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iSPIRT’s Second Open House on Balloon Volunteering

We had our second Open House session on Balloon Volunteering on 14th December over Zoom Conference. Do watch the session video to decide if you would like to explore volunteering with iSPIRT.

Till recently, all our new volunteers (aka Balloon Volunteers) came in through referrals from existing volunteers. Eight weeks back, on 20th Sep, we experimented with an open process in the first Open House session (https://pn.ispirt.in/balloon-volunteering).

We explained the process of Balloon Volunteering and shared a few volunteer challenges. Dozens of people registered. We spoke to each of them and worked with them on the next steps. Three applicants have been accepted as Balloon Volunteers so far. This has given us the confidence to go further in opening up our Balloon Volunteering process.

As you know, iSPIRT is a mission-based non-profit technology think tank. In this second Open House session, we talk about this mission so that you can ask yourself if our cause and theory of change animates you. To understand what volunteers do and how they work, you can read our Volunteer Handbook and Playground Coda. Pointers to these documents are on our new Volunteering page https://volunteers.ispirt.in

If our mission motivates you and volunteering is your passion, see if one of the open volunteering challenges resonates with you. You can then apply using one of the forms on the webpage.

However, keep in mind, volunteering is not for everybody. So, don’t be disheartened if you aren’t able to become a Balloon Volunteer right now. All of us grow with time. Volunteering may be the right thing for you a few years down the line. iSPIRT sticks with hard problems for 20-30 years, so you can be sure that there will be many volunteer opportunities in the future!

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2017 iSPIRT Annual Letter

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Problem solvers, responsible builders of companies, communities and ecosystems are the foundation for progress and growth of any nation. What drives all of them is a sense of challenge, ownership of problems, allegiance to autonomy, demonstration of personal accountability and the thrill of finding a solution. This energy is fueling a growing product movement in India. iSPIRT is proud to be part of this movement.

Every movement sees itself as a moral enterprise. Our moral imperative is to help lift India out of poverty over the next 20 years (see 2016 Annual Letter). Technology platforms are powering this ambition. These technology platforms have a significant role to play in driving innovation everywhere. Where India stands apart is that it has carefully thought about digital colonization and has boldly decided that its core technology platforms will be public goods.

Since our public technology platforms are open-access, we expect both Indian and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to participate in building solutions for India’s hard problems. Thus, Indian entrepreneurs will compete with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs not just in the US market, but in the Indian market as well. This inevitable competition will play out in the context of the maturity of the two ecosystems. Hence, unless we develop the Indian technology ecosystem rapidly, our Indian entrepreneurs will not succeed. iSPIRT brings an intensity to building our technology ecosystem that an entrepreneur displays for building her startup.

Four years on, there has been good progress but there is much more to do. We believe that Silicon Valley does an admirable job of innovating for the first billion. India has the potential to innovate for the next six billion.

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Presenting the iSPIRT Governing Framework

It has been a great, great year here at iSPIRT, and though we have a long way yet to go, we are confident that we are well on our way to get to where we want to be.

After all, well begun is half done.

But then, there is also the question of structure, not unlike the problem entrepreneurs face they have to scale their business – when the organization becomes big and responsibilities fragment and become more focussed, what if the core values get diluted?

This is why principles are important, and since we started with an ideal we wanted to reach, we have distilled it into three governing principles , which are –

  1. Radical transparency
    This is crucial to continued operation of our ‘peer production’ (volunteer) model.
  2. Polycentric governance aka Panchayat system
    Which means that SPIRT is bigger than any one individual.
  3. Open-Access Public Goods
    We work for many and not for any one company, no matter how important it might be.

The Governing Council (GC) is responsible for upholding these governing principles and ensuring integrity across the board. The GC is about empowerment, not control. It helps clarify the causes and initiatives that we pursue. It is responsible to the SPI at large and not to donors. Our inspiration comes from the world of Wikipedia and Linux.  It’s a world where people are organized but there is no traditional organization; disputes are resolved and order prevails but there is no single person in control.

In the GC, we have a clear conception of the long-term outcomes that we seek. Today SPI is not even an identified industry. We seek to change this. As we argued in the 2012 iSPIRT Annual Letter, India’s future depends on a vibrant software product industry.

To accelerate the growth of SPI we seek a healthier power-law distribution of big and small firms. Our focus on market catalysts like M&A Connect, Global CIO Connect (InTech50) and Software Adoption Initiative are geared to help companies scale faster. In keeping with the global practice, we measure ecosystem’s success in terms of market capitalization, not revenues. We hope to overtake Israel in number and value of M&A deals in the coming years.

The Governing Council is going to champion three causes in this regard –

  1. Solve market coordination failures (e.g. through M&A Connect Program),
  2. Influencing policy,
  3. Synthesizing and evangelizing playbook for faster success.

We recognize that these aren’t everyday tasks. And iSPIRT is just getting started. With our almost audacious mission of transforming India at large through use of software products, we know this is a marathon, not a sprint.

This governing framework that we are sharing with you has evolved from numerous discussions and conversations with our Founder Circle members, Fellows, Mavens and Saarthis over the last many months.  By placing this in the public domain, we once again commit ourselves to building a durable Think Tank that’ll turn India into a Product Nation.

Bharat Goenka (Tally Solutions), Jay Pullur (Pramati Technologies), Naveen Tewari (InMobi), Sharad Sharma (BrandSigma), Vishnu Dusad (Nucleus Software), Governing Council, iSPIRT Foundation