ABOUT THE

IMPACT DATA

CONSORTIUM

CHAIN

Our Values

Data Sharing

Crowdsourcing information and knowledge of impact provides insights, reduces costs, and promotes innovation

Data Integrity

Ensuring veracity, accuracy, and trackability of data strengthens trust between funders and beneficiaries

Data Ethics

Protecting digital rights, information privacy, and data self-sovereignty supports compliance and helps us go a long way

Letter from the

Executive Director

The Hong Kong social service sector is a vibrant and growing community consisting of social purpose organizations (SPOs) that are working on the frontlines of Hong Kong’s marginalized communities, impact intermediaries that are helping SPOs to run smoothly, and philanthropists and impact investors that provide much needed financial support to power these projects – all working together like our body’s immune system to help us heal when compromised. Much like how our immune system needs to immediately identify pain before it can heal itself, so too does our society need timely and accurate information to identify pain points – local community-information and knowledge – in order for us to work together to solve our own peoples problems. IDCC is the place for us to come together to make this happen – through community-driven data!

In collaboration with several leading Hong Kong social impact organizations in conjunction with public-private-partnership efforts, we have created this movement as a nonprofit organization whose mission is dedicated to bringing together people and resources with data, taking action to solve Hong Kong’s most pressing issues, and advocating for a new paradigm of bottom-up crowd-solutions for poverty alleviation and social inclusion. Our starting point is to advance capacity-building programs and open-technology platforms to build financial-literacy and digital-literacy in order to help bring the impact sectors and our grassroots communities into a more collaborative and inclusive economy – and to do this by making decisions together. We are not to be confused as a data analytics firm or tech solutions provider!

We recognize that information often grows silently in separate silos, and that in order for those data to make real change in society, that we need to break down these silos and build a means to share that data and make it accessible as a civic-data infrastructure, and as a consortium, to make decisions on how to build the governance of that data, not just on behalf of the people, but with the people for whom it serves, in ways that protect their digital rights and data self-sovereignty.

We believe in system change and work with various partners in the Hong Kong impact ecosystem to promote positive change and that IDCC will become the means for all Hong Kong people alike to build a better Hong Kong.

In my role as the Chair and Executive Director of Hong Kong’s Impact Data Consortium Chain, it is with a very excited and humble heart that I welcome you to join us!

James Leung

CHAIR & Executive Director

Hong Kong Impact Data Consortium Chain

It All Began One Day...

WhatsApp Image 2020-08-05 at 2.02.10 AM.

The movement to create a place to share how social services make impact was first set into motion over a half-decade ago through countless conversations between Hong Kong’s social impact ecosystem leaders, academics, impact investors, and grassroots communities, to identify systemic industry-wide and society-wide problems for which a better flow of information and communication could help to provide immediate relief and unlock long term value for Hong Kong communities.

The swirl of these energies began to take focus and shape within the last two years, with the leadership of the fellows of Shanzhai City, CUHK ACF and HK-SIA guiding a collaboration between industry leaders and community stakeholders, in conjunction with the support of public-private-partnership, to become a registered Hong Kong non profit organization limited by guarantee in 2020, as a city-wide open-source technology initiative called the Impact Data Consortium Chain, upon which the future of how digital information will change society can be discussed, exchanged, and enacted as collective actions for good.

IDCC’s consortium members collectively acknowledge the need for establishing a city-wide data platform as the organization’s first step, that allows them to more conveniently manage impact data for the sake of transparency, accountability, and making information become actionable, informing better policies, and creating more value for an ecosystem that often is lacking in crucially needed resources. With this impact data infrastructure to become the new cornerstone for Hong Kong’s social impact community to become empowered with better insights and data-driven collective action in the midrun, in the not-so-distant future, IDCC has its sights set on working with its consortium members and community stakeholders to build data-driven tools to unlock social finance – bringing much needed investment into the social impact markets, and moreover to provide last-mile financial inclusion tools for grassroots communities to boost liquidity where it can make immediate and direct impact.