Wow. What a great conference I’ve had the honor of attending this week. The annual Web4Dev conference is wrapping up and this is the first year I’ve attended it. It’s amazing to watch some of the efforts in developing nations and how technology is creating such momentum and efficiency. While I could probably write a book or two on all of the important information I’ve been gleaning during this conference I think I’ll highlight some of the items that I was most impressed with.
Before the jump however if your interested in browsing the wiki for more information on the conference (including video’s of the presentations) you can go too http://www.web4dev.org.
Kazi Islam CEO Grameen Solutions - Technology Innovations for the Poor: Challenges and Opportunities.
One of my favorite presentations so far came from Kazi Islam of Grameen Solutions. I have been reading a fair bit about sustainable social change lately but to be able to listen to Mr. Islam’s story was very telling. As the CEO of Grameen Solutions Mr. Islam leads an effort to implement profitable, effective, and efficient social change in a traditional corporate environment. As an example of one of their programs they have been able to install over 2500 solar energy stations to shops around Bangledesh in some of the poorest rural areas in the world. They achieved this by presenting to shop owners the idea that first Grameen would loan the shop owner the money to install the system. Second that by installing the solar power system the shop owner is able to expand their hours into the evening as opposed to only working during daylight hours. During these extra hours the shop owner is able to earn more revenue there by generating more than enough money to pay off the solar system and earn a tidy profit for their family. This is a powerful sustainable system. It feeds itself and generates social change at the same time. In many ways this is how I desire to approach technology issues for education. Looking not just as a piece of technology as ‘the solution’ or even effective adoption as a ‘problem’ it’s important to take a look at the system of education and view that as a human system needing powerful inputs and outputs that create a holistic benefit for the social system.
http://www.grameen-info.org/
Also along a similar line I suggest reading about the Ashoka institute has also been pioneering in implementing these types of sustainable systems and social entrepreneurship.
http://www.ashoka.org
Robert Kirpatrick - CTO InSTEDD - Workshop for Monitoring and EvaluationInSTEDD is working to develop technology solutions that provide low fidelity data gathering for rapid response in crisis situations. Their work to develop and test systems that allow people in the field to provide rapid collaborative information for a center office or multiple offices to quickly meet emerging trends in the crisis. Oh how we could of used this during Katrina. It seemed such a mess in even our own country that crisis teams were responding to the news media’s onsite communications instead of allowing data to be gathered from low fidelity devices such as sms platforms. Wouldn’t it have been appropriate for not only police but residents and anyone in the field to be able to text in emerging information with geographic information and collaborate on that.InSTEDD has some great content on their pilot studies on the website. I’m excited to see these systems reach public beta in the near future.http://www.instedd.com
John Gage - Team Member, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Former Chief Researcher and Vice President, Science Office, Sun MicrosystemsJohn Gage provided a very telling presentation and I recommend watching it on the Web4Dev wiki. One of his pieces of information was incredible however. He opened with an anecdote that at the time of Columbus’ voyage to the Americas the travel from Europe too the Caribean took approximatley 70 days. Today we can travel at almost the speed of light investigating and interacting with the other-side of the world almost instantly. This means that we have effectively shrunk the world from it’s size at Columbus time to the size of a golf ball. A golf ball. Great work humans!
In conclusion I’m excited to return next year and am impressed with the opportunities this conference has presented me. Thanks to the UNICEF organization for sponsoring the event.
