Google announced last year a philanthropic effort it called Project 10 to the 100. (10 to the 100 calculated out is a googol.) Now it’s time to vote for the idea you’d most like to see established.
The Project has been neutralized a bit from the quite ambitious plan that was announced to the more generalized one now, but Google still hopes to improve the world by dedicating $10 million toward up to 5 of the projects. Along with changing their initial ambitions, the voting phase and announcement of the submitted ideas had also been delayed from January 27th to September 24th.
Project 10^100 accepted idea submissions until Oct. 20th, 2008. Ideas were to be in these categories:
- Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
- Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
- Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
- Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
- Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
- Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
- Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
- Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don’t fit into any category at all.
with this criteria used to determine a “good” idea:
- Reach: How many people would this idea affect?
- Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need?
- Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
- Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea?
- Longevity: How long will the idea’s impact last?
154,000 ideas were submitted and Google has lumped all the ideas into more general themes. Now Google wants you to vote on which of these themes do you want to see enacted the most. What would make the most difference? What would improve your neighborhood, community, nation, or the world?
You can vote on the following ideas:
- Drive innovation in public transport
- Make educational content available online for free
- Build real-time, user-reported news service
- Create more efficient landmine removal programs
- Build better banking tools for everyone
- Collect and organize the world’s urban data
- Work toward socially conscious tax policies
- Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists
For more information about Project 10^100, go straight to the source and watch this YouTube video from Google:
The deadline for voting is October 8th, 2009.
Go Vote for the idea you’d most like to see accomplished.