For better or worse, the viral stunt known as the Ice Bucket Challenge is cluttering your newsfeed. And it’s not just your friends and family dumping freezing cold water on their heads all in the name of the crippling neurological condition ALS (or as it’s more widely known, Lou Gehrig’s disease). Celebs (Martha Stewart, Justin Timberlake), athletes like Michelle Wie and Andrew Luck, politicians and other public figures have all taken part. Even Ethel Kennedy recently challenged President Obama to do it.
For those who aren’t up to date, the challenge requires participants to record themselves dumping a bucket of ice water over their heads and then nominate others to do the same. Those who refuse to take part have to donate money to an ALS charity or another cause of their choice.
MORE: How a Terminally Ill Man’s Plot to Steal Donuts Led to a Remarkable Day of Giving
Whatever you might think about social-media driven activism (which is often referred to as slacktivism), this campaign has been a huge success for a disease that gets comparatively less charitable giving than others. ALS Association spokeswoman Carrie Munk said the organization has collected an incredible $1.35 million from July 29 to Aug. 11. The same time last year, donations were only $22,000.
“It’s just been wonderful visibility for the ALS community,” ALS Association’s national president, Barbara Newhouse told WBZ NewsRadio. “It is absolutely awesome. It’s crazy, but it’s awesome, and it’s working.”
Yes, funding and awareness is important for any deadly ailment, but critics of the ice bucket campaign say that it’s similar to a host of other causes that have become popular through clever marketing (#nomakeupselfie, Kony 2012, to name a few). Sumpto founder Ben Kosinski wrote in a Huffington Post blog post, “The whole thinking is that instead of actually donating money, you’re attributing your time and a social post in place of that donation. Basically, instead of donating $10 to Charity XYZ, slacktivism would have you create a Facebook Post about how much you care about Charity XYZ — generating immediate and heightened awareness but lacking any actual donations and long term impact.”
Not to mention that it’s a problem when the premise of the challenge is to pour cold water all over yourself or else donate money for charity. Philanthropy shouldn’t be a punishment.
ALSO: This Amazing Boy Wrote a Book to Help Cure His Friend’s Rare Disease
So don’t pour water over your head just for a few likes and favorites or because it seems like everyone else is doing it. As Jezebel points out, “Martha Stewart didn’t even mention charity — making it seem like a random dare from Matt Lauer.”
If you decide to go for the challenge, do it because you’re acknowledging that a few moments of cold discomfort isn’t nearly as difficult as what people with ALS have to go through every day. The disease, which affects more than 12,000 people in the U.S., still doesn’t have a cure, nor do we even know what causes it.
As the Associated Press reports, former Boston baseball player Pete Frates, who started the ice challenge craze a few months ago, is paralyzed and eats through a feeding tube and cannot talk because of the disease. (He was diagnosed with ALS back in 2012 at the youthful age of 27.)
Additionally, be sure to also volunteer, donate, and educate yourself about ALS and encourage others to do the same.
DON’T MISS: Meet the Teen Who Helped Scientists With a Breakthrough in Her Rare Disease
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Tag: social media
The 7 Smartest Uses of Technology in Government Today
Ahead of our July 30 lunch with Rachel Haot, we’re surveying the best applications of new technology in government across the country. Click here to write Rachel a question or idea, and we’ll pose it to her.
- ShotSpotter
This Milwaukee-based program relies on microphones in public places to instantly identify a gunshot by its sound signature. One thing this technology helps to prevent is false alarms: sometimes people confuse fireworks or tires going flat with gunfire. But more importantly, it notifies the authorities to actual gunshots, since in the vast majority of cases residents do not report them — even when they clearly identify the noise as such. In Milwaukee, one city that’s found success in ShotSpotter, only 14 percent of residents dialed 911 upon hearing gunshots. This is partly out of fear of retribution, but also a tragedy of the commons problem. ShotSpotter is now live in 75 American cities, including Washington, D.C. and most recently, New York City.
- NYC OpenData Portal
After Rachel Haot wrote the era-defining Digital Roadmap for NYC in Spring 2011, the city followed up on her instruction to make as much data open to the public as possible. Since then, New York City has published more than a thousand datasets on the usual topics like education, health, transportation and crime. This is an inherently transparent move: more of what the government knows about itself is now available to its citizens. Even better, it’s also proven to be a good first step in government-citizen collaboration. Some amazing visualizations have been derived from the data, including the Breathing City and the Collisions by Time of Day map:
- Grade.DC
Our nation’s capital is on the vanguard of discerning public opinion through digital interaction. Check out grade.DC.Gov: through it, any Washington, D.C. resident can grade any aspect of the city’s service. Every day, the mayor and his staff receive an analysis of the feedback, so they can focus their efforts on what citizens need most at that moment. They can also geo-target the responses, enabling them reallocate resources by district. In June they averaged an A-. Not bad.
- Predictive Policing (PredPol)
We know what you’re thinking: Minority Report. Yeah, kind of. This California program uses data to allocate policing resources to areas where criminal acts are more likely to occur. Its advantage lies in its bigger-picture comprehension of crime. Instead of issuing a blanket designation that certain areas are heavily problematic, PredPol analyzes each individual crime against a history of similar transgressions from the past, to calculate an array of probabilities. When the LAPD ran the program against its own internal data processing, PredPol was twice as good at predicting where wrongdoings would occur. Founded by a mathematician from Santa Clara University, the system incorporates some of the techniques that geologists use to predict earthquake aftershocks.
- Diplopedia
The State Department has this well-named internal wiki where diplomats and their staffers share vital but sensitive information about all kinds of things. The rules and principles are very similar to Wikipedia’s, including the requirement to adopt a neutral point of view, cite professional sources, and defer to others. It’s almost two years old and a model of intra-government collaboration and information sharing.
- FastFWD
This program is like Code for America, but for infrastructure. Run out of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, FastFWD pairs entrepreneurs with local governments to solve civic engineers’ and public officials’ infrastructure problems. Their goal is to push projects through the pipeline much faster, more affordably and with greater impact. Its first class of entrepreneurs graduated this summer.
- Smarter Sustainable Dubuque
Dubuque is a town of 58,000 on the eastern border of Iowa. In 2009, it partnered with IBM to install smart water meters — which flag overuse and monitor leaks — in 300 homes. During the program’s first year, participating residents used almost 7 percent less water.
Sources: Digital Transformation: Wiring the Responsive City; WhiteHouse.gov; StateTech Magazine
Rachel Haot Revolutionized City Government. Now She’s Working At The State Level, and Wants Your Input
Rachel Haot was first amazed by computers when she was eight. She logged onto IBM’s early Internet service, Prodigy, to play checkers. “It was the coolest thing,”she told The Verge.
Twenty years later, in January 2011, Haot became New York City’s first Chief Digital Officer (CDO). It was her job to write a Digital Roadmap in 90 days, but also to define the CDO role. She was the first person to hold that title in any major American city, and her work has changed our cities’ attitudes to 21st-century tools.
Like Bloomberg, Haot is a technology entrepreneur. In 2006, she founded GroundReport, one of the first citizen journalism outlets. Her insight was that anyone with a phone can be a primary source for breaking news. Which is why on the GroundReport platform, anyone can submit an article or media for publication. Advancements in personal technology meant to Haot that “the crowd” isn’t just a scattering of passive readers, but a mass intelligence eager to contribute to everything.
During Haot’s four years as CEO of GroundReport, she saw the power of this principle as more than 7,000 people around the world contributed text, images, and video to the site. When Mayor Bloomberg approached her to make NYC Internet-awesome, she left GroundReport and moved to City Hall. Her transition from one job to another should, in theory, be seamless. The idea behind GroundReport — that the collaboration of many ordinary people can supply extraordinary value — also makes sense as political science. Journalism and democracy both work better when they’re more open and inclusive.
But in practice, she faced an uphill battle. NYC is arguably the intellectual capital of the world, but ancient IT systems and clunky bureaucracy bogged down City Hall. And then there was the culture. Another Bloomberg staffer, Stephen Goldsmith, was Deputy Mayor when Haot arrived and worked regularly with her. He said that getting departments to embrace new technologies like social media and data analytics was “very difficult.”
“New York City is a huge platform of information,” Goldsmith says. “When Rachel arrived, it was underdeveloped, underutilized, not personalized — just waiting for social media to unlock it.”
In the spring of 2011, Haot’s office published the “Roadmap for the Digital City,” which recommended a series of steps to make NYC the best at “Internet access, open government, citizen engagement and digital industry growth.” Some ideas included: installing public WiFi hotspots in parks and subways, investing in digital education and Internet access for low-income families and redesigning nyc.gov.
The benefits of open source collaboration and the importance of a great user experience have been obvious to Haot since she was very young. But her other talent is spreading computer literacy. Haot also has a knack for showing the technologically hesitant how the Internet can make their jobs easier.
Which is the main thing that needs getting done at state and local governments, says Jennifer Bradley of the Brookings Institute and co-author of “The Metropolitan Revolution.” “Digital is not something one person does,” she says. “It’s an approach a government has internally and externally. Digital has to be infused into everything.” Haot told A Smarter Planet she begins her conversation with other department heads by asking what their goals are. Then, she “backs into talk about digital tools” in pursuit of those goals.
Last fall, NYC announced that 100 percent of the Roadmap’s projects had been completed. Then in December, Haot announced she’d be taking the position of Deputy Secretary for Technology for New York State. Goldsmith, reflecting on the cultural change wrought by Haot, says, “The staff matured a lot in the time that she was there. In the end, there was much more of an appetite for digital.”
Now, from her new perch in Albany, New York, she’s issued the following challenge to NationSwell readers:
“How can we in government improve our service delivery and performance by embracing digital tools? How can we support a vibrant tech ecosystem statewide? Broadly: How do we realize the State’s innovative potential?”
Help her out by taking action using the button on the left.
How Your Food Porn Can Provide a Brown Bag Lunch for a Hungry Child
The reasons that some people abstain from social media? It’s a time suck; it jeopardizes your privacy; it’s filled with superficial flotsam (such as people posting pictures of what they’re eating for dinner).
But the new mobile app Feedie, which was developed by the nonprofit The Lunchbox Fund, is turning an activity that might be considered frivolous into a new way to spread generosity. How so?
Every time a user takes a photo of a meal at a participating restaurant and shares it with his or her social network through the app, Feedie donates 25 cents to The Lunchbox Fund, which provides a daily meal for orphaned and disadvantaged school children in South Africa.
The Lunchbox Fund founder Topaz Page-Green explained the level of poverty in South Africa to Patrica Dao of Take Part: “There were children sitting away from the other kids at break under some trees,” she said, “and when I asked why children sat separately from the others during break, the teacher mentioned they had nothing to eat and didn’t want to see the kids who had food eating.”
Restaurants across the United States have signed on to participate — from Los Angeles to San Antonio and Miami Beach to Atlantic City. The app lets users know how many meals have been shared at each location; so far more than 12 million meals have been shared using it.
With the market for food-sharing being as huge as it is — Dao notes that “on Instagram alone, more than 20 million photos are hashtagged #foodporn” — converting virtual sharing into giving is bound to make a huge difference in the lives of those with empty stomachs.
MORE: How 40 Pounds of Leftover Broccoli Sparked a Farm-Friendly Innovation
Want to Spread Positivity? There’s an App for That
Like any great invention, social media platforms have had various effects: We saw them help citizens share messages of freedom and democracy during 2011’s Arab Spring. But we’ve also witnessed teenagers abuse them to bully their peers — sometimes with devastating, fatal consequences.
But two Canadian grads are hoping to usher more positivity through social media with the launch of an app called Posi. With it, users can share positive images and messages with friends and peers; there’s no ability to leave comments, though, which prevents people from leaving snarky comments.
In the short month the app has been available, Posi has been downloaded 3,500 times in 35 countries.
Co-founder Jason Berard came up with the idea for Posi while backpacking. Traveling always left him feeling inspired and enlightened — feelings that were often washed away as soon as he logged into Facebook or other social media platforms. Berard and fellow co-founder Braden Pyper wanted to halt the negativity and instead create, in their words, a “positive sanctuary on our phones” with the app.
“Social media is not about self-promotion and negativity, even though that’s what it’s perceived as,” Berard told the Winnipeg Sun, while referencing the “meanness after meanness after meanness and selfie after selfie after selfie” on existing social media sites. “People are starting to perceive social media as a negative thing, when it’s a really important tool for connection now.”
Want to Avoid L.A.’s Most Dangerous Streets? There’s a Map for That
The story of Kitty Genovese’s murder in 1964 is practically American folklore — stabbed to death in a dark alley in Queens, N.Y., just outside the front door of her apartment building, with at least 30 neighbors within earshot. Intense media coverage focused on this last part, examining the bystander effect and why she died, despite dozens of nearby witnesses.
Stories like these are painful reminders that the most gruesome crimes can happen in broad daylight or with countless others present. So what can happen on far less populated blocks?
As Atlantic Cities writer Conor Friedersdorf writes, Los Angeles is void of what the late Jane Jacobs, an urban theorist, would call “eyes on the street.” L.A.’s design — spread out and dominated by highways — drastically reduces sidewalk populations that could deter, if not at least bear witness to, crimes.
But the Los Angeles Police Department is actively exploring ways to combat this inherent city problem. A new law enforcement tactic called “predictive policing” involves a computer program that analyzes all crime that occurs in an area and produces a map with boxes drawn around blocks where future illegal acts are most likely to occur. Each day, cops release a new map via social media with updated boxes so people know which cross-streets in their neighborhood need the most attention. A community-driven initiative like this allows cops to better plan their focus their attention.
“Cops working with predictive systems respond to call-outs as usual, but when they are free, they return to the spots which the computer suggests,” The Economist noted when the plan first came to light last summer. “Officers may talk to locals or report problems, like broken lights or unsecured properties, that could encourage crime.” And it works: The tactic coincided with a 12 percent reduction in property crime in one Los Angeles neighborhood.
Friedersdorf wrote about the expansion of his program; he and his neighbors received a message from the LAPD, which stated:
“In an effort to do this we are deploying as many resources as possible to the box areas. To further increase the effectiveness of Predictive Policing we are asking the public to spend any free time that you may have in these areas too. You can simply walk with a neighbor, exercise, or walk your dog in these areas and your presence alone can assist in deterring would be criminals from committing crime in your neighborhood.”
Unsurprisingly, Friedersdorf is eager to do whatever it takes to make his neighborhood within L.A.’s Pacific Division safer. “I’d change the route I take on dog walks to help out,” he writes. “And if lots of my neighbors do the same, it’ll be a sign of civic health. We’re all responsible for safeguarding our neighborhoods.”
Though city governments can often cause frustration, this attempt to galvanize citizens to pursue safety can also increase cooperation between Los Angelenos and their governing bodies. “This latest example is a good illustration of how transparency can help law enforcement to improve public safety,” Friedersdorf writes. “And if the experiment works, needed eyeballs will be dispersed to at-risk areas without the use of Orwellian surveillance cameras being installed all over the neighborhood.”
How This Nonprofit Uses Snapchat to Connect to Youths
Powerhouse nonprofit DoSomething.org has already mastered the art of engaging with young people. Through their national campaigns, which inspire youths to get involved with causes they care about (without requiring the assistance of parents or access to a car or money), the organization has grown to include more than 2.4 million members. Now, the organization is finding a new way to connect with this highly coveted (and often elusive) demographic on the social media platform du jour: Snapchat.
WATCH: How Rock the Vote Is Reaching Millennials
Snapchat is a photo-sharing mobile app that acts like a text message — except the messages received will disappear in the time the sender allotted (one to 10 seconds). Users can add text or even draw silly pictures, which is something DoSomething.org’s resident Snapchatter, Bryce Mathias, often does. In fact, it’s the platform’s similarity to text messaging that led DoSomething to get involved, since texts have a 97 percent open rate and are one of the easiest ways to engage with teens. “We noticed that teenagers, our core demographic, were flocking away from Facebook,” DoSomething’s Colleen Wormsley told TechCrunch. “But they love Snapchat.”
DoSomething started its Snapchat account in November 2013, sending a note to its Twitter followers to add them. Requests started pouring in, and each new follower was greeted with a selfie from Mathias. Now, the team has an extensive following, which allows them to get creative with the snaps they send, and most importantly, tie them to their campaigns. “When we make interactive Snapchat stories, we ask ourselves, ‘How ridiculous can we be? How much fun can we have?’” Wormsley told Mashable.
MORE: How to Get Teens Interested in Saving the World
Recently, the team has been building Snapchat stories — a series of images that together tell a tale — using them to engage their followers in campaigns. For example, on Valentine’s Day, Mathias created a Snapchat story called Love Letters, which involved him running around New York City dressed as Cupid so he could deliver letters to homebound seniors. He asked followers to text to vote for how he should deliver them. Everyone who texted was then asked to create his or her own Love Letter for a homebound senior. The results were positive. Of the people who texted, 57 percent signed up to participate in the campaign. Needless to say, DoSomething will likely be using Snapchat — and selfies — for more campaign promotions in the future.
ALSO: What Are All Those Teens Doing on Their Phones? Learning About Politics, Apparently
SXSW: NationSwell on the Rise of Online Youth Activists
On the final day of SXSW Interactive (that stands for South by Southwest for the uninitiated), two inspiring student activists joined Greg Behrman, Founder and CEO of NationSwell, and Ronnie Cho, the former Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, to discuss how they’ve successfully used technology to address national challenges.
Simone Bernstein, a senior at St. Bonaventure University in New York, said her frustration from the lack of information for teenagers who wanted to volunteer in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, led her to work with her brother to start a website called St. Louis Volunteen. This later grew into VolunTEEN Nation, a national organization that lists volunteer opportunities for teens while also encouraging organizations to recognize the potential of younger volunteers.
“So many kids wanted to volunteer but there were very few places they could go to find those opportunities,” she said. “A few months after we launched St. Louis Volunteen, we got hundreds then thousands of emails from people who wanted to volunteer in their own cities.”
Bernstein wakes up at 6:30 every morning, runs three miles, then spends six hours each day working on VolunTEEN Nation — all of this on top of her academic work. She says she is grateful for Skype, Twitter, and other online tools that allow her to lead the national team, including 240 ambassadors across the country.
High school senior Charles Orgbon III talked about his work founding and running Greening Forward. The has its roots in a school project that had him picking up litter around the Mill Creek High School campus in Hoschton, Georgia. Initially, his Earth Savers Club only had three members, but the Internet provided Orgbon with a power platform to rally student action. Using a blog called Recycling Education, he shared posts on environmental issues with, as he describes it, “anyone who wanted to listen.”
Describing the transition that led to Greening Forward, which works to provide a diverse group of young people with the resources they need to protect the environment, Orgbon says that he started thinking toward the end of eighth grade about how he might use technology to advance the impact he could have.
“Let’s do more than just post on a website. Let’s build some resources and support tools to help young people build similar projects like the Earth Savers Club in their own communities,” he said.
The audience, many of them working professionals in their 20s and 30s, laughed when Orgbon defined a young person as someone under the age of 25.
This old 26 year old tweeting in the corner captured some other memorable moments from the conversation:
Cho moderated the afternoon session. While serving as President Obama’s liaison to Young Americans and writing the White House’s For the Win blog (which focused on the remarkable initiatives young Americans advance in their own communities) Cho came across many stories of student innovation. He talked about the importance of a platform to “highlight interesting, effective, impactful work” or Americans across the country.
This is exactly where NationSwell comes in, Behrman said, talking about the website’s model of telling stories about individuals making an impact and mobilizing support around innovators like Ben Simon of the Food Recovery Network. He then shared a video outlining the impact of its call to action.
MORE: How Much Food Could Be Rescued if College Dining Halls Saved Their Leftovers?
“The founding impetus is really these guys, people throughout our country who are doing amazing things, and sometimes they’re overlooked and sometimes people who are interested may not know about them, so we want to be a platform for them, a source for their stories,” Behrman said.
Then panel went on to explore the way tools from social media to smart phones have helped Bernstein, Orgbon, and so many student activists advance their causes and achieve national impact. The audience posed questions ranging from the distinction between activism and service to the role of school curriculum in encouraging volunteering. The conversation itself seemed likely to inspire not only more stories about student innovators who have leveraged technology to address national challenges, but strong support for them as well.
How a Viral Photo Is Giving Students a Chance at a Much-Needed Scholarship
Maybe someone’s always hitting you up to play Words With Friends via Facebook. Or perhaps you’re tired of seeing your neighbor post pictures of these elaborate meals she cooks on Instagram. Regardless of the annoyance, we all complain about social media from time to time. But despite the irritation factor, there’s no denying it holds incredible power.
Just ask Annette Renaud.
Last week, Renaud was riding the C train in New York City when she was approached by Brandon Stanton, the creator of the moving and incredibly popular photography series Humans of New York. Stanton, as is his usual practice, requested to take Renaud’s picture and then asked his usual prompt, “What’s on your mind?” Little did he know that her answer would ignite a firestorm.
The visibly upset Renaud told Stanton about a problem she was dealing with at her child’s high school, the Secondary School for Journalism in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “I’m currently advocating on behalf of my child and 17 other children whose parents don’t speak English,” she said. “These kids have all done very well on their Regent’s exams — I’m talking 90/95th percentile. Very smart kids. They were on their way toward qualifying for an Advanced Regents government scholarship that would give their parents badly needed money to help in their education.”
MORE: A Guidance Counselor Told Her Daughter Not to Bother Applying for College Scholarships. What She Did Next Will Inspire You
Renaud, who is on the School Leadership Team, went on to tell Stanton that the scholarship — like many others — requires three years of foreign language classes in order for students to be considered. Last year, the high school’s principal, Jodi Radwell, released the Spanish teacher, Briana Harris, due to budget constraints and didn’t replace her, leaving the seniors who were vying for the scholarship without options. Renaud, along with some other concerned parents, reached out to the Board of Education and were told to put their complaint in writing. They did, but a year has passed and there still isn’t a replacement Spanish teacher.
“We’ve got a new mayor and a new chancellor. So we aren’t blaming them,” Renaud continued. “But they need to know how impossible they’ve made it to help our kids. Trying to get something fixed in these schools is like praying to some false God. You call and email hoping that God is listening, and nothing happens.”
As it turns out, however, the Internet was listening.
DON’T MISS: The Neediest Students Couldn’t Afford His Help, So This Test-Prep Prodigy Stepped Up
Stanton published Renaud’s story on his Facebook page — which boasts almost 3.6 million likes — on March 2, and it immediately went viral. Within just a couple of days, the photo had been shared shared almost 17,000 times and had received more than 5,600 comments. Many commenters offered to teach Spanish at the school for free. Others posted the school’s email address and phone numbers for people to contact the principal directly. Since the post went up, two Change.org petitions have been started to request that the school hire a new Spanish teacher. The students, meanwhile, are still protesting. While officials at the Education Department told the New York Times that the students received access to online language courses to make up for in-class instruction, the students said the course wasn’t provided until January and is not registered on their transcripts.
Now, education officials say they are meeting with the school to make sure the students have what they need. “We just want a fair chance,” Alejandra Figueroa, a senior at the school, told the Times. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask.” And thanks to Brandon Stanton, Humans of New York and the World Wide Web, they’re that much closer to getting it.
ALSO: The Next Frontier in Crowdfunding: DIY College Scholarships
This Technologist Retweeted Only Women for a Year and It Broadened His Horizons
Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash has made a name for himself through such projects as Expert Labs, a non-profit that aimed to help “ordinary citizens who aren’t lobbyists or insiders or politicians get their voices heard by policy makers simply by using social networks like Twitter and Facebook,” according to its website. Through blogging about technology and being an early Twitter user, Dash has gained almost 500,000 Twitter followers, which got him to thinking about how he could use his influence to help others be heard.
Dash is currently the CEO of ThinkUp, “which is all about being more thoughtful about the way we use our social networks,” he writes in an essay on Medium. An analytics tool showed him that 75% of his Twitter followers are men, and that 80% of the tweets he retweeted were written by men. He feels “a growing sense of social responsibility about what messages I choose to share and amplify, and whose voices and identities I strive to bring to a broader audience.”
Considering how underrepresented women are in the field of technology, Dash resolved to only retweet tweets by women in 2013, and it opened his eyes. “One thing that has happened,” he writes, “is that I’ve been in far more conversations with women, and especially with women of color, on Twitter in the past year. That’s led to me following more women, and has caused a radical shift in how I perceive my time on Twitter, even though its actual substance isn’t that different.” In general, Dash found women on Twitter to be more thankful and less focused on certain pervasive memes or tech stories than men. Dash said he only slipped up once, retweeting a message by Prince. Now he’s inviting others to try only retweeting women, especially those in fields dominated by men.
MORE: Why Are These Female Scientists Tweeting Photos of Their Manicures?