The U.S. National Science Foundation has a novel program called the Convergence Accelerator designed to bring business, non-profits, and universities together to develop important, multi-disciplinary solutions for society. 

Comprised of 12 diverse institutions, our team is one of the pioneers of the C-accel program and is a project of the Spatial Decision Support Consortium. 

Many of our problems have solutions that are social, not technical.  So, our team is creating a system which fuses social learning and tech innovation to change the game for our future. We focus first on collaborative decision-making for regional resilience. It’s hard for people, with current tools, to make big, high-impact decisions together. There are so many people, institutions and jurisdictions that a human brain just can’t track it all. Our work addresses this by integrating 3 technologies: geographic information systems, knowledge graphs for linking and retrieving large scale information, and collaborative workspaces. We use cloud computing,  machine-readable semantics, participatory mapping, machine learning, and collaborative platforms to bring tech and social learning together. 

We have now prototyped key components of our Collaborative Decision Toolbox, and are now looking for investors and partners that want to engage with us for Phase 2.  Phase 2 involves continued work with Phase 1 collaborators, launches in more regions, new collaborative templates and governance, evaluation, and preparation for Phase 3, where we scale the effort to regions nationwide.

If you are interested in investing, or partnering please contact us immediately, and hopefully that will be before our next demonstration.  If you know of anyone that fits this description please send this page along to them. Thank you for your help and interest!

If you are interested in attending the upcoming Expo 2020 on July 1-2, please register here.

Project

Open Knowledge Network

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