What’s your idea?

One Click Organisations takes the hassle out of forming a legal structure for social entrepreneurs. The project’s main deliverable will be a free web service.

All underlying software will be released under an open source licence. Social entrepreneurs needing a legal structure will come to the website, select their organisation’s name, choose from a menu of options (eg how new members are appointed) and click “Go”.

One Click Organisations will take care of the rest; maintaining a constitution, an official register of members and officers plus an electronic platform for proposing and voting on resolutions.

What is the social need or challenge your idea could address?

Every social entrepreneur I’ve ever met reached a point in their project where they needed to set up a legal organisation. Without a recognised legal structure it’s impossible to get a bank account, raise funding, engage with local government or attract partners.

It’s also difficult to grow beyond a handful of team members without a structured way to make collective decisions. Most social entrepreneurs aren’t lawyers so setting up an appropriate legal structure takes time, effort and expense which would be better spent pursuing their primary mission.

Then after the organisation’s set up there’s a continuing administrative effort to call meetings, send out agendas and compile minutes.

One Click Organisations solves this problem by providing a free, simple and hassle-free way to create a legal structure and automatically manage decision-making and record-keeping so social entrepreneurs can focus on what they really care about.

What’s really new about your idea?

As far as I can establish no previous project has set out to automate the formation and governance of legal organisations. There are several initiatives (for instance Mako Hill’s “Selectricity”) providing a piece of the jigsaw but One Click Organisations will be the first to provide a complete platform.

The constitutional model underlying One Click Organisations will be the Themis Constitution developed by CIRCUS Foundation, designed to take advantage of electronic decision-making to simplify governance and administration. The Themis Constitution is an example of emergent democracy.

Users of One Click Organisations won’t need to know anything about this though. From their point of view the system will simply work without them having to worry about the theory!

What inspired you to come up with your idea in the first place?

My experiences working with the School for Social Entrepreneurs during 1998-2003 made me realise what a burden legal bureaucracy represented for social entrepreneurs at the early stages of their projects.

At Foo Camp in June 2008 I had a late-night conversation with the investor and innovator Joi Ito, who was very interested in emergent democracy.

This inspired me to set up the Themis Project with CIRCUS foundation and commence a series of workshop exploring innovation in democratic systems. The idea of One Click Organisations emerged from discussions at these workshops.

From 1-5, what stage of development would you say your idea was in?

3 – The idea is clearly worked out, half a dozen contributors have expressed interest in helping take it forward, some relevant technologies have been identified but no specifications have yet been written.

Social Innovation Camp will be an ideal environment to kick-start the project. Ideally we’ll need a UX designer, a couple of software engineers, a project manager, someone with legal expertise and a non-technical social entrepreneur to guide the project from a user perspective.

By the end of Social Innovation Camp we would aim to have a functioning prototype that can start being used in a pilot project.

What can we do for you?

This project needs a geek, followed by a funder and then a mentor.

If Social Innovation Camp is able to help push your idea forward, do you have the time or desire to take ownership of it?

I will be able to continue leading development of One Click Organisations as a CIRCUS foundation project. If funding is secured it’ll be possible to engage a part-time project manager to increase momentum on the project.

This idea was submitted by Charles Armstrong.

Charles is the CEO of a business called Trampoline Systems developing software that understands large complex organisations.