innovation Commons.

The project is an answer to an obvious problem: a maze of data and a warren of information stores permeates the field social innovation, rarely crossing myriad organizational boundaries and doubtfully overcoming technology hurdles.  This leaves the change agents, social entrepreneurs, non-profit execs and foundation program managers at a loss for answers to questions as simple as “What has been tried in this sector before? What has worked? What problems have stopped progress in previous attempts? Who are the experienced implementers?”

As Pete writes at the nuPOLIS blog,

“In response, social innovators and philanthropic funders and private investors in social innovations cope in various ways. Those who can afford to, such as organized philanthropies or large nonprofits, undertake costly information searches to develop their strategies and ideas; they fund staff or turn to outside experts to develop the information they need. The rest either engage in low-cost searches, finding what’s easy to find and using, rejecting, or adapting it without much comparative information or analysis, or they patch together a more disciplined and costly search that starts and continues as resources allow, but is slower than desired. In other words, rampant inefficiencies in the information market for social innovation create debilitating costs and low speed of development.”

“This almost unsolvable “information maze” is a universal obstacle to accelerating the development and spread of effective social innovations. In the “age of information” it is a notable breakdown in the field of social innovation, a missing but fundamental “decision-support” capacity for the field’s development.”

Here’s our proposed solution (PDF download). Funders are interested, but they’re not moving quickly.  Want to get involved?