Digital Vision Fellow - Steve Ketchpel

2007 Tech Laureate Showcase (Part II)

2007-11-11T23:14:00.001-08:00

(see Part I for descriptions of other projects: cooking fuel pellets from seaweed, packed earth vaulted ceilings, P2P microcredit, P2P marketplace with a mobile interface, and a web-conferencing platform with VOIP for students.)

The other projects that I got to see were:

TakingITGlobal

This prize-winning project is a social networking software platform for youth interested in humanitarian issues. The site TakingITGlobal.org has about 170,000 members. Membership is free, and they have a global reach (living up to their name). I did a quick search to see how global, and did come up with 50 members in Mali, but after looking through the first 25 profiles, I'd say that maybe only 1 or 2 is still an active member. (They provide both create date and last login date.) They have an impressive number of languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese), but the English one was the only one that was really active (41,000 posts); French was runner up with 1,344, Spanish and Arabic had a few hundred each, Russian hadn't even broken into the double digits yet... But they do have good content on various issues (like the UN Millennium Development Goals) and ways for youth to connect with each other and learn about events. In addition to the "free" site, there's a way to use the platform in schools, with licensing costs at the school/district level.

Counterpart International

This project is primarily software for logistics management for humanitarian aid. It allows the tracking of pallets and bundles (sounded like USAID was a prime user, and the goods were rather varied...) from the shipper all the way to the recipient, with report back capabilities. The technology platform is Microsoft (.NET and SQL-Server) though it's not really a web application. (Given money, that's what Vlad, the key developer said he would work on next.) The project has been going for about 7 years, with Vlad Roshchin as the person providing continuity, over the life of the project. He said that it's about the equivalent of 1.5 FTE's per year, so about 10 person-years of effort.

Grameen Shakti, Empowerment Through Renewable Energy Technologies

I was a bit confused about what Grameen Shakti was doing; it seemed a sort of hodge-podge of energy related projects using microfinance to allow even the rural poor to buy solar panels, cooking stoves, etc. Fortunately, I'd grabbed one of the info packets with many pictures of a smiling Managing Director Dipal Chandra Barua receiving prizes around the world. From the booklet, I see they have installed 120,000 solar home systems in Bangladesh and are adding at a rate of 4,000/month. A case study said that a pharmacy owner had replaced his kerosene lighting with a 20 watt solar system. I'm extrapolating a bit here, because the numbers are sketchy, but it looks like he has to pay $13/month for 42 months, and had to pay 10% down (about $56). After the 42 months it's paid off, and he can get a service contract for about $13/year. Given that he was paying about $20/month in kerosene, this is a win, breaking even after 8 months. Plus, the light is better (7 watt CFL, plus 3 LED's) and better for both air quality and environment.

The cook stoves seem a similar benefit, reducing fuel needs by 50%, as well as venting less smoke into living areas. A third program that they run is biogas power generation, converting cow dung to energy and fertilizer. It seems that a "family-sized" unit (3 cubic meters) produces enough energy to cook 3 meals a day.

PATH, Vaccine Vial Monitor

A simple idea, really, but one that seems to work: vaccines spoil if exposed to high temperatures for too long. PATH has figured a way to make labels that contain chemicals that change colors if they've been exposed to temperatures that would ruin the vaccine. So before a vaccine is administered, the health worker confirms that it hasn't spoiled. It's also saved many doses that would otherwise be discarded to be "on the safe side" when refrigeration loses power for a short period. There are different labels that have different "warning" temperature / durations. They cost a few cents each to make, falling within the target of being less than 5% of the cost of the vaccine, especially when the labels are applied to multi-dose containers.

Vaxin Inc., Rapid-Response Bird Flu Vaccine

This seemed like a cool technical breakthrough. I didn't understand the medicine behind it, but the general gist I got from Dr. De-chu Tang was that:

You could produce vaccines for avian flu much more quickly / cost effectively
You could vaccinate chickens while they're still in the egg (much easier!)
You could potentially combine other needed chicken vaccines with it

Vaxin is a private VC-backed company (raised $25M, I think he said) headquartered in Alabama, and founded in 1997.

2007 Tech Laureate Showcase (Part I)

2007-11-11T00:18:00.000-08:00

This past Wednesday was the annual Tech Laureate Awards sponsored by the Tech Museum of San Jose. In addition to the Gala Awards Dinner where the winners are announced, there's a showcase of the 25 different projects (which can be as early stage as a single person or a multi-year effort from a Fortune 500 company or top university). The showcase is a great opportunity to speak directly to these leading social entrepreneurs. It's possible to get several minutes of personal explanation from the people who were most responsible for the project. (In fact, it's sort of disappointing that there aren't more people that attend and mob the tables...)

I had only a limited amount of time at the showcase, so I didn't get to talk to all 25 projects. In fact, of the groups that I talked to, only one TakingIT Global.org won one of the $50K prizes. But among the groups that I talked to:

Marc Andre Ledoux, Consortium SudEco Industrie: This project kills two (or more) birds with one stone. Invasive seaweed is clogging up rivers needed for fishing and transportation. The idea is to harvest the seaweed, dry it, crush it into pellets that can then be used as fuel for burning in cooking stoves. The future plans for this project are the make the pellet-making press run off of oil extracted from other trees, and enable other machines to run off of the energy source as well. This project is still in proof of concept phase.
Association la Voute Nubienne: This project focuses on reducing building costs by (re-)introducing a way of using packed earth bricks for a vaulted ceiling rather than wood (disappearing quickly, and 10X the cost...). The vaults can be 3.2 meters wide and as long as needed. The photos showed a range of buildings that were constructed with the technique. In addition to being cheaper, the packed earth is also cooler than some of the alternatives. There's a great demand for buildings in this style, the challenge is training enough builders: it's an apprenticeship program, and you really need to build two or three with an experienced builder before you're ready to be the main builder, so it takes (if I understood right) a year of training. The growth is exponential (new builders can train more new builders) but only at annual rate of 1.06 (i.e., the number of builders doubles in the same time it takes to double your money at 6% compound interest, about 12 years.)
Kamal Quadir, CellBazaar: Kamal's brother Khalid Quadir was an RDVP fellow the year before me, and his other brother Iqbal Quadir started Grameen Phone and gave a talk at Stanford that I attended. So Kamal has some impressive credentials to start. And he's done some cool work. Recognizing that the cell phone is the access point to the web for many people in developing countries, Kamal has created Cell Bazaar, an online peer-to-peer market place (a la Craigslist.org) that you can access through SMS or other cell phone protocols (in addition to the browser-oriented interface shown above). The service is running, and even though it was the middle of the night Bangladesh time, new posts were being made while I was at his booth. I think he said he was getting about 70,000 daily hits, with a new item or service posted every 2-3 minutes (~700/day) and that a follow up survey had determined that about 28% of them sold. Cell phones were a high-traffic item, and tutoring services were another. He had already identified another country in Eastern Europe where he planned to roll out the next site.
Kiva.org: Kiva.org is a current media darling, and rightfully so. Matt and Jessica Flannery have really harnessed the power of the web to raise investment capital from the "retail investor" (John and Jane Q. Public) to fund microentrepreneurs around the world. They've gotten a ton of publicity (I still find it weird to see full page ads of Premal Shah in BusinessWeek for BlackBerry) and have had some growing pains along the way. Even now, they've had to restrict the amount of money you can invest, because they can't productively place all of the capital that people would like to invest. They are sending people out into the field to evaluate more MFI's, but Matt definitely said that placing the money is their biggest challenge now.
Elluminate, Inc., Fire and Ice / Elluminate Live!: This one seemed like a commercial product that was also being pitched in a "for development" context. Elluminate showed how their platform for teleconferencing over the web could be used for education, bringing together students from around the globe to learn and share ideas about environmental issues. The required hardware is minimal (a $3 microphone, I think they said) and once it's in place, there are plenty of other uses beyond primary and secondary education, like vocational training for nurses, ability for doctors to participate in conferences, etc. They'd run a couple of pilot events, and the students continued using the system after it was "over", leading them to set up more ongoing projects and events.

(watch for a Part II post with the remaining projects I saw, coming soon...)

SVMN: MicroRate, Damian von Stauffenberg (April 11, 2007)

2007-06-11T01:20:00.000-07:00

The April 11, 2007 meeting of the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network featured Damian von Stauffenberg from MicroRate, a rating agency that specializes in microfinance institutions. I ended up missing the first half of the talk, but was interested in what he had to say. After much cheerleading from the press, and the increased attention from Yunus and Grameen's Nobel award, von Stauffenberg sounded a note of caution. There have been some microfinance critics that oppose microfinance on it its own terms (that it doesn't do enough or works only in conjunction with other programs, works only for certain groups, unfairly profits from poverty, etc.) but von Stauffenberg's take was different: not that it didn't work for the borrowers, but that there was greater risk for the lenders than we were currently acknowledging.

Calling the industry's 40% annual growth a limit, given the institutional capacity, he said "We're in the seventh year of seven fat years." He quickly added that he wasn't necessarily predicting a crash next year, as timing any market is nearly impossible. This recent period of financial growth and stability has permitted nearly everyone in the market to do well. "Economic cycles haven't ended," he warned. When conditions change, those weaker performers or those that have overreached will run into difficulty. "We will see failures. It's only a question of how large and how soon."

His talk wasn't all doom and gloom. "We ain't seen nothing yet. The demand is so huge that even if we dream wild dreams, we will exceed them." Only the private sector can satisfy the demand for capital. There is a risk, he felt, that public (international financial companies) money could be "crowding out" private funding. Public money does have a role, but it's not in funding the established, successful MFI's that could be attracting private money. Too often, he said, the public money wins the deal by offering sweeteners, like technical assistance grants that the successful MFI's don't really need. Instead, the public money should be helping establish more MFI's as successful ones, ready for private money. They should be making the "5-hour journey" to the out of the way places that haven't yet made it on to the private money's map.

He talked a bit about the key cost components of the MFI's:

Operating costs
Cost of Capital
Loan loss provision

With relatively little flexibility in #2 or #3, and downward pressure on market interest rates (due to competition and regulation) MFI's are struggling with reducing costs, which causes them to move upmarket, into small business loans (at the $1,200-1,500 range). This is actually a different market, where the businesses have fixed assets and fixed costs, and therefore less flexibility, so are at greater risk for non-payment when hard times hit.

He talked a bit about the methodology that MicroRate uses to evaluate MFI's, looking at factors like:

microfinance operations, including their methodology
portfolio quality
management and operations
governance and strategic positioning
Financial Position

He noted that the "optimal repayment rate" varied from country to country, where a top-performing institution in Columbia might have 1-2% of its portfolio at risk (30 days or more late) while in Peru, 5-6% would still be seen as OK.

He talked about some coming trends and risks. As a result of more competition among MFI's, credit is more widely available, and some borrowers have become over-indebted. Without a credit bureau and strong identification systems, it's difficult to prevent borrowers using one loan to pay off another. (Indeed, he even related an anecdote where a similar scheme was run in collusion with the branch level MFI officials to try to maintain "healthy" portfolio-at-risk metrics in tough economic times.) A second risk he mentioned was that of MFI's overreaching. He noted that the leverage trend is clearly up, which gives the organizations less leeway in operations. Third, populist politics and the desire of politicians to be seen as protective of the poor sometimes induces them to impose rate caps that make it uneconomic to provide microcredit. (Though he also noted that in Latin America especially, where those laws are on the books, they are routinely ignored.) Finally, he noted that economic conditions (political stability, high liquidity, low inflation) can't continue forever. For lenders, especially the Microfinance Investment Vehicles (MIV's), he rattled off another set of risks: an oversupply of foreign funding (between 2005 and 2006, the level of funding from these MIV's roughly doubled from $1B to $2B.); lack of transparency, benchmarks, and independent performance evaluation. The returns that are offered, he said, really don't match the risk incurred (until those factors are mitigated.)

Mifos Bay Area Launch Reception (3/22/2007)

2007-03-22T20:24:00.000-07:00

The Grameen Foundation had a reception celebrating the launch of Mifos, hosted at VISA, just down the street from me in Foster City. It was well attended, with 60 or so people. Mifos is the MIcroFinance Open Source project that I worked on during my RDVP fellowship. Two and a half years later, there are 4 MFI's working on implementing Mifos at their institutions, in India, Tunisia, Kenya, and the Philippines. The other exciting aspect is the development of the open source community to support Mifos. While I tend to think about the volunteers that are involved, George Conard (of the Grameen Foundation) and Brian Behlendorf (of CollabNet) both pointed out that it's important to recognize that there are developers that can make their living from working on it as well.

Alex Counts, President of the Grameen Foundation, gave a brief introduction. George Conard, the Director of the Mifos Initiative, spoke next. He gave a really good talk, with a few powerpoint slides, emphasizing the need for microcredit (using examples of both recovering from emergencies and funding purchase of raw materials), the importance of IT systems in microcredit (ability to scale to 1 billion prospective customers), the sorry state of the current systems (90% using a homegrown system, Excel, or none at all), the challenges (each homegrown system re-creating the wheel to accommodate the slight twist that they need to support their local methodology; or small vendors trying to support a system in a different language and timezone). Open source provides a solution: the ability to re-use code and for an ecology of support vendors to spring up around it.

Brian Behlendorf of CollabNet (who brought you SVN) and a key contributor to the Apache project, was the keynote speaker. I was impressed that he spoke about microcredit; I assumed that we'd get a standard (if privileged, insider's) view of the benefits of open source. But Brian went the extra mile, and put it in the context of microcredit. He mentioned that he'd been at Davos recently, and that had driven home to him the fact that microcredit worked (ie, that borrowers could put small loan amounts to work generating greater economic benefit) and that lenders were interested in making the loans, but they couldn't connect, and that, according to Brian, sounded like a software problem! He did a good job of describing the open source benefits of transparency, and also acknowledged the Grameen Foundation for the the critical role they had in funding the development. (He compared it to the role that IBM had played in bringing Eclipse to market or CollabNet's development of SVN.)

All in all, a fun event. Great to see the Mifos progress (can't wait until it actually goes live at Grameen Koota!) and thanks to a Grameen Foundation board meeting, plus the gathering for this event, a lot of people that I'd met over the years were there (Alex Counts, Peter Bladin, Emily Tucker, Susan Davis) from Grameen, another early Mifos volunteer Charlie Tomberg, plus people that I'd met through the RDVP fellowship from Cisco (Peter Tavernise) and Google.org (Rachel Payne). It was also great to meet Elizabeth Clarkson of Omidyar.net which made a sizable investment in Mifos.

Tech Policy Summit Conference

2007-03-07T21:58:00.000-08:00

On February 26 & 27, I attended the Tech Policy Summit in San Jose. It was a really well run conference (props to organizer Natalie Fonseca of SageScape). The general intention was to bring together people from the tech sector, especially from Silicon Valley, with policy makers, primarily from DC. In spite of the cross-country flight, and horrendous weather in Washington on the 25th, causing many cancellations, it still seemed like the DC contingent was larger than the local one. I guess I'd chalk that up to mostly a questionable complacency from the techies that things political can be ignored as long as you stay focused on the customer/business/technology.

So I'll try to share my takeaways, from a largely "techie" point of view, hoping that others may be encouraged to learn more (podcasts are available) and participate in the future.

The Big Issues

Thinking back over the repeated themes that came up, I'd say the main topics were:

Patent Reform
H1-B visas and immigration
Privacy and data security
Net neutrality
Broadband access
Math & Science education
Tax policy (esp. R&D tax credit)
Trade policy (esp. monopoly /duopoly, anti-trust issues, in Europe)
Energy

I'll put together another blog post or two with the "content" highlights for these topics.

Overall, the tone was slightly alarmist. America has fallen or is about to fall out of the lead in critical areas of global competitiveness, and we need to take action.

The People

It was an interesting mix of different groups, with some impressive names from each.

Media

Government

FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras
Former FTC commissioner Mozelle Thompson
Congressman Howard Berman
Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office Jon Dudas (I noticed later that he was the one that "signed" my patent!)

Tech Executives

It was a good turnout of CEO's with a handful of others mixed in. As I was looking up bios, I was surprised that the most represented shade of red was not Crimson, Cardinal, or even Blood on Concrete (MIT), but Big Red. I've noted the Cornell affiliations below.

Jonathan Schwartz (Sun)
Stratton Sclavos (VeriSign)
John Chen (Sybase)
Rosen Sharma (SolidCore) (PhD from Cornell)
Jay Adelson (digg)
David Sifry (Technorati)
Jonathan Abrams (Socializr)
Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) (president of products)
Carl Bass (Autodesk) (BS from Cornell)
Nathan Myhrvold (Intellectual Ventures)
Talal Shamoon (Intertrust) BS, MS, PhD from Cornell in EE
Padmasree Warrior (Motorola) (CTO) Cornell MS Chemical Engineering

and representatives from "trade associations" (aka lobbyists).

UNICEF report on "Child Well-Being in Rich Countries"

2007-02-13T23:05:00.000-08:00

I saw a BBC article trumpeting the UK's last place finish in this UNICEF report (PDF version) and wondered how the US fared. Not well. We finished just above the UK (in the #20 slot out of 21), with education, ironically, being the main thing that kept us out of last place overall. (#12 vs. UK's #17)

I'll admit that I was surprised, and started reading through the report looking for methodological issues. Yes, there were a couple were I would have measured the data differently, but there were a number of interesting factoids as well.

Material wealth

The US was last in "relative income poverty" with 20% of households with children having less than 50% of the median income. This is one of the metrics I'd quarrel with. It's not a measure of absolute poverty. And if income were purely linear, you'd expect 25% of the households to have less than 50% of the median. So, it's a strange metric, and one that points more to the uneven distribution of income in the US rather than children being "poor" in the traditional sense of not being able to afford food, housing, clothing, etc. Figure 1.3a does a better job of capturing that (by asking 4 questions: Does your family have a car? Do you have your own room? How many times did you travel for vacation? and How many computers does your family have?) Here, the US scored 6th.

But in juxtaposition to that "absolute wealth" metric, was the fact that nearly 1 in 8 US households reported having fewer than 10 books. (Figure 1.3c) This put us deep in the bottom quartile. Fewer than 10 books?!? So, top quartile of wealth, but bottom quartile of access to books. Bad sign.

One point that I'm just going to quote straight from the report was interesting:

There is a trend for any increase in social spending in OECD countries to be allocated principally to pensions and health care, leaving little for further investment in children.

Hadn't really occurred to me before, but yes, certainly with medical costs rising, and seniors being voters, and children not, it does seem like a probable outcome.

Health and Safety

The US was also last in the overall category. Again, that struck me as odd, since overall, I'd say that our medical system is pretty good, health awareness generally high, and quite a bit of parental concern. The US was near the bottom for infant mortality rate (at 7 per 1000 live births not making it to a year). The differences in this category were relatively small, and especially given the potential variability in the denominator of "live births", I'm not sure this is fair. (That is, it could be the case that children who would die in childbirth in other countries, and therefore be excluded from this stat, do survive, but are at much higher risk during their first year.) Low birth weight rate is not as easy to explain away, and the US didn't do well here either.
But we're really good at gaining weight. (Figure 5.1d shows 25% of people age 13 & 15 report being overweight, again at the bottom of the list.) Accidental deaths was another area that the US was at the bottom, though here again, differences were small, and the absolute level was low. I'd assume that it probably is fully explained by miles driven per capita (both driven and passenger), and it hardly seems to fair to say children are better off if we prevent them from leaving home.

Education

Here the US was in the middle of the pack. I guess with all of the doomsaying about US education, I was expecting it to be lower. Performance on reading, math, and science was a bit below the rich countries' average. Not good, but not the horrendous showing I'd feared. The percentage of 15-19 year olds in full or part-time education was interesting. The US in the bottom quartile, though if you figure that most 19 year olds have completed high school, this might not be that big a deal. I'm hearing more and more people suggest that students should take a year off between high school and college, so perhaps a metric about how many students eventually earn college degrees is more important. The shocker for me on this metric was the Russian Federation number at 30%. ?!? Less than 1/3 of the 15-19 year olds in school?

Another stat that startled me was the percentage of 15 year olds that "expecting to find work requiring low skills". Here, the optimistic American was at the top, at about 15%. In contrast, more than half of the Japanese were pessimistic.

Family & Peer Relationships

The US was second to last, just above UK. Showings in the "single parent" and "living with step family" were at the bottom. For parental involvement (measured by child's self-reported "eat meals together several times a week" and "just talk to me several times a week") the US was middling (top third on talking, bottom third on eating).

Figure 4.3 was another distressing one. Percentage of 11,13, and 15 year olds who find their peers "kind and helpful". I was surprised at the variation between countries here. I assumed there would be a sort of constant level of "teen angst". But it ranged from 82% "kind and helpful" (Switzerland) down to 43% (UK and Czech Republic). The US was at the lower end, about 50%.

Behaviors and Risks

Here again, US second to last, just above the UK. The combinations of the health ones was interesting: US was among the least likely to eat breakfast (about 50%), not very likely to eat fruit daily, but were top 3 in terms of exercise, and still way more likely to be overweight. So we must be eating something besides fruit and breakfast foods...

In the sex & drugs categories, the US was better than the average in terms of smoking and drinking (measured by having been drunk twice or more), but near the bottom for cannabis usage (about 30% of 11,13 and 15 year olds claimed to have used it in the past 12 months) the UK, Switzerland, and Canada were higher (no pun intended), but Amsterdam's Netherlands only came in at 20%. The surveys were strangely silent on the US results in the sex categories. Perhaps the US government objected to surveys which mentioned condom usage? At any rate, no statistics are provided.

Self-Assessment

The US data were insufficient in this category to be fully reported. So there are interesting bits and pieces (many say that they aren't in good health. Related to obesity?), and another piece that I'll quote directly from the report:

Figure 6.2 shows how many answered – ‘I like it [school] a lot’. And the answer is ‘not many’.

(More specifically, about 39% from Norway, 23% from the US, and just 8% from Finland.)

One final "off the charts" finding from Japan. For percentages of youth that said "I feel lonely", in Japan it was nearly 30%. Runner up Iceland was just over 10%. Though perhaps there's a linguistic difference there, with different shades of meaning for the words in various languages used to render "lonely."

The biggest unmentioned factor, I think, was population. The US is about 2.5 times the size of the second largest country included (Japan), and more than 50 times more populous than the highest ranked Nordic states. So naturally, there will be higher variation. I think that there's also more diversity, particularly around languages spoken, in the US than any of the other countries included.

Anyway, read the study yourself, and see what you make of it.

Want to get paid to work on Mifos?

2006-12-06T23:21:00.000-08:00

The Grameen Foundation has a job opening for a Seattle-based Technical Program Manager:

Technical Program Manager

The Grameen Foundation's Mifos Initiative is working to address key information management challenges in the microfinance industry through the development of an open source software platform for microfinance
practitioners. By making technology a key strength of microfinance, the Mifos Initiative will have an enormous impact on the capacity of the microfinance industry in our efforts to alleviate poverty around the world.

We are looking for an experienced technical program manager to drive the technical roadmap for the Mifos Initiative and to own the software development infrastructure for the Mifos platform. This position is critical to the success of Mifos and will ensure that both the functionality and the underlying infrastructure for Mifos are rock solid. The ideal candidate will have deep technical expertise, a passion for delivering tangible, customer-focused results, and experience working with open source software efforts.

The Technical Program Manager (TPM) for the Core Software Platform on the Mifos Initiative is responsible for the technical roadmap and architecture for core Mifos functional and infrastructure areas as well as the software development technology infrastructure, including the open source infrastructure. The Technical Program Manager will work very closely with the software development lead for the Mifos initiative. The TPM will drive key functional areas of the Mifos platform (such as reporting) and be the driver of the overall technical roadmap and architecture for the platform. In addition, the TPM defines and implements process and technical improvements to the build and test processes, manages the continuous integration, build, and other servers for Mifos, and facilitates community discussion around the underlying software development infrastructure. The TPM identifies key technical
issues and drives them to resolution.

This position is based in Seattle, WA.

Essential Job Functions:

Develop and maintain technical roadmap for the Mifos platform
Work with Mifos community to identify and drive technical enhancements to key product areas including system security, reporting, accounting integration, deployment tools, system administration tools, etc.
Develop and execute strategies for release and upgrade management and test and build processes for Mifos platform
Work closely with Mifos technical lead to drive overall improvements to the software development infrastructure
Manage servers (test/demo, build, continuous integration, etc.) and open source infrastructure for the Mifos Initiative
Identify enhancements to process and infrastructure that support software development activities and implement appropriate solutions
Foster Mifos community discussions related to technology platform

Required skills and experience:

At least 5 years technical program management experience developing technology solutions
Demonstrated experience driving issues to resolution and shipping products; passion for delivering tangible results; able to juggle multiple priorities
Experience driving technical architecture and strategy for complex applications
Strong experience with Java-based application development tools (including build, test, and continuous integration)
Experience with some or all of the following technologies preferred: Tomcat or Jetty, mySQL, CruiseControl, Selenium, Ant,Cobertura
Experience with release and upgrade management
Experience with open source software development, agile development methodologies and test-driven development preferred projects preferred; willingness to learn and utilize these methodologies required
Passion for the mission of Grameen Foundation and microfinance
Experience with financial systems a plus
Previous exposure to developing world and/or microfinance a plus
Engineering- or CS-related BA/BS or equivalent
Strong written and verbal communication skills
Ability and willingness to travel domestically and internationally

To learn more about the Mifos Initiative, visit http://www.mifos.org and
http://mifos.sourceforge.net.

To apply, send resume and cover letter to mifos@grameenfoundation.org.
No calls please.

Mifos 1.0 Launches!

2006-11-19T18:30:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to the Mifos team!

(from left: James Dailey, Emily Tucker, George Conard, Melissa Turtel, Priscilla Dosiou)

At the Microcredit Summit in Halifax, Mifos was officially released. Since starting to work with the Grameen Foundation team in September 2004, it's great to see the project reach this stage.

You can find download instructions for the software at:
http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javatools/InstallMifosPackage

But be forewarned: Getting to a fully-functional installation does
require a fairly high level of computer savviness: installing MySQL, Jetty, Java; setting environment variables, etc.

With the launch, there's been a spate of publicity. A couple of notable articles:

Grameen Foundation Press Release
Article from International Development Resource Center on partnership for Mifos in Africa
BusinessWeek magazine article (mentioned 3 paragraphs from end)

Two ribbon-cutting ceremonies

2006-09-17T17:18:00.000-07:00

Two major construction projects had inaugural ceremonies within 200
yards of El Camino Real and Embarcadero Road in Palo Alto within the last 24 hours. Here's a quick scorecard:

	Stanford Stadium	Opportunity Center
Purpose	Venue for football games, commencements, other major events	Housing for previously homeless singles and families, drop-in social services such as laundry, mailboxes, showers, etc.
Opening Date	Sept. 16, 2006	Sept. 17, 2006
Construction Cost	$90M	$24M
Private money raised	$90M	$9M
Start Date	November 26,2005	September 13, 2001
Capacity	50,000	131 (approx.)
Replaces...	84 year old 85,500 seat stadium	Canopy in field behind Red Cross building
Media Coverage (from Google News)	26 articles	1 article
Website	www.stanfordstadium.com	www.opportunitycenter.org
Bands Playing at Inaguration	1, Navy's (Stanford Band had been banned...)	4

I was personally moved to see the opening of the Opportunity Center. It's an amazing facility, with computer labs, a playground, a medical center, private and common areas that let residents share community or have personal space. I know that many people were critical to its creation, but wanted to especially acknowledge Jim Burklo, a minister in Sausalito, and former pastor at Stanford as well as founder of Urban Ministries of Palo Alto, for being one of they key visioniaries and tireless advocates for not just the building and its programs but also the people the building and program serve.

Thank you, Jim!

DonorsChoose "September to Remember"

2006-09-16T00:23:00.000-07:00

My last post was also about DonorsChoose, but since it's been 3 months, and they've got a new campaign going, I wanted to write about it again. As a result of my last challenge (Thanks to all those who contributed!) and some confusion on my part for the way people contributed to it, I ended up with several gift certificates after the proposal in my challenge had already been fully funded.

I knew that they're in the midst of a big fund drive for the month of September ($1.2M nationwide, $250K in California) so I figured this would be a good time to cash in some of those gift certificates.

I had a lot of fun doing it.

In each case, I was able to find a project that I thought would be meaningful to the person who had given me the gift certificate:

A couple from San Jose, he got his degree in math. For them, I found a San Jose school that was looking for math teaching aids for kindergartners.
A friend from San Mateo who's into photography. For him, I found a program in San Bruno that's encouraging writing skills for a "Severely Disordered Language Day Class" of high schoolers through digital photography.
A family from Venezuela with a girl in first grade. For them, I found a project that helps kindergartners in San Jose by hearing tapes of stories in English, even if they come from non-English speaking homes.
A friend from Oakland who was born in Iran. For her, I found a teacher in Oakland whose class of 9th graders will read Persepolis, a story about a girl who lives through the Iranian revolution, as a way to teach Iranian history.

If you're puzzling over what to get that difficult to shop for friend or relative, I was amazed at the range of meaningful projects that are part of the DonorsChoose list. Please take a look at the challenge grant and see if you're as lucky as I was in finding the appropriate gift.

DonorsChoose.org

2006-05-25T16:12:00.000-07:00

I recently learned about a new initiative from DonorsChoose.org, a non-profit that accepts grant requests from K-12 teachers and makes them available to donors from across the country. DonorsChoose has set up BloggersChoose.org, a way for us bloggers to spread the word. Anyone can create a challenge, and then publicize it.

I've set up one on Economics and the World, though the only proposal I've found to include so far is one that's local: a high school in Richmond, CA. I've set a rather ambitious goal of $800, especially since this blog has been dormant for nearly a year.

If you're not in a position to give, consider putting together your own challenge, and publicizing it to your network!

Publicity from Dominican Republic visit

2005-07-26T22:13:00.000-07:00

Carlos just sent this article from Fundacion Global, a non-profit where we gave a presentation in December. For non-Spanish speakers, the paragraph that mentions me reads (courtesy of Google Translate):

Steven Ketchpel spoke on the microfinancial services for the developing world. It emphasized the possibilities of reducing to the poverty through the microcredit and the way that lacks to cross. At the moment, in the world it has around 7.000 microfinancial institutions and the majority serves less than 2.500 beneficiaries as loans.

Fun fact: I'm not wearing a tie because we were running late from the previous visit, and making powerpoint slides in the car on the way to this talk...

RDVP Seminar: Peter Hart, Ricoh Innovations (5/18/2005)

2005-05-18T22:19:00.000-07:00

Peter Hart, Chairman and President of Ricoh Innovations came to speak to the fellows about globalizing Co-invention. His starting point was the question of non-technical aspects that influenced adoption rates of technical products. He figured that as the fellows are focused on introducing technology solutions into markets where they haven't previously existed, we would be more cognizant than most of this co-invention process, the way that a target customer population takes an invention and uses it entirely unanticipated ways--changing work patterns as they adapt to this new technology. The feedback loops between different parties in the invention process were critical: between the technology provider and the technology integrator, but even more important, between the end-user and the technology integrator.

He cited 3 factors that influenced adoption rates:

Network Effects
The cost of labor relative to the cost of technology
Complementarities

These bear a bit more explanation:

1. Network Effects: Metcalfe's Law of the value of belonging to a network increasing with the square of its size. So, as more people have fax machines, having one becomes more valuable, because you can send your fax to more places.
2. Relative costs of labor and technology: He showed two historical plots (price of electric motors vs. assembly workers and price of PC's vs. knowledge workers). In each case, the rapid spread of the technology occured during a period where the price of labor was increasing quickly relative to technology. He pointed out that the correlation could be explained either by technology making the labor more valuable/expense (by making it more efficient) or by expensive labor making it wiser to invest in technology to leverage the employees' contributions.
3. Complementarities: From an economics point of view, this refers to a "negative cross elasticity of demand" (or, for those of us that don't speak fluent economics: the goods are used together, so a price increase in one (gas, for example) results in a decrease in the demand of another (SUV's)). The example that he gave was that although cities had been electrified for lighting, once they were, it became cheaper to use electricity for powering individual "unit drive" motors.

Building on the example of the electric motor, he pointed out that the original reason that Westinghouse brought them to market was increased efficiency in power transmission (through electrical wires rather than mechanical belts). In reality, this turned out to be a minor effect compared to the flexibility of adapting the workflow through a factory according to a logical production process rather than being forced to position machines according to mechanical constraints of belt drives. We talked about a couple other instances where novel customer uses resulted in unintended impacts of the original invention: podcasting for iPods, market equalization of prices once cell phones were more widely distributed, etc.

He also talked a bit about the need to carefully understand the user need and make sure that your product and service supports it. He used a couple of dot-com examples here: WebVan, and its failure to recognize that customers couldn't anticipate all of their shopping needs, so still needed to make a trip to the store, eliminating most of the savings of ordering online. His other dot-com example was Stamps.com, the online postage service. Compared to Pitney-Bowes, at first glance, it's a cheaper online solution. But, he argued, when you consider all of the steps required to mail a package, it's actually much simpler to use a Pitney-Bowes machine. Consequently, Pitney-Bowes' market cap is $10B compared to Stamps.com $350M.

During the Q & A session, he talked a bit about the reasons that Ricoh was investing in BOP research, and argued that Ricoh had often taken the "long view". Now, they're reaping the benefits of their "green" investments started 30 years ago.

RDVP Seminar: Motoo Kusakabe (5/10/2005)

2005-05-11T11:19:00.000-07:00

Motoo Kusakabe of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is visiting Stanford as part of the selection committee for next year's group of fellows. He gave a seminar on ICT, development, and a National Innovation System. Starting from first principles, he chose a metric that he wanted to improve: per capita GDP. He showed a list of the top performers in terms of increasing GDP over the period from 1980 - 2002:

China: 8.2%
Korea: 6.1%
Ireland: 4.8%

Then he looked at different theories that might explain the difference between high performers and low performers. He felt that most of the earlier theories (Investment/Savings Gap; Structural / Macroeconomic Policy; and Governance) had not adequately explained the difference, and proposed to delve deeper into whether technology and innovation might explain it better. He further segmented the study into Lower Income Countries (annual per capita GDP < $2,936) and Higher Income Countries (above that rate). Since it was a study of development, OECD countries (already developed) were excluded.

With each category of factor, he determined the strength of the correlation between the 2002 data and their growth rate over this 22 year period. Some findings were surprising (most troubling to me was the NEGATIVE correlation between number of scientists/engineers in Lower Income Countries and their economic growth), others were more expected, if weaker than expected and not always consistent between Higher Income and Lower Income Countries. Some of the factors that Motoo cited included primary education, telephone lines (and installation waiting time), internet users, PC, internet servers, and (especially) government priority in ICT and cluster development; exports (especially of hi-tech and ICT equipment and services); governance factors; availability of credit and risk capital.

He did include the disclaimer that showing a correlation is not causation, and there were some additional suggestions from the audience that he should look at multi-variate correlations and data covering the same period (correlating 2002 data with long-range growth rates implies that if there were causation it was probably that long-term fast GDP growth caused the related factors rather than vice versa).

He moved on from the data to the recommendations, outlining a policy of investment and priorities that he felt governments of the Lower Income Countries and Higher Income Countries should pursue to achieve faster GDP growth. These priorities included education, IT literacy, teacher training, connecting the rural poor, microfinance, a payment system for rural areas, job creation, and an ICT focus in government to create a national strategy and regulatory framework, and set up a universal access fund and incubator. Higher income countries should also focus on ICT exports, and move up to higher scale efforts on universities, incubators and science parks, even a national innovation system that includes collaboration from academic, industrial, business, and government parties.

He concluded with a brief description and demo of an Open Knowledge Management System, a way of creating a portal for sharing information with editor functions. A sample is http://www.ictseminar.org.

RDVP Seminar: Karen Mullarkey (5/4/2005)

2005-05-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

Karen Mullarkey of America 24/7 (the people who make the "Day in the Life..." coffee table photo books) came to speak about the power of photos and story telling. She started off with her own story, how she had graduated from college at a time when the only question a woman received in her job interview was "How many words a minute can you type, honey?" As she adapted to this environment and challenged it, after a brief detour through sales and market research departments, she ended up in the photo group, and continuously asked questions that were answered by the premier photographers and journalists.

She directed the photography departments at various publications (Rolling Stone Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and Newsweek) and then worked on the America 24/7 projects. She talked a bit about those projects, which are hugely expensive, and hard to make commercially successful. Rick Smolan transformed the business by lining up corporate sponsors to underwrite production costs. (For the 1995 "24 Hours in Cyberspace" project, Kodak, Adobe, Sun, Netscape, and AOL were sponsors.) For the recent 50 states project, some 1,000 photographers, plus stringers and amateurs submitted 250,000 photos.

After that she talked a bit more about how to use photos to tell the story of our projects. First of all, she encouraged us to use pictures (advice that didn't quite sink in for me if you look at my recent poster...) and choose pictures that "smack you in the face, are very beautiful or let you laugh a little bit" (they'll be more drawn to them). Start with a premise of what you want to show, and outline the story. She talked about self-publishing small books that can be distributed cheaply, as a way to make a project tangible for potential investors, etc.

She also finished off with a generous offer to share her expertise or contacts (photographers around the world to help record our projects), specifically mentioning CameraBits and ZoneZero.com.

RDVP Seminar: Howard Rheingold (4/29/2005)

2005-05-01T16:43:00.000-07:00

Howard Rheingold came to speak about the need to start studying cooperation in a more formal way, a topic he treated in greater depth in a course he taught winter quarter. With an interesting background (and wardrobe), he is an entertaining speaker. At times, I felt that he glossed over the existing work in this area. Economists, especially in the area of game theory, problems of fair division, and coalition formation, have been studying this for years. (Indeed, a good part of the reason that I abandoned distributed artificial intelligence, another discipline very interested in cooperation, is that catching up to what the game theorists had already done would have taken years.) His dissection of the prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons, just scratched the surface and focused more on the "pop" articles rather than the academic ones, though Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons did look like an interesting book. More news to me was his report of neuroscience studies that showed that punishing cheaters excites the same areas of the brain as gaining rewards. "Altruistic punishment is the glue that holds society together," was his quote in describing the Ultimatum game. (One person is given $100 to split with a second person (with whom he cannot communicate). If the second person "accepts" the split, they get the money, divided as proposed. If the second person does not accept, they both get zero.)

All in all, I'm happy that he kept it high level, since that left more time, for the areas where I think Howard's viewpoint is unique: technology trends. He talked about the emergence of the cell phone as a way that 1.5B to 3B people will have broadband data access on a "just-in-time" basis, and the implications for information distribution, transactions, forming connections, and maintaining trust and reputation. He covered a laundry list of technologies that allow corporations to benefit from the cooperation of others (e.g., Open Source movement, Amazon API, Google Adwords, Wikipedia, eBay reputation server, ThinkCycle, Folding@home) as well as a set of technologies that make such volunteerism/cooperation that much easier (e.g., email, blogs, wikis, blog rolls, buddy lists, PageRank, etc.)

He also left quite a bit of time for discussion, which led to some interesting comments about migration: the move of people from the countryside to the cities where there may be jobs or from a poor country to a richer one. Technology is a new enabler, however, for these migrants to stay in touch with (and send money to) their home communities on a scale not previously possible.

RDVP Seminar: Peter Tavernise, Cisco (4/27/2005)

2005-05-01T15:18:00.000-07:00

I had the sense that Peter Tavernise (see his Omidyar Network Profile) sees things a bit differently than the rest of us. He is a Senior Manager at Cisco Systems Corporate Philanthropy and Senior Program Officer at the Cisco Foundation. At times, I was prepared to dismiss what he was saying as looking through a biased, distorting lens. But at other times, it seemed that his comments were based on keen insight, because he's observing more closely than we are.

Certainly he came to the seminar better informed about the fellows' projects than most speakers. He had created an issue map that showed how he felt the different projects fit together within the overall context of disaster aid. He invited us to refine his draft.

As different topics came under his magnifying lens, he spoke his mind, but with such speed and assumed shared context that I often felt like I was trying to keep up with all the allusions of a rant by Dennis Miller.

His criticisms of the foundation/philanthropy world, especially as an insider, were eye-opening. His views that technology could help, and that it should be up to the funders to seek out and actively support the leaders of organizations that could effect needed change, were encouraging. He wondered why, after so much effort was made to select the best 5 to 7 projects in each of key program areas through the Tech Laureate awards, why all but one are sent home empty-handed? He criticized the stingy payout policies that lead some foundations to consider themselves perpetual memorials to dead people rather than active organizations addressing a key societal need. He pointedly asked why a small organization like Acumen Fund's A to Z Textiles' bed nets could be so much more effective than efforts funded by multi-lateral organizations for years with so much more money. He hoped that as technology permitted donors to recognize which organizations were being effective and which were not that donor-citizens would see that they should care about how organizations were using their money. Out of a $250B sector, Peter said that some $20-80B is being spent/wasted on overhead, redundant and ineffective organizations. The emerging trend of joint for-profit/non-profit models is innovative, but requires further exploration to figure it out, supported by legislation and tax and accounting reform.

Peter also talked about some successes (including the bed nets mentioned above). Global MapAid, incubated at the RDVP, was one. Using handhelds with GPS, collection of accurate GIS data in disaster situations helps aid workers better understand what they are facing. He said that Kofi Annan personally visited the Global MapAid offices during the tsunami relief effort, not for PR purposes but to get his hands on the maps they had!

A second was Active Voice which uses its VoIP and messaging service to provide voice mail boxes to people in need (homeless, job seekers, victims of domestic abuse) these Community Voice Mail services are available across the country and make a huge difference for the people receiving them.

He also mentioned The Foundation Center as a valuable resource for those of us looking to raise money from foundations. He also recommended 3 books:

RDVP Seminar: Interplast (4/25/2005)

2005-05-01T14:36:00.000-07:00

Susan Hayes, CEO, and Bill Schneider, Chief Medical Officer of Interplast, came to share the work this organization is doing to eliminate the hardship of living with conditions that can be treated through reconstructive plastic surgery. Cleft lip and cleft palate were two of the most common mentioned, but burn scar contractures (where tissue heals from a burn in such a way that the range of motion is limited) is another significant area, and doctors perform the full range of operations for their specialty. These volunteers treat about 3,500 patients per year. The patients are charged nothing.

Volunteer teams of about a dozen people (2 surgeons, 2 anesthesiologists, 4 nurses, 2 translators, 2 pediatricians) travel for a two-week period where they
might treat 20 patients per day. Other programs are "visiting educators" where a doctor makes a one-week visit to one location, covering a single topic. The volunteers are mostly, though not exclusively, Americans. Interplast also runs 7 outreach centers for training. Patients are taken for surgery only if they meet basic health requirements (since their conditions are not life-threatening, they must be in otherwise good health before a surgeon would operate). The Patient Care Improvement Program (PCIP) is designed to look for other ways to improve patient health, like providing iron supplements.

Interplast also focused on the contribution that IT could make--tracking statistics of patient data and enabling virtual collaboration among globally distributed colleagues. They maintain a blog. Their intranet site allows doctors to upload pictures and case histories of particularly challenging cases. But they were not hung up on technology: Dr. Schneider commented that through their expansion plans they have found it is the "individual that matters; a human being that is committed to making the program work locally." He cited the scarcity of plastic surgeons in other countries: with Zambia and Bangladesh each having 1 per 10 million people.

RDVP Seminar: Henry Lowood (4/20/2005)

2005-04-23T22:57:00.000-07:00

Henry Lowood came to speak about computer games, of the Serious Games variety. Stuart invited him hoping that by using the interactivity and playful attributes that cause people to spend hours with regular games, we could create powerful tools to help end users engage with our project material. We learned a bit about the debate of "narratology vs. ludology" (are games about telling stories or just about playing?) and the challenge between the pedagogical aspect of creating a simulation versus playing one. I was also surprised to learn how widespread game playing is--in Korea there's a virtual world game that counts some 4M subscribers (out of a population of 45M). And of course, some of the "lurid details" of the gaming world came up: the sad popularity of violent games like Grand Theft Auto and the lack of games that focus on growth and development rather than conflict. Henry did talk about some games like September 12th, where the nominal goal is to shoot cruise missles at terrorists, but killing civilians by mistake generates more terrorists. The game is "rigged" to make it impossible to win--a statement that Lowood compared to a political cartoon. The author of "Kaboom" (suicide bomber simulation) claimed not to have a political agenda. "There's nothing political in my game. It's just about someone blowing himself up."

Perhaps a bit more relevant to the RDVP focus of the developing world was the real world sweatshops where low-paid workers are taught simple "farming" techniques in the virtual world to accumulate points that can be converted into weapons, etc, and sold (for real dollars) on eBay (See for example, their market in Ultima Online goods). Upset by the manipulation of the game, a set of vigilantes has sprung up, trying to eliminate these farmers by drawing monsters to where the farmers do their work. Untrained in defense, the farmers are killed. So now, the virtual sweatshop managers are training their workers in virtual self-defense, too. Sigh.

Henry shared in my nostalgia for turn-based model/data simulation games, but said that they have been in decline, out of favor after the advance of the "Quake" model of "experiential" (also called first-person shooter) games. Even real-time strategy games are becoming action/click-oriented, he said.

RDVP Seminar: Hong Lu, UTStar (4/13/2005)

2005-04-23T21:26:00.000-07:00

Hong Lu, the CEO of UTStar, (and a member of Time Magazine's Cyber Elite) came to speak about expansion of telecom services in China, the technology, and the impact. The PAS system allows "traditional" (copper/wired) telecom providers to provide mobile service in a metro region. The service goes for $5-6/mo in China, compared to $6-8/month for Unicom, and $10-12/mo for China Telecom. A 1 minute phone call is less than a penny (I just got charged $.45/"over plan minute"...). There are about 66M PAS subscribers in China, with UTStar controlling about 60% of that market.
Hong talked about a series of predictions they had made that had come true, and seem like ground truth today, though were speculative at the time they were made:

All copper / narrow band will become fiber
Communication will move from circuit-based to packet-based

He talked about some of the developments in the telecom market, specifically comparing it to the US market:

	China	US
Fixed	300M	250M
Wireless	330M (+9M/mo)	170M

In 1995, it cost $3,000 to register for a cell phone in China, the purchase price for the phone itself was another $3,000. At that time, the monthly salary for an engineer was about $50.

Today, that same engineer makes several thousand per month (GDP in Shanghai is $6,000/capita, with talented, experienced managers breaking into 6-figure salaries). The 1,000 parking spaces they planned for their 5,000 employees are going quickly, and the black market is discounting the official exchange rate for the US dollar. Internet usage has grown from 620,000 in 1997 to 94M last year, and Hangzhou is starting a campaign to have fiber to every home within a year.

Hong also talked about the possible expansion to data-carrying service. Currently only about 5% of the revenue in China is related to data, compared to 20% in Japan. Although some technical details remain to be worked out, he suspected that TD CDMA could support 1-2 Mbps, charging $100/mo and being very profitable for both the mobile and wire carrier, in contrast to the $100/mo that is currently charged for DIALUP in some markets.

He also had some interesting charts comparing teledensity (ratio of fixed and cell lines to population) to the GDP, showing a correlation. Stuart asked whether he meant to imply causation as well as correlation, and Hong said yes. Although it was not perfect, it did seem to bear up. US and Canada had about 62% (must have been for fixed line only) while China had about 50%.

RDVP Seminar: Prof. VK Samaranayake RDVP fellow from Sri Lanka (3/30/2005)

2005-04-23T20:50:00.000-07:00

Prof. VK Samaranayake, or "Sam" to nearly everyone, joined the Reuters Digital Vision Program as a visiting fellow for about 3 weeks. He was supposed to join earlier in the year, but his plans were thrown into disarray by the tsunami that struck on the 26th of December.

Sam gave a background on Sri Lanka, a nation I knew basically nothing about. It has 19 million people, and has previously been a Portugese, Dutch, and British colony. There are about 1M fixed phone lines, with cell subscriptions easily outpacing the number (with about 1.8M, and growing much faster). There are about 2.3M televisions, but only 240K internet users. Email usage is below 1%, and only about 3.8% of the households have computers. The IT workforce in 2005 is about 25,000 people.

Sam himself has an impressive background. He has a Ph.D. in particle physics, and essentially started the study of computer science in Sri Lanka. He's the chairman of the new ICT Agency, a private corporation that's owned by the government (structured this way at the request of the World Bank(?)). The School of Computing has grown to 50 staff members, 1,000 students and 5,000 "external" students who study on their own, and complete exams toward a certificate.

Digital Diaspora Collaboration

Sam's project is focused on bringing research-level expertise to Sri Lanka, though he recognizes that given the salary they could expect ($450/mo for a Senior Professor) few will make the move to Sri Lanka. Therefore, he's focused on leveraging info tech to enable virtual collaboration. He mentioned that he's continued to present a weekly radio program via skype and cell phone while he's at Stanford, and thinks that similar techniques for tele-conference for lectures could enable the diaspora of Sri Lankans around the world to contribute by spending just a few hours a week, or remotely mentoring students. The e-Sri Lanka project (supported to the tune of $53M by the World Bank) is to increase penetration and usage of information technology.

The Tsunami

Sam mentioned a couple of the realities of being "on the ground" at the site of the disaster. He said the harbor is still clogged with in-kind gifts from around the world, many unused and unusable. Though he was appreciative of the outpouring of support that came from around the world following the tsunami, he wished that the support would be sustained. Only with ongoing injections of expertise and funding will Sri Lanka be able to reach higher levels of development. He mentioned that the focus on measurements was impractical: there were too many redundant efforts, and things were changing too quickly to be able to make any useful actions based off the analysis of the data. He mentioned one project Sahana, an open source effort for disaster management (tracking resources, missing persons, matching supplies and needs, etc).

RDVP Seminar: Zack Rosen, Civic Spaces (3/9/2005)

2005-04-23T20:08:00.000-07:00

A lingering event from before spring break that I didn't yet post notes for... On March 9th, Zack Rosen from Civic Space came to speak about this content management system for community organization. Zack talked a bit about his background (interest in technology and society pursuing a degree at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), as well as his experience in working on the Howard Dean political campaign. He was proud of what he called the innovation of the Dean campaign: opening the doors to anyone. But although the "Meetup" system brought Dean supporters together, it didn't provide the direction needed to have an impact on the election. The role of the campaign was not to direct a master plan, but to facilitate the grass roots discussions and plans.

Zack started with the "Hack for Dean" effort, focused on open source grass roots organizing tools. Starting with Drupal, and expanding it to a network of communities that could talk to each other. Zack cited Reed's law: The number of (potential) groups within a network grows exponential with the number of members of the network. So their focus became to form, build, network groups, share content, profiles and events across sites. By doing that, Dean was able to raise $15M in one fundraising cycle, compared to Clinton, who, as an incumbent, had raised $10M.

With the end of the Dean campaign, they attracted funding from Andy Rappaport and are now an independent non-profit organization with 6 full time people. They're refining their business plan ("a community organiaing platform that works with others to service verticals (like schools, churches, civic organizations) and sells services to vendors"). In March, there were 150 organizations using it. Now there are 187 (see current list of known sites).

In spite of the failure in the ballot box, Zack felt the Meetup idea was a success: it went against the mores of the time separating the virtual world from the real one. Zack saw it as one of the signs of increased political power of the online world, and pointed to South Korea's Oh My News (English Version) where users submit the content, and it is selected for inclusion by an editor. It is, he said, the news medium with the broadest reach in South Korea, and its political endorsements helped candidates win the presidency and congressial elections. Zack mentioned the project that Dan Gillmor is starting in the area of citizen journalism.

Mans, acting partially with his Reuters' hat on, warned against the danger when people start debating facts, rather than keeping an objective reporting, and confining advocacy views to an editorial page. Zack responded: "We're already there. They lied and they won."

And so as not to end on that grim note, Zack pointed out that there was a large market for these services: some $100M annually, currently being fulfilled by companies like GetActive and Kintera.

Emerging from Hibernation

2005-04-23T19:48:00.000-07:00

I can't let a month go by with no posts without some explanation. Some of the silence was semi-intentional: Stanford had a couple of weeks of down time for the program (winter quarter final exams and spring break). Then the first few sessions of our classes and seminar upon the start of the spring quarter were more internally focused: looking at what we hoped the program would accomplish in our final quarter. As such, it was more for the fellows, and less of interest to outsiders who might be reading the blog. I may sprinkle a few comments in some of the related posts, but for the most part, I'll skip this.

A quick project update as well: after a gruelling RFP (Request for Proposals) process to evaluate different potential partners to build version 1.0 of Mifos, we're very close to reaching an agreement. We benefitted from recommendations from a number of contacts, and evaluated the different candidates based upon their responses: the technical merit, how well they understood what we were asking, how well we felt they would work with us, the quality of product they would produce, the timeliness of their efforts, references of people who had worked with them, and, of course, the cost. It was a great opportunity to hear from outsourcing companies as well as US-based companies that had chosen to outsource work. My assessment is that running a project with a remote team adds a number of challenges around communication, expectations, skills, schedules, and people. There is a potential cost advantage over US-based development teams, but finding the right group and making the project a success is no less challenging than hiring a local team--and probably riskier.

It is, I believe, the right decision for Mifos: by engaging a team, we'll likely have a more coherent view of the global system than we would if it were pieced together by many volunteers working part time. It will probably be faster. We will probably have more dedicated QA resources. And given our expected partner is in India, they will probably have greater access to MFI's than a US-based team.

A new form of government?

2005-03-23T23:52:00.000-08:00

Over dinner last night with a few friends, we were bemoaning the politicazation and partisanship of the US media. Too often, citizens choose to consume only media that reinforces their own views and therefore have little opportunity to hear the true debate that should shape the political landscape and determine elections. Instead, spin-doctors and pundits from each political stripe immediately (post-debate) deconstruct the event, showing how their candidate "won", until the original event is forgotten, and the analysis becomes the reality.

"It's as if it's no longer a democracy at all. It's become a whole new form of government that needs a new name..." my friend begin.

"A Media-cracy" I blurted out.

I was chagrined to later find out that I had not been the first to coin this new word, it was already registered at Unwords.

Catch up post (3/22/2005)

2005-03-23T23:47:00.000-08:00

Mifos Update

Although the RDVP program has officially been on spring break, it's still been a busy time for me. One of my Grameen colleagues, Ericka Lock, came down from Seattle for a couple days, as she, Steve Mushero, and I started combing through the Business Requirements Document, looking for ambiguities or things that weren't specified clearly enough.

The process continued for a week while I was in Seattle, though we did take a couple of days out to give our technical advisory board an update and gather information about the possibility of outsourcing the development work, probably to a firm overseas, in an area of the world where microcredit is actually done. Even after two solid days of plowing through a list of open issues, many still remained, so we’ve continued the process in the exemplary manner of a distributed team: two members in Seattle, a third in the Seattle area (but at home), one at Berkeley, and one at Stanford. For one of the meetings today, we added another continent, with Ericka calling in (via Skype) from Peru.

http://www.Namaste-direct.org

In addition to the Mifos activities, I sat in on a board meeting for http://www.Namaste-direct.org a microcredit organization started by Bob Graham. His vision is to use the power of the internet to attract donors and allow them to have a much more detailed view of the impact that their donation makes, by having their money directly fund a “Group of 100” (women borrowers) in places in Guatemala like Ixil or Villa Canales or
Chimaltenago. Team captains (primarily college interns from the US) will visit the groups, record the stories of the borrowers and share them with the donors that funded the group, giving donors a real sense of how their money was invested. I'm curious to see if some of the internet marketing techniques that I learned at Vividence.com will help boost online contributions and conversion rate.

MicroMentor

I also had a chance to meet David Rand, the Founder of http://www.micromentor.org, an online service to match micro-entrepreneurs in the US (for now) with mentors who can provide business expertise, such as advice in strategic planning, marketing, fundraising, networking. Micro-entrepreneurs self-register, mentors register on the site, and when approved, can search through the profiles of the entrepreneurs, and contact anonymously (via the site) the entrepreneur. If the entrepreneur (who sees a "blinded" mentor profile) agrees to the match, the site exchanges the contact information. After a two year pilot, Micromentor re-vamped last year (moving to the model just described) and is growing in a controlled fashion while they prove out the model.