Ask HN: Who'se running a nonprofit here?
Are there any nonprofit projects you're working on? What are you struggling with the most?
Most nonprofits are actually struggling with the same thing businesses are: How do they use resources effectively? How can they take in more cash than they spend? How can they decide what services to offer? Nonprofits are more like businesses than most people think: http://seliger.com/2012/09/02/why-nonprofits-are-more-like-b...
One key difference in many respects is that businesses have customers or clients while nonprofits' principle customers or clients are actually funders, rather than service recipients, and that can create some odd incentives and behavior.
This year we registered on HackaDay[1] for a early heart failure (HF) detector. Most aging adult suffers from HF, sometimes as early as when they are in their forties.
Our design is good, the gold standard here is the Physionet 2016 competition, Physionet 2016 competitors mostly used machine learning on file wide features such as the heart rate and its variability. We choose to find features in heart sounds, there are up to four sounds per beat. The code is on Github. The project on HaD will be declared finished in September or October.
We will have huge problems when we will reach the point of trying to obtain a regulator agreement (EC/FDA). It needs to make travels, provide samples, make clinical studies, rise awareness. Lot of problems that we are not equipped to manage.
If we succeed at this there are other R&D projects in the pipeline, to keep us busy.
[0] https://padiracinnovation.org/
[1] https://hackaday.io/project/19685-early-and-low-cost-detecti...
There was another Kaggle competition on lung cancer that recently finished up, and the winner shared their code.
Is your plan to take things like this and put them through the required red tape?
What are you doing to raise funds?
We did not try to raise funds, it was difficult when there was nothing concrete to show. But now we can show a simple app that can classify a heart sound as normal or not. For example in [0] there is a ultra simple app (one button!) that classified my heart sounds as not normal, in less than one second.
I am thinking about making a kickstarter in December or next January to rise awareness about the detector and to raise some money.
[0] https://padiracinnovationdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/...
I run Security First (https://www.secfirst.org). We are talking the issue of how to help make security learning and management easier for people at risk - NGOs, journalists, aid workers etc.
We've built a mobile app called Umbrella that puts best practice digital and physical security advice in the one place.
We also train and consult on various security issues for other organisations.
We are always looking for more help - technical, UI/UX, copywriting, dev (and funding of course).
Struggling with the most is the industry in general. From banking, to landlords, to police, vendors, paying employees, and everything in between. It's a really interesting business full of awesome problems to tackle and there's never a dull moment, but it's definitely a challenge.
I'm CPO/CTO/CMO at GlobalGiving. I know there are other members of CTOs for Good lurking here (https://www.ctosforgood.org/), but I'll let them call themselves out.
Tough fight. Politically complex.
EDIT: capital formation much murkier than in startup world, regulations, etc