#prototype fund

We are excited and humbled to be included in the latest cohort of Knight Foundation Prototype Fund awardees!

Our project is the Neighborhood Drawing Tool, a web application that will help activists, planners, students, and others find information and crowdsource popular knowledge about their neighborhoods. The tool will aggregate data based on user-defined neighborhood boundaries.

Our goal is to build a working prototype so that users can pull the data they need at the geography they want, easily and quickly. That way they can spend more time using the data to advocate for change in their neighborhood or to inform discussion at a public meeting.

We're excited to announce that One Degree received support from the Knight Foundation through the Prototype Fund.

The $35,000 in grant funding will help us understand how best to serve low-income families, how to improve our platform, and how to scale our solution beyond the Bay Area. The ideal outcome of this partnership with the Knight Foundation is to provide a proof of concept that will propel us to serve more families.

With the Knight Foundation's support, we are figuring out how low-income families are looking for social services and the best ways to deliver this kind of information to them. We posit that by giving people not just information that is most relevant and useful for them, but action-oriented 'next steps', we can reduce the cognitive stress of wading through the ocean of social service information. For example, a user searching for housing assistance via One Degree would be met with a list of action-oriented items that fit with their profile, needs, and eligibility. Rather than just a list of nonprofit names, we would present: “Set up a one-on-one meeting with an affordable housing coach,” “Take an affordable housing workshop to learn about different options,” and “Sign up for waiting lists for XYZ housing.”

We traveled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania last month to attend the Knight Foundation's Design Workshop at the Luma Institute. Armed with new tools in human-centered design, we're approaching our hypothesis with rigor and thoughtful analysis. We've already used the human-centered design tools to plan out our user recruitment strategy and to learn from current users.

The Knight Foundation’s experience with open government strategies and community innovation uniquely position it to be a great adviser and partner for One Degree. Ultimately, we are values-aligned in wanting to create a more functional, transparent, and efficient social service system that aids in the discovery of social services.

Thank you, Knight Foundation!

Read the official press release from the Knight Foundation here and blog post here.

Eric, One Degree's CTO, conducting a user interview at SF Public Library.