Two New Social Investment Initiatives are Launched

Two new social investment initiatives have been launched in the past week, one private and one public. The first is New Media Ventures, the first national network of angel investors focused on creating political change. The second is the federal government's Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, a series of formal "code-a-thons" in which teams of entrepreneurs and software developers compete to build real applications for prize money. The contest was unveiled last week by U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra at the 2010 Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan.

New Media Ventures advisory board member Mike Mathieu, writing in The Huffington Post over the weekend, said the aim of NMV's private fund is to "create real impact" in citizen organizing. "Real impact comes from backing passionate entrepreneurs and helping them build well-functioning organizations around their missions, not just creating innovative Web sites," wrote Mathieu, who has incubated a number of projects in the tech startup space-for-good, including ObamaCTO.org, CountMore.org, and PredatoryLendingAssociation.com. "We saw the power of technology-enabled organizing in the Obama campaign, and I believe that was only the beginning." NMV, launched as an initiative of the Democracy Alliance -- a network of progressive fundraisers -- will provide seed stage funding to new media and tech startups within the progressive community. "We're looking for the ActBlues, the Catalists, the Huffington Posts of the future," Mathieu said.

There is a similar entrepreneurial energy behind the Obama Administration's new Community Health Data Initiative, which Chopra says aims to unleash government health care data into the public sector -- including nutritional information on 30,000 food items now hidden in government bureaucracies. The new Health 2.0 challenge, Chopra says, will provide prize money to software developers and entrepreneurs who aim to use that information and other data to create new public healthcare startups. At the PDF conference on Friday, Chopra demonstrated "Asthmapolis" -- a data platform to help patients and professionals track asthma outbreaks in the population by attaching real-time sensors to asthma inhalers, which record the time and location of its use. Chopra said patients, armed with this information, could avoid asthma hotspots and reduce their visits to the hospital. "We need to unlock the energy that exists and work more collaboratively for the public good," he said.

For more information on the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, go to the contest Web site. New Media Ventures is similarly soliciting proposals from social entrepreneurs.