Team Four: Idealized Design

Assignment: Synthesis – Idealized Network Design

Once everyone on your team has shared his or her thoughts, please prepare a synthesis of your individual work that incorporates the key points from each member of your team by creating a ‘model’ of the ideal network.

You might consider the following questions:

• What is the optimal structure that would represent all the needs of the IDA field?
• What is the experience of this network for each of its users?
• What impact does it have on the field itself? On society?
• What services and products does it provide?
• What obstacles does it overcome?
• Who is served by creating a cooperative network?
• What are the interactions between the internet and face-to-face relationships?

Also, reflect on what you learned from the panel on Business Models of Collaboration and note if and how it applies to your thinking.

The synthesis should be prepared on the white boards in your area.

Note that it is not necessary to reach consensus at this stage. Therefore, please do not feel obliged to downplay your disagreements. In fact, disagreements may present key opportunities to highlight differing assumptions, and therefore they may be valuable signals of important themes and ideas to consider. So please let us know about the points of agreement or disagreement on key and important issues.

Be prepared to make a short (5 minutes or less) presentation of your work to the other teams.

Report Out

We focused on creating a network. From our images there were a couple of different ways of doing this. We also looked at a cost structure. Two people introduced doing some sort of shared systems. We want to be able to offer more products than just an IDA.What we see the network doing is being sort of a tool. Practice would be at the center of the network. Shared services would include account management, new products, back office, functional infrastructure. All of these would be utilized through a fee structure.

The network would include all of the different players that are listed around the central network. Foundations, CBOP practitioners, financial distributors, etc. These folks would pay to be a part of this network. It would also have an idea of shareholders that could come from any one of these of these groups of people.

Another important function of the network would be a coordinating function. How do we have common measurements and outcomes that we can all look for?

Can we hear more about the cost structure? (Pat Stuart's individual work)

The shareholders would be just be practioners, They would play a greater role.

The TA piece is not only to access outside information, but some folks would pay to access the ntetwork. Part of my fee would be to pay a percentage of the fee to get into the network.

Team Three: Idealized Design

Assignment: Synthesis – Idealized Network Design

Once everyone on your team has shared his or her thoughts, please prepare a synthesis of your individual work that incorporates the key points from each member of your team by creating a ‘model’ of the ideal network.

You might consider the following questions:

• What is the optimal structure that would represent all the needs of the IDA field?
• What is the experience of this network for each of its users?
• What impact does it have on the field itself? On society?
• What services and products does it provide?
• What obstacles does it overcome?
• Who is served by creating a cooperative network?
• What are the interactions between the internet and face-to-face relationships?

Also, reflect on what you learned from the panel on Business Models of Collaboration and note if and how it applies to your thinking.

The synthesis should be prepared on the white boards in your area.

Note that it is not necessary to reach consensus at this stage. Therefore, please do not feel obliged to downplay your disagreements. In fact, disagreements may present key opportunities to highlight differing assumptions, and therefore they may be valuable signals of important themes and ideas to consider. So please let us know about the points of agreement or disagreement on key and important issues.

Be prepared to make a short (5 minutes or less) presentation of your work to the other teams.

Report Out

I think we spent a lot less time on design. We're on ideals over here...

We focused on the why - why are we doing this? There is some incentive or savings for all low-income people. In terms of a mission, we want to build political power to get to our vision, and we want to increase the impact of our efforts.

Our strategy is in three parts. First, we want to broaden the base of our support. We want to reach out to the private sector, gain popular support across all idealogical boundaries. We envision individuals joining this, much like you'd join any other "club." We need to focus on smart and better messaging.

The 2nd component of our strategy is a better link between policy and practice. This would include informing existing policy groups, and engaging them in our work.

The 3rd part would be to improve practice itself.

We felt like this organization's lead staff would be focused on the top two strategic issues. We don't see our organization as much a TA organization as in the first group.

We want to see this have "one big end goal."

Team Two: Collaborative Model

Assignment: Synthesis – Collaboration Models

Once everyone on your team has shared his or her thoughts, please prepare a synthesis of your individual work that incorporates the key points from each member of your team by creating a ‘model’ of the network that connects IDA practitioners. Use the whiteboard to illustrate this model. Show the structure, linkages, relationships, flow of information, products and services.

Also, reflect on what you learned from the panel on Business Models of Collaboration and note how it applies to your thinking.  You might consider the following questions:

• What are the underlying assumptions in your model of collaboration?
• What are the structure?
• What are the benefits of organizing your field in this way? Challenges?
• Who is served by creating a cooperative network?
• How will this solve the ability to go to scale and reduce costs?
• What are the interactions between the internet and face-to-face relationships?

The synthesis should be prepared on the white boards in your area.

Note that it is not necessary to reach consensus at this stage. Therefore, please do not feel obliged to downplay your disagreements. In fact, disagreements may present key opportunities to highlight differing assumptions, and therefore they may be valuable signals of important themes and ideas to consider. So please let us know about the points of agreement or disagreement on key and important issues.

Be prepared to make a short (5 minutes or less) presentation of your work to the other teams.

Report Out

We started off with a large range of ideas. Without public support, we're simply not going to get to the appropriate scale that we need in order to make a collaborative model work. We had some financial institution perspective as well as a technological perspective in our group. This was very useful.

In our model, we have 2 functions that are centralized. Withdrawing money takes a lot of effort - is there a way to centralize that nationally? Could we build an asset management platform where all assets go in there, and any financial institution could access it? This is not unlike the Visa name. There are hundreds of financial institutions that are all independent of each other, but live under the same name "Visa."

Program services and financial institutions need to be tailored on a local level.

We need to change the culture of savings. We've been talking about all kinds of things, but we need to include moral obligations in our discussions. There are some things that we could be doing to encourage lower income famlieis to save more.

Team One: Collaborative Model

Assignment: Synthesis – Collaboration Models

Once everyone on your team has shared his or her thoughts, please prepare a synthesis of your individual work that incorporates the key points from each member of your team by creating a ‘model’ of the network that connects IDA practitioners. Use the whiteboard to illustrate this model. Show the structure, linkages, relationships, flow of information, products and services.

Also, reflect on what you learned from the panel on Business Models of Collaboration and note how it applies to your thinking.  You might consider the following questions:

• What are the underlying assumptions in your model of collaboration?
• What are the structure?
• What are the benefits of organizing your field in this way? Challenges?
• Who is served by creating a cooperative network?
• How will this solve the ability to go to scale and reduce costs?
• What are the interactions between the internet and face-to-face relationships?

The synthesis should be prepared on the white boards in your area.

Note that it is not necessary to reach consensus at this stage. Therefore, please do not feel obliged to downplay your disagreements. In fact, disagreements may present key opportunities to highlight differing assumptions, and therefore they may be valuable signals of important themes and ideas to consider. So please let us know about the points of agreement or disagreement on key and important issues.

Be prepared to make a short (5 minutes or less) presentation of your work to the other teams.

Report Out

We took a bit of a different approach, as you can see by our 4 individual flip charts here.

1. We'll develop a network that would provide an umbrella for the 500 providors. It feels like this netork could facilitate brand recoginition. The IT software application needs to be the right one to facilitate this model.

I think the lack of trust is one of the barriers that prevents us from acheiving our future model.

2. I was concerned about relating IDAs to the larger field, whether it's policy or something else. I definitely subscribe to the idea that we need a big end goal. Worldwide, we have a chance to affect families in their asset building. I think that what we have is a lot of the pieces. But what we don't have is an ability to bring the different pieces together around all sorts of different tables. We typically talk about small amounts of staff. Perhaps it's virtual tables that we need to create in order to get the right folks around the table. There are some online support structures.

So we have a network here, and a chaordic bunch of ideas here...

3. I see it as an IDA plus. There is an oranizing body that is not necessarily in charge. They are there to facilitate the process and the organizational actions. I like turning this into a cooperative design, with various kinds of shareholders that are involved.

4. I see all these different factors such as researh, media, fundraising, etc pulling togeter to affect practioners. I've tried to be sympathetic to what I wrote in the charretes as I drew my model.

So you can see that we were unable to synthesize. So we'll move to our assumptions and feedback from the other participants in this workshop. We struggled with things like "Is this a network or not? Is this regional or not?"

Who besides families will benefit from IDAs? What does the profit potential look like to a financial institution?

One major assumption that we haven't been able to reconcile is whether this is IDAs or IDAs plus.

One thing that struck me in going around, as you are building such a large cooperative, is that it's much easier to think about a platform that supports one kind of "thing." The Child Care group has such a situation. In our situation, I wonder if having a network of the more basic things is even useful. This is so hard to solve, because the framing is so difficult. All of the providers are very different. I don't know if some of us want to do the things that others are willing to.

We might need to back up and define what the mission is of the collective that we're trying to create. If my idea of the mission is X, and yours is Y, then right off the bat we're solving this for different reasons.

As a segue to our next excersie, those are two great comments.

Scribing