Platforms for the people: enabling civic crowdfunding through the cultivation of institutional infrastructure

Digital platforms offer a promising contemporary means for encouraging social innovation through cross-sector collaboration. Yet although such “social-mission platforms” are equipped to facilitate a high number of arms-length transactions, they are conversely ill-equipped to provide the necessary consensus which typically characterizes successful examples of cross-sector collaboration. Employing an in-depth archival case study of a civic crowdfunding platform, we surface a process model of social-mission platform creation, which exposes the dilemmas such platforms encounter as they attempt to navigate user growth, and the importance of institutional infrastructure for overcoming these dilemmas. These findings and our emergent model thus contribute new theory regarding the creation of digital platforms for enabling cross-sector collaboration and social innovation, while bridging the emerging body of research on platforms with institutional theor

(3S,4R)-3,4-Dihydroxy-N-alkyl-l-homoprolines: synthesis and computational mechanistic studies

This is the first synthetic report of (3S,4R)-dihydroxy-N-alkyl-l-homoprolines described so far. 2,4-O-Benzylidene-d-erythrose was obtained from d-glucose with an improved yield, and then transformed into the title (3S,4R)-dihydroxy-N-alkyl-l-homoprolines, in a two-step strategy, with excellent overall yields. Hydrogenolysis of the benzyl group led to the NH congener. The synthesis of final products from 1,4-lactone intermediates was studied by computational means either under acidic or basic conditions. The theoretical mechanism studies fully explain the experimental results: (a) an equilibrium between l-homoprolines and their bicyclic counterparts is established in acids; (b) the equilibrium suffers a complete displacement towards the l-homoproline side in a basic medium.We thank the NMR Portuguese network (PTNMR, Bruker Avance III 400-Univ. Minho), and FCT and FEDER (European Fund for Regional Development)-COMPETE-QREN-EU for financial support to CQ/UM. We also thank Search-ON2 for the revitalization of the HPC infrastructure of UMinho, (NORTE-07-0162-FEDER-000086), co-funded by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (ON.2-O Novo Norte), under the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF), through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the doctoral scholarship SFRH/BD/87292/2012