Your vision. Our software. World-changing.

This issue of Perspective provides a quick peek into the work we have done under our Social Impact Program (SIP), and what some of our clients have to say about their experience working with us. The SIP is our focused effort to build partnerships with world-changing social mission organizations.

ThoughtWorks business is founded on three coequal principles, which we call our Three Pillars:

• To run a sustainable business
• Champion software excellence
• Promote social justice.

The third pillar has a deep influence on what ThoughtWorks stands for as an organization, and how we operate on a day-to-day basis. The Social Impact Program is an integral part of Pillar 3. It focuses on building custom software solutions for mission-driven organizations.

Michael MacHarg, co-founder of Simpa Networks, talks about how ThoughtWorks helped them take pay-as-you-go solar home systems from concept to market using open source frameworks and tools. This software enables users to buy energy credits for solar lighting using mobile technology.

Your vision. Our software. World-changing.
We are fanatical believers in the power of software and technology as tools for social change. This belief is intrinsic to our mission as a company, and the reason we strive every day to revolutionize the creation and delivery of custom software.

We actively seek to put our expertise to work for everyone by collaborating with organizations with a humanitarian mission, broad reach, and a passion to use technology to better fulfill their social missions. We bring expertise in creating complex custom software using the latest technologies and rich experience in the fields of Health Care, Mobile Communications, Renewable Energy and many more.

We are convinced that software has a liberating capacity for society, and a potential to address the most pressing issues of our time: social and economic inequality, the environment, energy, health care, participatory democracy, economic activity; as well as ushering in the as yet undiscovered.

Download the SIP brochure

Case study: Simpa - Clean Power to the People
ThoughtWorks helped Simpa Networks take pay-as-you-go solar home systems from concept to market using open source frameworks and tools. This software enables users to buy energy credits for solar lighting using mobile technology. Design, coding, testing and deployment for this custom SMS-enabled revenue system were completed, from scratch, in twelve weeks.

Case study: Queensland Flood Telethon - Clouds against the Floods
Ola's most recent project was on a fairly typical Java Web project where there was a component that had to be written in JavaScript. Nothing fancy, and nothing big. It seems like people are still not taking JavaScript seriously in these kind of environments. In this blog post, Ola talks about how his team developed JavaScript on this project.

Case Study: Sukrupa - Learning well, doing good
Sukrupa is a charitable organization in Bangalore, India, that educates children living in poverty in urban slums. The school provides safe surroundings, nutritious meals, and education to more than 400 children in Bangalore. In keeping with the company’s core values, including promotion of social justice and volunteerism, ThoughtWorks University (TWU) students worked with Sukrupa from January through May of 2011, resulting in three successive classes delivering software to solve real problems and help advance Sukrupa’s mission. Thanks to a website created by TWU, Sukrupa is now in touch with global donors, giving children in India hope for a better life.

Spotlight on ThoughtWorks-HNI Partnership
This blog post talks about how, under the Social Impact Program, ThoughtWorks collaborated with HNI on the DataWinners application to bring it from its early design stages to the functioning platform that is currently in the beta test phase today.

Mobile Networks and Cloud-Hosted Services
In this blog post, Jeff Wishnie talks about two key technologies: Mobile Networks and Cloud-Hosted Services. He also talks about ThoughtWorks' contributions to the development of several Mobile/Cloud services for mission-driven organizations.

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mHealth: Making India Aware
In an interview with CIO.in, Rohit Bansal, Head of the Social Impact Program at ThoughtWorks, talks about some of the work ThoughtWorks has done in the area of mobile healthcare applications in India.