New Blog: runningaround.org

Hi readers,

I've started a new blog over at runningaround.org. Hope you like it! This is more about creating things - applications, web sites, baked goods, whatever!

Entrepreneurship Week at Stanford

The DV Fellows (myself included) are presenting at Eweek today.

Today's event is two parts. First, a panel discussion about funding social enterprises followed by an open house the Digital Vision projects.

The panel began with a discussion of what social entrpreneurship is. Stanford's Center for Social Innovation uses Greg Dees' very specific definition of social entrepreneurship that firmly incorporates social returns with financial ones.

The first panelist is Jenny Shilling Stein, the executive director of the Draper Richards Foundation.

She first talked about the characteristics of a prospective social entreprenur, and specifically someone interested in investment by Draper Richards Foundation.

• A candidate who is organized, who knows who the competitors, and funders are. It is critical that they know the market landscape
• Personality, charisma. In the for-profit world, this would be a sales-type personality. Someone who fillls up the room with passion, excitement, and is willing to take a risk.
  
• A good heart. This is critical to support funding, interest, and collaboration.

Some common mistakes that seekers make is trying to solve too many problems at the same time, for example tree farming and clean water. Also, an existing or large board of directors is a bad idea at the beginning, it's much better to be nimble and well supported.

Finally, great ideas really come from direct experience. It is critical to experience a problem or need first hand and move from there to solving it from an organizational perspective.

---

The second is Jessica Jackley Flannery, Co-Founder and Director of Business Development of Kiva.org.

Jessica talked about her experience getting started, and how it was critical to meet and understand the people that Kiva serves. She emphasized the importance of really getting to know the people that they would serve. Jessica learned this by going to visit people served by the village enterprise fund in east Africa two and a half years ago, and that experience coupled with her passion for microfinance ultimately led to Kiva.

The stories were quite compelling, but she wasn't sure at the beginning how her friends and family could directly lend a few dollars to the people.

Specifically, her advice is:

• Meet people
• Stay focused
• Follow what fascinates you
• Talk to anyone who will talk to you, both to spread interest and be informed.
  
• Don't plan too much, just give yourself a deadline and start, then interate
  

(On a personal note, this was one of the most important points to me as well. It was critical to break things down, start early, learn quickly, and get momentum. I loved using the ideas of using rapid prototyping and applying them to my project)

"Doing good, smart."

What did we do right? Figure what you want to do and do it. Don't be afraid to be scrappy. (One of my other favorite Kiva notions was from Matt Flannery, who mentioned his MDBS list in a talk at Stanford list -- the Must Do Before Sleep list. :)

---

Amy Clark, Ashoka, Global Fellows Program Leader

In terms of people, Ashoka fellows are typically creative, entrepreneurial, and trustworthy people. They start school newspapers, high school organizations, and others. They are interested in how people react to problems. They want to know if the person is interested in seeing a change happen, to make sure potential fellows are tenacious and bold.

• Is it innovative?
• Does it have broad scope?

Common mistakes grantees make are applying without a deep understanding of the social benefit to the recipients. Echoing what the previous panelists said, personal experience with problem areas to be solved is invaluable in social enterprise.

Ashoka particularly looks for trustworthy and credible applicants.

---

Suzanne McKechnie Klahr, Ashoka Fellow and Founder of BUILD

Suzanne was a law studend at Stanford during the first dotcom boom, working in East Palo Alto. She was passionate about working with low income entrepreneurs. What was so frustrating was they had great ideas but no access to funding just a few miles down the road. Here were crazy dot-com businesses getting tens of millions of dollars while a local restaurant couldn't get a thousand to expand.

She started a community law clinic, and a few months later, four kids came by and wanted to start a business, but to do that they would drop out of high school. Everyone dropped out of high school. So she made them a deal where she would help their business if they finished high school. And that was the beginning of BUILD.

Her advice for social entrepreneurs is:

• Know what you want
• Be prepared
• Be ready to say no or 'we're not ready' so you don't go in half baked
• Find a good mentor

---

EDIT: Michael Tsai has a great writeup of the open house with the Digital Vision fellows.

EDIT2: Neerja Raman, a Media X fellow at Stanford, also covered the open house in her blog.

Liveblogging myself

Experimenting on myself.

Got into a social media kick this afternoon, so I thought I'd document it.

Downloaded flock

Imported favorites

Set up facebook

Set up twitter. My twitter username is jkuner.

Sent a twitter message in reply to a friend.

Sent a facebook message in reply to a friend's status.

See an ad on facebook and realize...

Looked for adblock pro for flock -- where is it? Are they trying to get mozilla users? will the mozilla one work?

Changed my default search engine in flock to google (I guess Yahoo must be a sponsor since they are the default search engine)

Realized I should blog this so I started up textwrangler. :)

Back to searching for adblock

No go in the flock addons, but it I find out I can install regular adblock plus from mozilla extensions

Voila! Installed & restarted.

Look for instant messenger feature but it seems to only be blogs & media. So I add my blog.

Add my blogger account

Go back to checking out new facebook app -- Knighthood. [join me! :) ] Start building a watchtower.

Think about Jimi Hendrix's version of all along the watchtower and look for last.fm / flock integration.

Why is 'sign up' HUGE and 'log in' minuscule?

Retrieve password. On the way to my spam email account, check out media streams.

Look at facebook friends pictures

Search for flock google galleries. Nope, no such luck.

Decide to get back to work and post this blog entry.

Of course in the flock blog editor. :) (Note: link name editing should not continue the link, or at the least you should be able to link to nothing to end the link.)

Blogged with Flock

Catching up: Back to the beginning

Click to Play

Why am I doing what I'm doing? Once I realized I could actually use what I'd learned about business and technology to manifest social change in a concrete way, I couldn't do anything but that.

I could explain more, but I'll let my video do the talking.

This was the first video piece I created for Project VIEW, but I hadn't posted it until now. I created it at an amazing workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling.

Muhammad Yunus @ Commonwealth Club Writeup

I had the good fortune to see Muhammad Yunus speak yesterday at the Commonwealth Club, and he was very inspiring. He spoke a bit about his overall philosophy of poverty reduction, some about Grameen's new corporate joint ventures (such as with Danone), and about Grameen Bank's new program for beggars. My favorite moments were his repeated entreaties to study poverty now so that we would have materials for the Poverty Museum in the future, when poverty has been completely eliminated from day-to-day existence and is only a relic of the past.

He started with some history of himself and Grameen Bank, which in itself is a fascinating story. In 1976, after degrees from Dhaka University and Vanderbilt University, he encountered many poor women in the village near where he worked. So he started lending them very small amounts of money. Seven years later, in 1983, Grameen Bank (aka Village Bank) was launched as an actual bank, designed to serve the poorest of the poor.

Dr. Yunus framed his talk with an amusing anecdote. A friend said, "All you're doing is giving away small amounts of money? And for this, you get a Nobel prize? That's too easy!" Dr. Yunus went on to say that it was simple -- just take everything you know about banking, reverse it, and collect your prize! And that was the basic idea of Grameen Bank.

Banks say: the more you have, the more you can get
So Grameen said: the less you have, the more attractive you are

Banks want a lot of collateral, but the poor have none. No collateral, no guarantors.

Conventional banks are owned by rich men, but Grameen was owned by poor women. One of the things that led to its increased education program was that some of the women that Grameen talked to in local communities said, "No, no. Don't give me a loan. I don't know what to do with money." In fact, some of them had never even touched money in their entire lives. So the staff is trained to recognize that kind of woman as the ideal client. That is the person for whom a small loan will make a huge difference.

Building on that, Grameen added an education program. So children of clients are encouraged to go to school. And when these children did attend, they excelled. Some of them were at the very top of their class. And for those who were eligible for college or higher education, a student loan program was instituted. Last year, Grameen gave 51,000 scholarships, and now has 21,000 student loans available; the only qualification is enrollment in college or university.

The next part of his talk dealt with Grameen's program toward beggars. The prevailing theory about microcredit is that it is only for "entrepreneurs". Dr. Yunus contended that all people are entrepreneurs; hard work and creativity are basic human traits.

After examining their local community, the Grameen team realized, by talking to many beggars, that in each of their lives there was a "tipping point" that forced them into a life of begging rather than formal work. So they started a program of very small loans and education for the beggars. They would give beggars small items to sell -- food, matches, household items. With a twinkle in his eye, Dr. Yunus asked, "Since they were going house to house anyway, why not take a few things to sell? "

This program quickly grew to serve 100,000 beggars; and now 10,000 of them have completely stopped begging and earn their livelihood through selling these small items, or becoming personal shoppers for the households they previously begged from.

The bigger picture in all of this was examining the fundamental nature of business. Is it just to maximize profit? From an economics perspective, this is an incomplete model; it's a one-dimensional view of human nature. To augment this model, Dr. Yunus suggests we also need "social businesses" measured by the degree to which they help, just as for-profit businesses are measured by profit.

(Personally, I am also in favor of a hybrid approach; I think for-profit businesses are realizing they can create premium products and have happy employees by adding social change into their product mix. But this is my personal sidebar. Back to the talk...)

One of the social businesses started was Grameen Danone, a joint venture between Grameen Bank and Groupe Danone, on of the largest food companies in the world. Grameen Danone's sole mission was to feed the hungry by selling yogurt fortified with vitamins and nutrients as cheaply as possible. If they had a penny of product, they didn't need 99 cents of marketing and sales - they could just sell it for a penny. This business was solely measured by how many people would be prevented from going hungry and malnourished. In fact, the mission was so focused that Dr. Yunus insisted they go one step further than biodegradable containers. The containers needed to be edible! If the poor were paying, they should get something from it.

At a higher level, these social changes need to be measured, and a clear and agreed upon metric is the set of UN Millenium Development Goals. One of these goals is reducing poverty in half by 2015. In the new beggars program, these loans are not handouts, they are real loans. They must be paid back, but the beggars can pay back a penny at a time, even once per year. No interest, no time limits. And this program has had 60% repayment so far!

So if 2015 is the date at which poverty will be reduced by half, Dr. Yunus is already talking about plans to open a Poverty Museum soon after 2030. The grin and twinkle in his eye re-appear frequently, particularly with this pronouncement.

The final questioner from the audience said that Muhammad Yunus was a great inspiration to so many people. So who was his inspiration? He simply replied that the borrowers were his inspiration. Talking to the people whose lives had been transformed was his greatest inspiration.

EDIT: This also posted on the Madera Group blog.

Doing good is the new green

I had an interesting conversation with a friend who used to run an import/export shop here in San Francisco, and has been working for peace in the Middle East since the 70s. I was explaining to him some of what I'd learned about social entrepreneurship. I told him that the upcoming business trend (in my humble opinion) was a super-set of green business. That the new business trend would be companies incorporating all kinds of social change into their core business practices.

Just one day later, thanks to the power of internet synchronicity, there was a great article on SocialEdge called "The Arrival of Ethical Business". Keep a close eye on this one, folks. Changing the world is going to be big business.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to everyone! 2008's going to be an interesting year, with elections ramping up in the US and more. I wanted to highlight a very interesting project that came out of a TED conference called Pangea Day. The idea is very similar to Project VIEW, using digital or mobile storytelling to connect people from all over the world. Basically, this is big simulcast of short films from all over the world designed to support global connections. Best of all, Nokia sponsored it!

David Sasaki from Rising Voices has a great writeup on the PBS website.

PSA: Two good links (inter-related)

Two interesting and interrelated links came up today. The first, Joel On Software, is written by a software developer and CEO of FogCreek Software. It's a pretty good read for anyone technical or interested in the sausage factory of software development. (It's not always pretty but the end result is usually tasty).

But the thing that caught my eye, which I wanted to relay, was a link to CatalogChoice. I'd seen similar websites that contact catalog companies and unsubscribe you from their paper mail, but this was the first free one. It's sponsored by several foundations. The main paper mail I'm trying to get rid of are those persistent coupon foldovers; we'll see how it works.

Project VIEW on the internets!

Just a quick post to link to a few places Project VIEW is mentioned on the net. Firstly, I'm very happy to be included on Nokia & Vodafone's collaborative best practices site; ShareIdeas.org. They have a quick summary of the summer collaboration with BAVC.

Also, there's a great article on icommons.org about a collaboration with Steve Vosloo that allowed us to connect San Francisco, Sao Paulo, and South Africa using mobile storytelling to describe our neighborhoods and lives.

Good Afternoon, Mr President

One of the things I love about this project is how much of a effect synchronicity and going with the flow has. One recent example of this is my friend Ken and I were chatting about someone he had been trying to contact at the Hoover Institute about his project. "Rumsfeld?" I joked, but it turned out to be Larry Diamond. Ten minutes later, I saw a poster advertising an event.

Twenty minutes later, we were listening to the former President of Peru (Not Fujimori, Alejandro Toledo) in conversation with Larry Diamond from the Hoover Institute, who's written quite a few books about democracy. President Toledo was a great speaker, and it turned out, had several degrees from Stanford. He spoke about helping the poor during his term, and the importance of grassroots, on-the-ground projects. In particular, he highlighted a program that he was particularly proud to improve the lives of the poorest of the poor, and talked about how to balance the short term and long term societal improvements.

It was difficult to get much of the details in only a few minutes of Q&A, but the principle was the key take-away for me. That to improve a society, you must improve education, healthcare, and basic living conditions for everyone, starting from the bottom up.

DiSCO Neighborhoods Project

Click to Play

Digital Sister Cities Online (or DiSCO) is a collaboration between Bay Area Video Coalition and CDI, a leading social action NGO in Brazil. Our goal in this project was to show how the digital link between San Francisco and Brazil could also be a personal connection to sharing culture and creating art while developing real-world job skills. Over the summer, five high school students in San Francisco collaborated with their counterparts in Sao Paulo. To show San Francisco in their eyes, the students used camera phones to document their neighborhoods, using the universal language of images and music. Please enjoy their work.

Skype on my phone?

This has been pretty widely covered on mobile phone blogs, but it was still news to me. I'm planning a vacation trip to Turkey (late summer vacation), and was looking for different applications I could load my phone up with since I'm not bringing a laptop.

And one of the best discoveries so far was an application called fring which finally connects your phone to skype, MSN, GTalk, or most any SIP-based voice over IP service. So if you have a wifi phone, you can now connect to skype directly from your phone!

Pretty cool.

In other, more project related news, we're wrapping up some awesome neighborhood videos that I'll be promoting here and elsewhere in the next few days.

You can see some of them linked from my Vox blog if you just can't wait.

Who needs computers? Citizen Journalism direct from camera phones

There's a great article on AfricaNews today about training African camera phone-based journalists to capture & file stories using Nokia E61i phones with portable keyboards. They are calling the reporters 'camjos' (a combination of camera & journalist). The acronym may be a bit unwieldy, but the idea is amazing -- it's great to see more and more of these project start to happen.

New Group and New Ideas

We have started with a new group of Digital Pathways interns from Bay Area Video Coalition. They are a very bright group, and working on two sets of videos about San Francisco culture, which I'll link to later this week.

Also, I saw a great post on boingboing (linking to Daniel Hernandez's blog, linking to the LA times) about African hand-outs versus African support by Femi Kuti, the great musician Fela Kuti's son.

The gist of it was that aid wasn't nearly as effective as interchange, tourism, commerce, etc. The "people" relationships need to be supported by the business relationships in a spirit of real interchange, not just paying to get rid of problems.

Wrapup from Communities & Technology Conference

(Warning, this is a long post)

I presented a paper last week at the 3rd annual Communities & Technologies Conference. Overall, it was a great conference. I've mostly been to more corporate events, so the academic side of things was a good change.

My paper was on how mobile storytelling (digital storytelling with cameraphones or other mobile devices) at a minimum gives participants the ability to tell their own story, increased self-esteem and technical skills. And when well aligned with industry and government, like the Digital Pathways project, you also start to see job placement and even job creation!

My presentation is at the bottom of the post; here are some of the highlights.

Day 1 was the Workshop about business clusters in emerging markets. The highlight for me was the presentation by the Shantanu Biswas and Soumya Roy from Motorola research in Bangalore who had done an in-depth case study of Bellary jeans cluster, in Karnataka, India. There are around 800 small companies in a relatively small area who are all involved in the production of cheap blue jeans for the Indian market. They talked about the ecosystem from textile wholesalers to packaging and shipping. In this particular cluster, ICT usage was quite low and everything was done by hand; with paper reciepts and messages being sent through runners. It was a great look 'under the hood' at how this specific group of businesses worked together, and could work together better.

At the end of the day, Marc Smith from Microsoft Research gave the keynote. He talked about a number of topics, all around Digital Traces, visualizing the 'footsteps' we leave behind as we communicate in various ways. One cool thing he's done is create an outlook plugin called SNARF to allow more people-oriented ways of sorting email, like 'who did I get a lot of email from last week that I haven't gotten any this week?'

His prediction for the future was that in 24-36 months mobile devices will start to recognize the presence of others and actually do something about it. I've seen this on a small scale with some bluetooth apps, like itunes pausing when your phone goes out of range, but it would be interesting to see it on a larger scale.

Day 2

My highlight for the second day would have to be the 'history of slashdot' by CmdrTaco and Hemos (AKA Rob Malda & Jeff Bates). (flickr photo by eschipul)


It was clear they had worked together and been friends for a LONG time.. They had a great back-and-forth banter as they talked about the history of Slashdot from the pre-mod_perl days to the multi-homed, multi-loadbalanced present.


Some random Slashdot factoids (mostly on the techhie side)

• All incoming submissions are viewable: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl (not nearly as entertaining as the just-updated livejournal feed, though)
• Comments are about 10% of the traffic but 50% of the work
• Slashdot hardware:
  - 20-25 machines
  - 2 master dbs, 4 slave dbs (search, backup, slaves)
  - 15 front end machines (static, dynamic, ssl)
  - bunch of helper boxes -- SMTP, NFS, logging

From the community point of view, it was interesting to hear about how they trained new editors; a mix of picking the right people and the appropriate editing guidelines. Unlike digg (for example), Slashdot will never be dominated by Paris Hilton news. (I read both for what it's worth)

Also interesting was the talk about Rhythms of Participation on Facebook. It's mostly what you'd expect for the college crowd, spike from noon Friday to noon Sunday, lots of random messages after 2am. :)

Day 3

The keynote for the third day was Judith Donath from the MIT Media Lab. She gave a talk based on her upcoming book about "human signaling in mediated and face-to-face communication". It was fascinating; she talked about the basic idea of signaling theory. She describes it as:

Many of the things we want to know about each other are not directly perceivable. These qualities include emotional states (are you happy?), innate abilities (are you smart?), and the likelihood of acting a particular way in the future (will you be a loyal friend?). Instead, we must rely upon signals, which are perceivable indicators of these not directly observable qualities.

Qualities can be almost anything: strength, honesty, genetic robustness, poisonousness, suitability for bookkeeping employment, etc. We rely on signals when direct evaluation of the quality is too difficult or dangerous. A bird wants to know if the butterfly it is about to eat is poisonous before it takes a bite, and relies on the signal of wing markings to decide whether to eat or move on. An employer wants to determine before making a hiring decision whether a candidate will be successful or not, and relies on signals such as a resume, references, and the candidate’s actions and appearance to predict suitability for the job.

I can't really do it justice in terms of a summary, but it was fascinating look at how we communicate both explicitly and implicitly. She has a chapter of her book available if you're interested in reading more.

My presentation is embedded here from Slideshare:



EDIT: Joe McCarthy from Nokia Research just posted a very comprehensive summary as well, reminding me of a few things, like the "Daddypants" philosophy of moderation on Slashdot.

Pre-blog: 1st day of Communities & Technology conference

Well, here I am in beeyooutiful Michigan, at the MSU campus. I saw lightning for the first time in a long while. Thunderstorms are one of the things I miss living in San Francisco.

Anyway, I just got in last night and met up with a few people at the cocktail reception. It looks like it's going to be a great conference. I met a woman from Australia who's presenting on a generative 'what's the community mood' sculpture, and chatted for a bit with Joe McCarthy from NRC. I went back and re-read his blog, which is always inspiring.

This morning, I'm presenting my paper at a session called ICT for Business Clusters in Emerging Markets. I think it's going to be great. My basic idea for this paper is that media education, in particular mobile or digital storytelling can always be effective for participants in self-expression and digital education. And when it's properly aligned with industry and government, there is huge potential for job opportunities and even job creation.

I'll try to blog throughout the conference.

A picture's worth ten thousand miles

We've been having a great series of videoconferences with Keio University as part of their English Language Lounge (E-Lounge). In particular, here are two really cool ones.

In this picture, you can see me, Hernan, and Edgardo (three Digital Vision Fellows) chatting with some E-Lounge students. We had this chat last week, where we explained our projects and their subject areas; mobile storytelling, micro enterprise resource planning, and financial services for the poor through cash cards and SMS.

This week, we presented projects about San Francisco culture. Three interns walked around the Potrero Hill neighborhood in San Francisco to take pictures with our camera phones.

Afterwards, we created stories (two web pages and one video) about San Francisco culture. I think they are great. Check em out!

Rowvin (WEB PAGE):
http://mobilestorytelling.org/sfculture/sf_culture_rowvin/sfculture2.html

Anton (WEB PAGE):
http://mobilestorytelling.org/sfculture/sf_culture_anton/sf_culture.html

Seanne (VIDEO):

Doing Good With POWER!!!

Quick linkblog today. I saw two noteworthy items about power, big and small.

On the big end, I saw a link to powering the Google-plex with rooftop solar. They have a cool Flash realtime graph about how much power they're saving (and what it means in real terms. Like how long it would power a flat-screen TV).

http://www.google.com/corporate/solarpanels/home?gsessionid=NZZ6-gaUEBo

On the small end, I got a newsletter from Nokia about alerting you that you can unplug your phone when it's charged.

It's a great idea, actually. Phantom loads actually account for a lot of power overall.

Show your culture

The Project VIEW team (me, Anton, Rowvin, & Seanne) had a great time today prototyping a new project.

We talked a lot about culture, and what is American culture, San Francisco culture, and each of our own. Then we tried out a empowerment evaluation, which I just learned about from Dr. David Fetterman here at Stanford. It was quite interesting to involve the students in thinking about how they would measure cross-cultural impact based on the framework we were using.

We did a little field trip to a nearby Safeway and shot some other camera phone pictures to document American and San Francisco culture around the neighborhood. Here are some of the highlights. They're great photographers.

Project VIEW expands international finance operations

Nothing so grand actually. But one of my initial Kiva loans has been repaid. Senora Llanas from Mexico has repaid her loan to buy more videogames for last year's Christmas rush. So now I've invested the grand sum of 25 bucks into a new business. This time, I'm funding the purchase of two cows.

Microfinance is a very interesting topic, but it makes it even cooler to directly participate.