Technology
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Foursquare Experiments With Charity-Based Game Mechanics
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Fight Poverty in a Refugee Camp With Your iPhone
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Twitter and Facebook Shut Down in Attempt to Silence Activist
Ashoka at the Intersection of Technology and Social Entrepreneurship
Published July 24, 2009 @ 03:27PM PT
Ashoka is a constantly interesting source of great information and news about some of the most interesting social innovators around the world. For the past few years, they've been partnering with the Lemelson Foundation to increase the intersection between technological invention and innovation and social entrepreneurship.
For the past couple months, they've been blogging about that intersection at Tech.Ashoka.org. I've only just discovered it today after a conversation with the staffer Paula leading the effort, but it's an absolutely terrific resource not just to learn more but to frankly be blown away by all the creative stuff going on out there. Case in point, "Creating Electricity From Onions:"
Oxnard, Calif. based onion producer Gills Onions has turned to fuel cells to solve both its waste and energy needs.
Working with Southern California Edison and FuelCell Energy of Danbury, Conn., Gills Onions' advanced energy recovery system reduces 75% of the 300,000 lbs of daily waste. This waste is then converted to liquid and placed in an anaerobic digester where it is converted to methane and burned to power two 300 kilowatt fuel cells, which provide 35 percent to 45 percent of the farm's electricity needs.
According to the Danbury News-Times, Gills Onions "received a $2.7 million California state grant to cover part of the [$9.6 million] cost."
You can view a video about the project from the Ventura County Star.
Check them out here.
The Controversy Around Kiva's US Loans
Published July 07, 2009 @ 03:04PM PT
Kiva CEO and President, Matt Flannery and Premal Shah
There is a fascinating and instructive debate happening on the Kiva Friends website about whether or not Kiva should be providing loans to US based entrepreneurs. The first US loans, announced just a few weeks ago, were met with much excitement.
As with any site that has been driven by it's member's participation however, there are many members of the Kiva family who feel that US loaners should be accessing credit elsewhere, and even that having US-based entrepreneurs on the site crowds out others.
A poll started just a couple weeks ago on Kiva Friends asks:
Question: Having loans to citizen's of the world's richest country funded by Kiva members is:
- Taking money from the pockets of entrepreneurs in the third world and should be stopped with immediate effect.
- A good idea, as it doesn't matter where you live, if you can't access credit, you can't access credit.
- Don't know yet.
The debate has been raging for 22 pages of comments. Of those that feel that the site shouldn't be loaning to US entrepreneurs, most of the arguments come down to the fact that credit tends to be more available (in their opinion) for those in the US, that the presence of the larger loans needed by the US will crowd out other loaners, and perhaps most of all that loaning to US entrepreneurs was not what Kiva was intended for, and is somehow an affront to or at a degradation of the mission.
On the other side, supporters point out that no one is committed to supporting US based entrepreneurs if they have personal reservations, that a tiny fraction of the loans available are intended for US entrepreneurs, and that even in the US many don't have access to credit right now.
There are a few things that I think are great about the debate:
1) Although KivaFriends.org is a separate site, it seems clear that Kiva itself is not interested in shutting down this debate. This reminds me of when Barack Obama supported the FISA bill and in response, his supporters used his own organizing site my.barackobama.com to ask him to change his position. Rather than trying to suppress them, he welcomed their participation, even when the group critical of his position became the largest on his site.
2) I wouldn't actually accuse anyone of this, but I wonder if it's harder to feel the flow of philanthropy reversed on citizens of your own nation if you're not accustomed to it. Philanthopy is a powerful force for good, but it is complicated to go about it in such a way that affirms rather than denies dignity. I think Kiva's US loans - loaning to entrepreneurs in general - tends to be a way to do philanthropy that has dignity and ownership embedded at it's core, but it still might produce a different feeling for some in the US unaccustomed to being on the other side of that relationship.
3) I wonder if it's easier for people to be more judgmental about the entrepreneurial capacity of others when the activities of those people feels more familiar? When a US citizen is supporting a bean farmer in Uganda, we don't necessarily know anything about bean farming, and certainly not enough to know whether they're approaching bean farming the right way. We have to trust, and take faith in institutions like Kiva and their intermediary microfinance partners. When someone wants to sell hot dogs down the street from us, however, we may have a different intuition about the supply and demand and likely success of that person, making us be more critical because we have more information (or at least deeper intuitive feelings). I'm not saying that this is the case, but it wouldn't totally surprise me, either.
I'm a supporter of Kiva's experiment. I think their model of making these loans through a nonprofit apparatus may be well-suited to the need and I'm looking forward to seeing how they work.
U-Haul, QuestionBox, and Democratizing Information
Published July 06, 2009 @ 02:09PM PT
A few nights ago, I saw every U-Haul in the San Francisco Bay Area.
After the 1800 some odd mile trip from Chicago, my friends and I were desperate to unload the 6x12 trailer that had carried our lives that distance. It was not just a matter of convenience: there was literally no place to park a vehicle with a trailer that size on the street.
After no less than three U-Haul places had no facilities for night storage, we began to get frustrated. The 24 hour U-Haul helpline had no information about which areas had night drop off. After hours of driving around, we finally gave up and luckily, found a dog park to park next to.
Night drop-off is one of the best features of U-Haul. Moving invariably takes longer than it seems like it should, and the night drop-off is a great system for keeping the rental service flexible.
Worse than the fact that no place in the Bay had night drop off however was that there was no information that could confirm or deny that. The very nice people on the U-haul help line had no idea where there was night drop off, but were pretty sure there must be somewhere that had it. That sort of lack of information is almost more maddening than the lack of the service itself.
But it's also a good reminder about just how poor the feedback loops in nonprofit work tend to be, and how much of the world lives without the sort of omniscient access to information that smart phones and Google provide us. While much of that information is superfluous, some of it is essential.
I think that's why I'm so excited about projects that open access to information, such as QuestionBox, a service which allows people in rural villages to call an operator who then uses the internet to help that caller find specific pieces of information they're looking for. It's simple, but I can see many applications where it could provide vital information for a segment of the population that would be otherwise more or less totally overlooked by modern telecommunications.
What other services like QuestionBox exist out there to help ensure that information is accessible even to the poorest of the poor?
Act.ly: A New Tool for Public Pressure
Published June 25, 2009 @ 07:53AM PT
A petition supporting British abolition in the early 19th century (source)
Online petitions are a pretty mixed medium for creating tangible change. Occasionally they provide a vehicle to carry people's frustration in a clear and aggregate enough way to see some impact, such as a petition started by our Human Trafficking blogger Amanda that led to Diners Club International terminating their relationship with a mail order bride service. More often than not, however, petitions are well-intentioned but in the end, ineffective gestures.
It surprised me today when I found myself excited about Act.ly, a new service that uses Twitter to disseminate petitions. Basically the way it works is that you identify a target (just a Twitter user account), type what you want them to do (or not do) and then every time anyone retweets the message, they've signed the petition. An extremely simple, friendly, and intuitive site keeps track of all this, and even if and when the target of the petition responds.
There are a few things that I think make this promising:
- Clear Target: Focusing on a specific target seems likely to increase the efficacy of petitions, particularly because most Twitter handles one would target are actively maintained accounts.
- Clarity of Request: While the 140 character limit doesn't force clarity, it forces brevity. For those who really care about their petitions, those two things are probably two sides of the same coin.
- Ease of Dissemination: It is dead simple for people to retweet a message they agree with.
- Public Pressure: All of this happens in public, and because of the way Twitter notifies a user when they're being talked about, it's an ongoing din of people complaining about something.
I can already think of dozens of uses for this and I'm thrilled to see it live. Great work.
Iran and A New Era of Censorship
Published June 23, 2009 @ 10:17AM PT
"They Killed My Bro Koz He Asked: 'Where's My Vote' -June 17"
Information wants to be free. That mantra of the internet has grown and shaped ever since it was first uttered by Stewart Brand at the Hacker's Conference in 1984.
At no point has the political resonance of that statement been as tested as in the last few weeks in Iran. Under the pressure of a questionable election and the power of an autocratic state, protestors have been using Twitter and Facebook to get their message out. The world has watched alongside, even contributing by passing on tips for how to avoid censors, get around firewalls, and confusing the state machinery by setting time and place settings to Tehran specifications.
Internet author Clay Shirky wrote:
This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true ... and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants, they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can't immediately censor.
The New York Times yesterday wrote a piece about the changing nature of censorship, and the threat to Iran's state power that social media creates. Calling the battle between the state and citizens to a "cyberduel," the Times wrote:
Iran’s sometimes faltering attempts to come to grips with this new reality are providing a laboratory for what can and cannot be done in this new media age — and providing lessons to other governments, watching with calculated interest from afar, about what they may be able to get away with should their own citizens take to the streets.
One early lesson is that it is easier for Iranian authorities to limit images and information within their own country than it is to stop them from spreading rapidly to the outside world. While Iran has severely restricted Internet access, a loose worldwide network of sympathizers has risen up to help keep activists and spontaneous filmmakers connected.
I can't help but think about rugby, where the ball is thrown backwards and to the side, ever avoiding the gridlock of the scrum in an attempt to move slowly but surely down the field. This is the political organizing power of networks; even when some part of the movement gets shut down, they pass not only the message, but now the media to convey the righteousness of their cause along the grid.
It's still unclear how this will end, but the world is shifting before our eyes.
Iran, Twitter, and the Shifting Media Landscape
Published June 17, 2009 @ 06:58PM PT
Protesters outside the Iranian embassy in London (Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images)
The Iran story continues to grip the world. A few days ago, I posted a bit about how Twitter was impacting the story, and then yesterday added my two cents to a great conversation begun by Jeff Trexler about how the protest movement was not social entrepreneurship.
With the reporting help of Change.org's very own Danny Moldovan, I wanted to share a few updates and additional angles to the story at the intersection of social media and social mobilization:
The State Department steps in. As we wrote last time, Twitter has been one of the only mass communications mediums not shut down by the government or stiffled by bandwidth, and has been a lifeline for internal organizing and sharing information with the outside world. On Tuesday, Twitter had planned to have a 90 minute scheduled maitenance time, but after a day of the #nomaitenance hashtag showing that users wanted the channels to remain open, and a call from the State Department urging Twitter to keep the service up, Twitter rescheduled the maintenance.
Greening the profile. Andrew Sullivan has been all over this story, including pointing out how people are using the green color of the protesters to signal solidarity across the social media sphere.
The shifting power of the media establishment. A huge amount has been written about the poor coverage of the uprising over the weekend, bookended by a #cnnfail trend on Twitter. But more recently, mainstream media journalists have been confined to their hotel rooms and one of the results has been even more attention being paid to the citizen journalists who are tweeting, sending photos and posting videos on YouTube. As I wrote a few days ago, platforms like Twitter dramatically accelerate and amplify messages.
Volume of the conversation. Mashable recapped some social media statistics provided by tracker tool Trendrr. Consistently there have been 50,000-100,000 tweets mentioning Iran per hour, with a peak of 221,744 yesterday. 2,250,000 blog posts have been written about Iran in the last 24 hours; 12% of the total blog posts about Iran, ever. 3,000 videos have been posted to YouTube.
Platform for change. In his incredible TED talk at the state department last week, Clay Shirky spoke about how the internet is changing media, saying: "Media is increasingly less just a source of information and increasingly more a site of coordination, because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well."
Yesterday, in a Q&A with the TED blog, Shirky shared his thoughts about Iran:
I'm always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that ... this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true ... and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants, they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can't immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.
Live From Iran, One Tweet at a Time
Published June 15, 2009 @ 08:36AM PT
Like the Gaza war a few months ago, a fascinating story brimming underneath the upheaval in Iran is the use of Twitter to communicate internally and with the outside world. From Andrew Sullivan:
Mock not. As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived. With some remarkable results. Those rooftop chants that were becoming deafening in Tehran? A few hours ago, this concept of resistance was spread by a twitter message. Here's the Twitter from a Moussavi supporter:
ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and shout ALAHO AKBAR in protest #IranElection
For Sullivan, this is a story about freedom. It is about a technology that connects a young generation's desire to grow up outside the bounds of tyranny with the unyielding churn of information to free itself from repression. He writes: "This generation will not bypass existing institutions and methods: look at the record turnout in Iran and the massive mobilization of the young and minority vote in the US. But they will use technology to displace old modes and orders."
Mashable has another side to the story; the power of new forms of real-time, user-generated media to tell a different story - perhaps sometimes a more accurate or representative story - than editorial boards of vetted media institutions.
In a post called "#CNNFail: Twitter Blasts CNN Over Iran Election," Mashable's Pete Cashmere writes about the viral spread of the #cnnfail hashtag, which is being used to represent frustration with CNN's incredible lack of coverage around the protests over the weekend. While it's unlikely that CNN's increased coverage is directly do to their Twitter shamming, it's hard not to recognize how powerful it is to be able to aggregate an alternative voice, particularly one that can so dramatically amplify those speaking from the center of the storm.
For this blog, there is something deeply entrepreneurial about the whole story. Not in the sense of using market mechanisms to achieve something, but in the hunger for newness, the incredible willingness to risk for something better, and the incredible way available resources are tapped to advance a goal.
The Twazzup conversation aggregator platform is being used particularly effectively to put conversation about the elections and protests all in one place. Using a variety of different hashtags and linking out to other key media sources, it's a one stop shop for ground level perspective on things.
The question, in the long run, is what this new powerful technology allows them (whoever 'they' are next) to do to create a better future. Perhaps just as much though, it's if and how 'we' choose to hear them and to respond.
