The Three Musketeers - crowdsourcing, impact & the SDGs.

With this in mind, we need to do what we can to make sure that we allocate whatever money will be raised, where it really helps. Now that might seem trivial, but it is in fact quite complicated to accurately assess the deep, long-term effects that many of these investments will have on the environment and society.

In practice, a large part of these investments will be made through private companies. Actually, almost everything that we produce and consume is made by companies. They are the ones that grow our food, make our medicines, build our infrastructures and develop our technologies. They are the real operating agents of our societies, and they are the ones that will implement on the ground, most of the initiatives related to the Sustainable Development Goals.

It is therefore crucial that we can correctly and thoroughly assess the impact that companies have on each SDG if we want to make sure the investments we make really go in the right direction. Without robust tools to measure impact, we might end-up financing models that create more problems than solutions.

The power of collective intelligence is well known. There is not only considerable academic literature on the mechanisms that allow collective intelligence to over-perform expert-based models; there are also well-known platforms that have proven it’s possible to generate high-quality information by asking potentially anyone to participate. Many scientific research projects have used collective intelligence to collect and even analyse data. This approach known as “Citizen Science” is a good illustration of the level of quality you can get if you gather a large-enough (and diverse-enough) community of participants.