Nominet Trust is UK’s leading social tech funder. Among its objectives are facilitating and investing in the work of people who use digital technology for social change. The trust has been working on a global list that celebrates the work of organizations which find ingenuous uses of technology to change lives. Wikileaks, Bitcoin, M-Pesa, Khan Academy, Arduino and Coursera are some of the projects named in the inaugural Nominet Trust 100 list.
The Nominet Trust 100 (NT100) steering group describes the list as a dynamic public database of social tech innovations globally. By recognizing the work of social entrepreneurs, Nominet Trust hopes to inspire organizations and individuals to follow in the footsteps of social technology pioneers.
“In seeking people who are coming up with creative answers to the big issues of our times, we were bowled over by the scale of the response with hundreds of nominations from all over the world. But the NT 100 is not a definitive, final list – it’s the foundation for a dynamic resource that will inspire and inform other social entrepreneurs,” says Annika Small, CEO of Nominet Trust.
Key themes in creating the list included use of digital technology to open up access to healthcare and education; use of community tools to empower citizens in challenging traditional power structures and imaginative uses of digital technology in addressing the effects of climate change.
Leading projects which have made the list include Witness, founded to combat human rights abuses through online videos; Kickstarter – the crowd-funding platform through which creative projects have secured $850m; Creative Commons which provides a straightforward licensing framework for online creators; and Cell Slider – a crowd-sourcing platform which helps in fighting cancer through the classification of millions of samples of cancer cells.
