Grant writing in America

I have posted before about my mental healthcare app idea but I also want to mention; I think if holochain can pull everything off they can get Government contracts, at the very least at the county level! Its not that difficult to get grants and contracts with a good product to show.

I live in America and have some grant writing experience as well as some basic Government systems experience. I did my masters program (two years) focused around Government work and honestly if holochain and its peeps need anyone to help with grant writing, finding resources or anything similar I would like to offer my services in any way possible.

I have been looking a lot into seed funding and I think holo will change the world in time. I believe it would qualify.

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…and I replied! :wink:

Holochain is just code, it doesn’t “pull” anything off, but it does allow people to leverage it in order to transform the potential into the virtual and hopefully the real!

Sounds promising! I helped Brighton Council migrate to Open Source ten years ago, first helping to onboard them to how the community works, doing a pilot project with them, resourcing and introducing them to the local community. That was with the Drupal CMS/platform. I was asked to quote for further councils but every time I was ‘beaten’ by companies which had grown as the project grew but for many reasons I prefer to remain interdependent - not least that you end up selling inappropriately due to having wages to pay whereas I connect the appropriate resources for the project in hand. Anyway now here in the UK you can’t even bid for anything unless you’re a ‘proper’ company and on this system of theirs, and I haven’t ever teamed up with anyone and my excuse for that is I discovered recently I’m ADHD and Autistic (more specifically PDA - that’s me saying the line ‘misunderstood’ on the 1min intro video!) and really not good at things like it sounds you are good at and so far haven’t co-operated with anyone like yourself to do that hence why I’m replying here.

Oh, and I also helped the New Zealand prisons teach women prisoners a tradeable skill - weaving, that project won a New Zealand Open Source Award (OK, so I submitted the nomination because I thought it was an awesome project by awesome people but the project still won and I cried when the whole Hetet turned up and did their Haka dance in the middle of the award ceremonies!).

Awesome - you said previously about your project, do you have any more info on that? It sounds very similar to what I’m trying to achieve in terms of connecting people with the appropriate resources.

On your previous post @Brooks mentioned someone called Steve Melville who previously worked on Holo Health. I did a quick google and found a Steve Melville on LinkedIn so just messaged him to ask if he is one and the same as from the looks of his project his thinking is very much along the same lines as mine in terms of technology approach - patient (i.e. agent) centred as opposed to clinic-centred.

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I am also involved in a project at uni about mental healthcare. We developed a simple service which allows students across universities to support each other in difficult times. The community helps each other. There is a real need for this (enforced by Covid) and the demand is growing a lot. I was thinking as well to integrate Holo there at some point. Always happy to exchange thoughts and to work together.
I see Stephen likes it as well.

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I am diagnosed with ADHD and suspect I might be autistic as well, but I do not have a formal diagnosis in regards to ASD.
Essentially here in America and now in Canada they have a resource line called 211. People call in when they need help and representatives connect them to their local supports. My goal would be to connect users with resources using an AI system that uses their demographic information. SO many resources are specific to certain individuals such as jewish scholarships or woman business grants ect… so I think it would revolutionize the market to provide services that are specific to each user. The entire resource industry is lacking heavily.

I am leaning toward this being marketed toward the social services industry though as a way for social workers, doctors, counselors and even police officers to connect clients with community resources in a fast and pratical way. It could be an app offices can add resources to as they learn about them and also scrape data already available online using databases from counties ect…

Also I woke up dizzy with vertigo so I apologize if my spelling is off or anything.

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@litioncoin @EpicThunderCat

Here’s the thing.

Holochain offers the opportunity to develop applications that simply couldn’t have existed before, with the additional benefits of being decentralised and distributed.

99.99% of the concepts and ideas people come up with that they want to build on Holochain are based on improving the problems caused by the current system.

By solving problems caused by the current system, we are not solving the root cause of the problem and instead are actually reinforcing the current system, embedding it even deeper.

The problem is it is relatively easy to see how to utilise something in an incremental step, both from a development and a marketing point of view. It is a little harder to develop something new, and the marketing process is also more complicated as it requires more education.

Taking this to a real-world example, yes we could make it easier for people to connect with others for mutual support, and with ‘officials’, and the result would be hopefully a lot better than the current system. But then what we have created with our time and effort is a system that supports the notion of these dis-eases and by its very nature requires the persistence of them in order to be sustainable.

So the question I ask is what is the bigger opportunity here, because the effort to build anew on Holochain is not one I want to waste on creating faster horses :racehorse:

The reason I decided to support the Drupal project for almost 20 years was because of the modularity of its code and that the code was built only because someone had a need for it, unlike the proprietary software industry where it is built in order to sell you the next version. This meant over the years generic modules were exposed to many different real world situations and have been refined to a point where you can now build 95% of pretty much anything you want to for free in a very short space of time; of course the last 5% is the most expensive and time consuming but that’s the 5% of functionality that’s specific to your particular business model, and ideally you would share as much as you can of that with others in your industry as for example those in the media publishing industry have done by creating their own distributions, much like GNU/Linux does.

This should’ve meant that we would be living in a world now where you could say start up a beauty salon and there would be a distro specific to your business model, available as perhaps OpenSAAS so you wouldn’t have to worry about developing your own code because you’re a beauty therapist not a software developer. What did happen though is business saw money to be made, with extremely low source material costs, perhaps offering pizza and beers to those who decide to give up their own time in order to fix incredibly complicated software code issues. At the same time it is not necessarily business savvy to spend any money on making it easier for people to use when you are selling them the other hours of these developers lives when they’re not eating “free” pizza.

Those developers might end up getting depressed and wanting to connect with others for mutual support or with a mental health ‘professional’. Whether not on the blockchain, on the blockchain, or on Holochain, I’d much prefer it if people didn’t have the need to connect with these people in the first place. That said, of course I still want a system where that can happen, and in a better way than it is done today.

So, to finally get to the point of today’s prose, I have been pondering where my focus should be as I have been on a mission for many years to solve problems like this where for example we have lots of WordPress sites for beauty therapists with a thousand different calendar booking plugins and commerce carts that don’t work together and thus a fragmented field due to the fact that nobody is going to say no to selling more of their hours to do what they do and it seems, at least currently it does, that Holochain provides this opportunity as not only is the hosting shared but the way applications are being developed and distributed it gives me a little more hope we can build this more utopian view of the future I have where we write even less code because at the moment lots of code is being written, and mostly it seems by those who shouldn’t be writing code :wink:

My first ‘vision’ in 2005 was to create spaces IRL which would provide support for collaboration amongst people and code:

However, especially given events of the past year, I believe similar and even better can be achieved by combining Holochain with the collective intelligence meta language IEML in order to create ‘holo.press’, the equivalent of the printing press for the holographic universe.

I started a thread Collective Intelligence with Holochain + IEML - Information Economy Meta Language for this, what I really need is help moulding it into something actionable that people can start getting involved in. First would be strategising development because whilst what interested me in replying to both of your posts was the shared areas of interest but also the route to market, however I believe it is the skills an expertise of both of you that could help by starting to build better. That doesn’t mean what you suggest can’t be built, it could be that is the first stage as it provides a funded way forward, the trouble I’ve seen is that funding always comes with strings attached. So it could be that a white paper is something that needs to be written first, and although I can type type type like this, I am stuck at developing my ‘real’ stuff hence reaching out here. Because if I could say “hey I’m feeling like this” and instantly be connected with supporting resources tailored with the knowledge of a lot more of my life than just that question, and that data be sourced from me and owned and controlled by me as opposed to some corporate AI system’s assumptions about me then that would be truly revolutionary.

Stephen’s Sunday rant endith :wink:

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Well, almost… I always press send, then re-read it again as I did before pressing send but of course this time is the time I realise I missed out what I think is a major point of my reply and this time it’s the business model - encoding in holo.press means even better connection matching between ‘consumer’ and ‘supplier’ so if I were to talk in capitalistic fashion, the opportunity would be described as ‘huge’. I’ve always believed the model to be a %age of sales, that ensures the focus on development is aligned with the focus of the people using the product or service, otherwise it’s to sell more subscriptions or whatever. By always providing the ‘bleeding edge’ you’re working towards brand loyalty, as they know all funds are going to improve the thing they’re paying for.

(That’s discussing a service built on holo.press as I see having holo.press as a communications layer for collective intelligence)

Hi Stephen, sorry for the late response, didn’t have much time over the last days, but I really like to read your posts. I share your view and agree that a lot of projects trying to build on problems caused by the current system. In order that such business models can exist and be profitable over time, they need the problems to permanently exist. In some cases though there is no other way as we would be worse off not having tackled such problems and if there is a new, better and more efficient way to do it, why not. This in response to your statement: “But then what we have created with our time and effort is a system that supports the notion of these dis-eases and by its very nature requires the persistence of them in order to be sustainable.” Of course you can say that the root of the problem has to be resolved but sometimes it’s A) not possible at all B) not possible with technology. I.e. there is nothing that can prevent stress from occurring in human beings, the root problem will always persist. However, implementation of smart technological solutions in order to improve how we access, interact and deal with information (overload) and other human beings can help to reduce stress and even remove it.

This brings me to your other though about what do we want to build and where is the bigger opportunity we want to spend time on and how do we build the new Horse (and not just the faster one). I totally agree with your point that with Holochain we have NOW the huge opportunity to build distributed applications which become part of a new way how we collaborate and interact with each other. I think the main drivers for certain projects, just making quick money, will never disappear but will become less attractive and the focus will be more on solving real problems and to create innovation. (with less code as you said ( :slight_smile: ). For that we need adaption though. Holochain value proposition I believe is very strong and has the potential to scale.

I think what you mention here…
“Because if I could say “hey I’m feeling like this” and instantly be connected with supporting resources tailored with the knowledge of a lot more of my life than just that question, and that data be sourced from me and owned and controlled by me as opposed to some corporate AI system’s assumptions about me then that would be truly revolutionary.”
…totally agre, and in combination with true incentive mechanisms (not just short term) it is even more powerful and revolutionary. :slight_smile:

You mention a funded way comes with troubles. What alternatives do you see?
As my vision and goal is to build something revolutionary on Holochain, and I read that you share the same, I am interested to collaborate and to discuss in more detail. My background is more on business than development side.

Have a good Sunday!

Best,

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H @litioncoin - no worries about timing, I’ve been following the https://metacurrency.org/ project for years and don’t expect world-changing things to happen at any speed slower or faster than they will :wink:

I am about to begin my twice-weekly at least two hour salad making process - before I spend my energy on a reply one thing is still bugging me…

…so it’s nothing to do with:
https://twitter.com/Lition_Block

https://www.lition.io/

?

If not, then why on earth would you want to keep the name? If you did create anything with it you wouldn’t be able to use it due to it already being used surely? And if it is then it would be good to share more relevant info too wider than “we’re a bunch of students” as I’m sure you will understand. Either way it’s no problem, I just like, as you probably have gathered, being open :wink:

cheers!

sbp