Etsy Recognized as Technology Pioneer by World Economic Forum

On December 4, 2008 The World Economic Forum in Generva announced 34 visionary companies selected as Technology Pioneers 2009 for their accomplishments as innovators of the highest calibre, and whose technologies will have a deep impact on business and society.

After working in social enterprise for 5 years prior to joining Etsy (official start is in January) I'm really pleased to see Etsy's vision to empower people to change the world’s economy, one person and one community at a time being recognized.

Selection is the result of a vigorous process, for which the Forum received more than 320 applications from around the world that were evaluated by 44 global technology experts. The entire list of Technology Pioneers, with profiles and executive interviews, can be found here.

When Aid Can Make You Foolish

I've commented before that I've seen the affects of a generation of Africans who have been weened on the bottle of too much foreign aid. It can alternatively make people feel that they need not work hard for results or that no amount of work will lead to change as the deck is already stacked for others. BBC news recently posted an article and video on just this topic called The pitfalls of Afirca's aid addition written by Sorious Samura a BBC reporter from West Africa.

I encourage you to click over and read/view the whole report which touches on corruption, rewarding failure, dysfunctional lifestyle and graduates lost. The main solution offered in the article is for regular citizens throughout Africa to start demanding more from their leaders. While this may seem a tall task, we in America seem to have done just that in our last election. Maybe this is some foreign aid we can export to more positive and lasting results?!

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I've added a new flag counter to my blog which will track visitors from around the world. Check it out on the right side of the page.

Check Out Etsy

Big changes are coming my way in January 2009! For a sneak preview check out Etsy!

Innovation Born From Constraints

Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and an expert on how technology impacts the developing world, recently spoke with Nii Simmonds whose blog Nubian Cheetah I read regularly. The topic of their discussion was how innovation can thrive even where constraints are quite significant—as they often are in Africa. He offered seven rules about how innovation in the developing world happens, and I found that they ring quite true, particularly #2. Note: Comments/examples in parentheses are from Nii.

1. Innovation (often) comes from constraint (If you’ve got very few resources, you’re forced to be very creative in using and reusing them.)

2. Don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)

3. Embrace market mechanisms (Giving stuff away rarely works as well as selling it.)

4. Innovate on existing platforms (We’ve got bicycles and mobile phones in Africa, plus lots of metal to weld. Innovate using that stuff, rather than bringing in completely new tech.)

5. Problems are not always obvious from afar (You really have to live for a while in a society where no one has currency larger than a $1 bill to understand the importance of money via mobile phones.)

6. What you have matters more than what you lack (If you’ve got a bicycle, consider what you can build based on that, rather than worrying about not having a car, a truck, a metal shop.)

7. Infrastructure can beget infrastructure (By building mobile phone infrastructure, we may be building power infrastructure for Africa - see my writings on incremental infrastructure.)

Environmental Stewardship is Not a New Idea

One of my friends has the following Kenyan proverb below the signature line on her emails.

"The Earth was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children."

It's a good reminder that environmental stewardship is something that has been around for a long time and does not only reside so-called developed West/North (though we get the "credit" for causing a hugely disproportionate share of the damage).

Ecuador Gets It (Inalienably) Right

The following is from Grist (slightly modified by me)

Ecuador approved a new constitution last weekend that grants inalienable rights to nature, the first such inclusion in a nation's constitution, according to Ecuadorian officials. "Nature ... where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions, and its processes in evolution. Every person, people, community, or nationality will be able to demand the recognition of rights for nature before the public bodies..."

The specific mention of evolution isn't accidental; besides being an activity nature arguably likes to do anyway, evolution as we know it has close ties to Ecuador's territory of the Galapagos Islands, where Charles Darwin formed his famous theory. Ecuador's constitution grants nature the right to "integral restoration" and says that the state "will promote respect toward all the elements that form an ecosystem" and that the state "will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems, or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles."