Due Wednesday, April 24
In the social issue that you have chosen to address, describe in detail (2 pages) the technology that you will be implementing (e.g. the estimated cost, maintenance, complexity, etc.). In your response, be sure to answer the following questions: "Is the technology feasible?" and "What are the risks of failure associated with the technology?" As always, include complete citations when drawing from your sources.

Due Wednesday, April 16
Write a 2-page essay in which you choose a social issue and propose a project that utilizes technology to address it. Just as in Essay 1, be sure to include citations on where you found your information. Answer the ALL following questions completely in the course of your essay:

• What social problem are you solving & how are you solving it?
• What is the magnitude of this problem? Be specific.
• How will you evaluate progress/success? Think metrics.
• What strategies have people been/are pursuing with regard to this social issue?
• Have they been successful? Why or why not?
• Who would be affected by a project addressing this social issue?
• What are the risks of failure, in broad terms?

Essay 2 Example– See examples from last year (concentrate on Social and Background sections of "Finalist" projects) here
What social problem are you solving?
Global warming is the most pressing issues of the 21st century, capable of causing worldwide environmental changes that would result in countless negative effects – from rise in ocean levels to drastic changes in the worldwide agricultural economy. Currently, building practices in the U.S. emit a great deal of the “greenhouse gases” that are acknowledged to be the leading cause of global warming. Our project strives to demonstrate that such environmentally degrading practices are outmoded, unnecessary, and economically suboptimal.

What is the magnitude of this problem?
Residential and commercial buildings are major contributors to carbon dioxide emissions. “According to the Energy Information Agency 2005 Executive Summary, the residential sector actually contributed 1213.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide” to the environment in 2004. [EIA] Moreover, figures in the U.S. from the U.S. Green Building Council show that U.S. buildings account for: 36% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, 136 million tons of waste output annually, and 36% of total energy use.

How will you evaluate progress/success?
Success in our Eco-Friendly Communities will be evaluated on the demand for the amount of units, revenue, the ability to lower the costs of implementing similar developments, and a change in social norms regarding sustainable living.

What strategies have people been/are pursing with regard to this social issue?
etc., etc.

Citations (Please be more detailed in your citations, e.g. using MLA or any other formal citation method)
[EIA]: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605 /ggrpt/pdf/executive_summary.pdf

Write a 1-2page essay on which issues are the most important to address for you personally. You can include big world issues like poverty or you can take modern US issues like crime and unemployment. However, you should make a well-reasoned argument that shows that you did some reading, and put some thought, rather than just BSed based on the general impression you have from mass-media consumption. You should include what metric you are using to frame your discussion:

• Should we count human lives saved?
• The number of parties held on the beach?
• Dollars earned? or what?

Then, according to your metric, rank your top 5 issues. You will certainly want to go see what other people have thought about this previously. Have other people come up with these lists? Were they the same as yours? If you are counting metric of 'beach parties', then how did you find out that 'trash on the beach' is the #1 issue, resulting in 80% of all canceled parties, did you have a reference for that? You'll note that you haven't been given any readings on this yet. You'll have to do a little web searching to come up with some numbers or notes to back up your ordering. Its important that you can compare issues according to something quantifiable. Every problem is "a really big problem that needs attention". The point of this exercise is to compare somehow.

Using money as a metric for human happiness, we can classify issues according to their effect on lost money. Unsafe drinking water accounts for US$800 gazillion in lost revenue yearly [Banker00]. On the other hand use of low tech farming methods only results in lost US$400 gazillion in lost revenue [Farmer04]. The world issues web ranks similar issues and finds that cow dung is the biggest problem, resulting in US$900 gazillion in lost revenue while people clean their feet [Dung07].

[Banker00] Joe Banker, "World Issues as a function of GDP", Journal of Rich Fat Cats, v13.9, Nov 2000.
[Farmer04] Pradeep Farmer, "Land use in central asia", Journal of Plants, v2.14, p35-49, Jan 2004.
[Dung07] http://worldissues.net/cowdung.html

Summary
· What are you going to do?

Social
• What social problem are you solving?
• What is the magnitude of this problem? (Quantify).
• How will you evaluate progress/success? (Quantifiably )
• What is your expected social return? (How much success in quantifiable units?)

Background
• What have people done with regard to this social issue already?
• If anyone is pursuing a similar strategy, have they been successful? (Quantify past success or failure of similar plans )
• Why are existing methods not solving the problem?
• Who is the “customer” in terms of the social good you are providing?
• Do the people you are serving think this project is a good idea? (Go ask them and provide evidence that they think so. )
• What are the risks of failure?

Economics
• What sustainable business are you running? (Who are you selling what to? )
• How big is your expected market? (If you controlled all of the customers, how much could you make? )
• Who makes money in this market right now? (How will you compete against prior business X? )
• Who is your economic “customer”? (Who is handing you $$? )
• How do you plan to reach this customer? • What are your costs associated with doing business? (Do a breakdown of revenue vs costs, and show that it is positive. )
• What are the risks of failure?

Technology
• Is the technology feasible? (provide citations/evidence/letters-from-experts if there is any question)
• What are the risks of failure associated with the technology?

Resource Requirements
• What resources do you need? (startup capital, contacts, information, technology inventions, anything that you don’t have right now.)
• How long will these resources last? (Especially in the case of money, how long until you run out of startup funds and need to be making money? )
• If you had $5000 (or whatever you need) to start, how would it be spent?

Team
List team members by name and any background which is relevant

Objections
• What are the objections?
• (list each objection with an answer) Objections could be tech, econ, social or anything


Timeline of due dates:
It is always ok to be ahead of the game. If you have a complete proposal by the first abstract deadline, then you have nothing to do for the next couple weeks. However to make sure that people are making progress and thinking about their proposals, I’ve imposed some arbitrary checkpoints which will be graded. Its fine to change your proposal at any point. If you realize its not going to work and you need to change plan, then change. However by each checkpoint we want to see all the information that should be done by that checkpoint. You don't need to turn in any paper for these checkpoints. We will grade from your online project.

5/7 Project Abstract – You should create a new topic in the forums for your project. The first post in the thread is your project. When you edit your proposal, you will edit this post. All the responses will come after it. For this checkpoint, you must have at least a team and an abstract.

5/9 Project Rough Proposal – Edit your prior post to be a complete draft of your idea. This should show that you’ve thought a little about all the sections of the proposal, but its fine if you don’t have solid numbers or references yet. The reader should however be able to get the general idea of where your proposal is going and how its going to work.

5/14 Social/Background Sections – Fill in the details of the social and background sections. They should now have solid facts.

5/19 Technology/Economics Sections – Fill in the details of the technology and economics sections. They should now have solid facts.

5/23 Full Proposal Due – Ideally you have little to do for this checkpoint, since you completed all the sections previously, however there are likely interdependencies that you will want to clean up to make the whole proposal more consistent or better argued.

5/28 Project comments – You don’t have a forum assignment during this week because you instead should read 5 of your classmates projects and respond to their forum telling them things you think need improvement. Do not be mean, but do be critical. Ideas improve under the harsh light of reality, so its fine to say “I think this will never work because of X”. You should have at least one post on each project you read. In addition, rank the 5 proposals you read from best (1) to worst (5). Include the ranking in your post.

5/30 Project comments - For the same 5 projects you already read, now post constructive suggestions for how they can improve their projects. By this point every project has gotten a lot of criticism, so there are plenty of areas that you could make suggestions of how to fix.

6/6 Full Proposal Version 2 – You have a bunch of feedback from classmates. Improve your proposal. Fix holes in your argument. Address criticism.