A Digital Framework for Fellowships

Fellownies was created in the summer of 2005 by Carlos Miranda Levy, a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University upon finishing his 2004-2005 fellowship with the strong belief that Human Development Fellowships could have a much bigger impact on social entrepreneurs and society worldwide, beyond their current successful impact through the specific projects developed by the fellows.

The discussions, visions, ideas, insights, opinions, field research, speakers and the lessons learned could serve a larger public and the fellowships and their fellows have a great potential of becoming the center of attention of the social entrepreneurship world today.

It is not more structure that the fellowships need, but rather a framework upon which fellows, their projects and ideas, and the fellowships themself can build larger things, have more and better connections and do more during the time of their fellowships and afterwards.

Our goal is to empower fellowships around the world and put their fellows and projects in the spotlight through enabling an interactive community and a valuable knowledge base.

Key elements to acomplish this are the ability to:

• share information and resources (articles, opinions, web links, events, etc.),
• publish information directly on this virtual environment,
• comment any content published,
• freely customize and update each member's profile,
• allow direct contact with fellows and other people,
• enable open spaces for discussion,
• track each user's participation,
• create special interest groups or task forces,
• restrict access to sensitive information, documents and resources and enable open access to all other.

Of special interest for the fellows is the ability to:

• request and offer collaboration,
• directly publish and update projects information and status,
• publish and share notes and files on seminars and meetings,
• have easy and organized access to the knowledge base and repository and easily contribute to it.

As a new plattform for fellows, social entrepreneurs and human development stakeholders, Fellownies will continue to grow and improve in functionality, features and services, content and flexibility, as we monitor usage, sugestions are made and needs or advantages are identified.

We have also set up Devopedia, a wiki (open encyclopedia) for sharing concepts and ides at http://www.devopedia.com

The first Fellownies pilot was implemented with the 2006 Digital Vision Fellows, which provided genuine and practical feedback on terms of usability, relevance and value of the tools and features enabled. Special and valuable input and guidance was received from the Digital Vision program director, Stuart Gannes and Karen Coppock, in charge of the DVP Public Relations.

Do send us your comments and suggestions to improve the plattform site and add features to it.

Feel free to participate and become a part of our virtual community with your ideas and projects.

Fellownies is also available as an independent, multilingual, flexible platform that can be customized and deployed for fellowship programs, including all the features, special content, installation, customization, hosting, training and support. So if you'd like to have your own version of Fellownies for your fellowship program, contact us today.