My Davos remarks on IP

I had multiple chances to plug my ideas around a more open approach in Davos, and found a sympathetic hearing, given some exciting activity in the same area. Nike launched the GreenXchange, and the Young Global Leaders had a humanitarian patent licensing concept that seemed promising. My main talk was at a session on commercialization of university research. Here's what I said.

The underlying goal of spinning off university research is seeing that society actually benefits as much as possible from the immense investment we make in research. Commercialization is a proxy for societal impact: if it sells, it's a pretty good indicator of social value.

However, there is a problem with this: market failure. What if an innovation could be of great benefit to society, but doesn't make enough money? My favorite example is in the pharma area. Imagine two drugs. One would save 100,000 lives a year, but they are almost all poor people in the developing world. The other drug helps men feel - better about themselves. Which drug do you think a western pharma company will make? Hint: it won't be the one that saves lives.

I ran into this problem with my venture capitalists 25 years ago. We had invented the best character recognition available at that time, and it would have made a great reading machine for the blind possible. But, our investors vetoed the idea because it wouldn't deliver the financial returns we had promised them.

So, a key action to improve this market failure problem is to be open to licensing technology to social entrepreneurs. Let's encourage tech transfer organizations at universities (and government labs) to license their technology to both commercially valuable opportunities as well as socially valuable opportunities. Let's come up with ways to navigate the thicket of intellectual property to lower the transaction costs and lower barriers to using humanity's knowledge in humanity's interest.

Most of all, let's keep the balance in our approach to knowledge. We need to preserve the incentive of businesses to commercialize technology while allowing social applications to happen. This will need both strong voluntary action as well as public purpose exceptions.

If we take these actions, we'll greatly increase the chances that our incredible investment in university research will benefit all of humanity, not just the top ten percent!

Total Engagement

I just finished reading the book Total Engagement. It's rare that I read a book that has me wondering if the authors have caught a glimpse of an unexpected future, and that ten or twenty years from now people will be looking back and saying: that was the book that spotted this crucial trend. Having lived in Silicon Valley for many years, I'm used to having that experience of being exposed to the future ahead of its time. This could be one of them.

The thesis is simple. Millions of people pay each month to participate in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). I've tried them, and I have friends (and kids) that have been totally sucked into them. They punch a bunch of psychological tickets for humans: the game designers know what they're doing. The book discusses how this is done:

• an epic story line(we're saving the galaxy from the Crumlons)
• clear paths to advancement, with transparency about your skills and performance
  
• intensely meritocratic societies called guilds that work together in groups to accomplish major tasks
• strong social interactions with other people
  
• the ability to try, fail and try again rapidly, learning quickly
• the option to try on leadership roles

For many people, these games are where they come alive and truly experience their potential to solve problems, meet challenges and lead a team.

And then they go into the modern workplace, which is frequently as stultifying as these virtual worlds are thrilling. Fail!

Read and Reeves are convinced that at least some smart workplaces of the future are going to adapt some of the ways of the games to more fully engage their employees and become more effective as economic organizations. They don't have a magic formula for how to do this, but do invest a great deal of time analyzing what makes people inside these games tick and how those concepts transfer to the workplace.

Fascinating ideas, and well worth watching and thinking about.

Bookshare user on the leading literary edge!

This comment came to our volunteer email list today, and I got permission to repost. It captures the power of Bookshare so well:

Just had to share this with you guys. My husband went out to dinner last night with a friend. His friend mentioned that my husband really ought to look into getting a Kindle for me, so I could read what everybody else is reading (a Kindle probably wouldn't work for me, but the thought was kind).

So my husband told his friend about Bookshare, and how Bookshare staff and volunteers and outsourcers get books scanned and proofed and available. His friend said that sounded nice but thought that if I wanted to have access to current books and a wide variety, I really needed a Kindle.

Chuckle. My husband asked his friend for an example, and his friend gave him the name of a newish and off-the-beaten path book. Guess what? I'd already downloaded it from Bookshare and read it, and my husband knew that because I'd mentioned the title to him, and told him that I have to buy him a copy so he can read it too because I know he'll enjoy it.

It just made my day. Five years ago there is no way I could even carry on a conversation with our friends about what they were reading without being terribly frustrated about all the books I couldn't get. Now, I can read books that are newly published as fast as or even before our friends. What a difference!

Thank you, Bookshare and volunteers!

Judy

The Davos Blur

The Davos scene is nonstop: it starts with breakfast meetings at 8 am and ends typically after midnight. You rush from session to session, often jumping a shuttle from one hotel to another or back to the Congress Center. In between the meetings, there’s the powerful force of serendipity. In the hallways, you’re as likely to run into the head of an international NGO, as CEO of a Fortune 100 company, as a renowned professor as the foreign minister of a major country. And, everybody is working on something and usually is interested in several issues. Every table conversation brings a new perspective and a new idea: whether it’s new knowledge, a great contact or a new extension to the idea under discussion.

I spend time desperately trying to capture some of these insights myself, or give someone an action item (send me an email on that and I’ll do it). Each hour there’s something memorable.
Today was an example of this. In the morning, I attended a session put on by the Young Global Leaders with six interesting proposals. James Moody of Australia’s national research organization was talking about an idea of a humanitarian license for patents that has been floated by the YGL community. Since I’ve been working on IP policy and licensing on Bookshare, I was quite interested and had ideas of how to work with companies to apply their IP to social needs.

Next, I went to the Social Entrepreneurs Corner (a space set aside for the SEs) and ended up talking in detail with Iftekhar of Waste Concern from Bangladesh about the idea they floated in the bar a couple days ago for software to help cities reduce their carbon footprint. With Iftekhar’s help, I was able to quickly get three pages of notes about the opportunity, the needs, the existing tech landscape, potential partners and funders.

I next attended a session on global biodiversity, and ended up talking to two of the three speakers afterwards about our Miradi project and about the software idea from my friends at Waste Concern. Stephen Schneider is a professor at Stanford: as often happens I end up meeting someone from across the street in another country! And, had a great chat with Achim Steiner, the ED of the UN Environmental Program.

With a few minutes to spare, I grabbed some lunch while discussing the best way to help one of the YGLs get expansion funding for her cool product that could fight cervical cancer nonsurgically. Then I plunged (late) into a session called “Discover a Hacker’s Mindset,” with Pablos Holman, which was chock-full of traditional hacking (lock-picking, credit card slurping) along with hacking the world: one on maintaining the arctic ice pack and the other on preventing hurricanes. I ran into Brian Behlendorf, one of Benetech’s board members, and he gave some very constructive feedback on the city software idea, along with pointers to a couple of people I should talk to in the eGov software space. I also got to talk to Pablos because he knew Brian, and ask about ideas that might be worth licensing for social purposes.
Next I zipped over to the Global Changemakers event, where six teenagers from around the world presented their projects to change the world, using the PechaKucha format (20 slides timed over five minutes). Prince Haakon of Norway kicked off the session, along with our moderator, Angel Cabrera, the dean of the Thunderbird Business School. My mentee, Musa, talked about his efforts to help communities in Iraq, including getting blind schools what they needed in terms of equipment (something I’m planning on helping him with), and ended with a rap. Each of these changemakers was dynamic and the crowd was excited about how to help them succeed.

Running through the hall, I ran into Kristine Pearson of the Freeplay Foundation (hand and solar powered radios for mainly Africa), and heard about her great projects. The goal of these devices is to provide educational and informational content to villages with limited resources: their player is loud enough to play for 20-40 people at one time. She promised me a demo tomorrow and wants to help the blind with the device in addition to the her main constituency, the poor.

I did twenty minutes of email and then headed over to the social entrepreneur’s corner for a debrief with the Schwab Foundation staff, Hilde Schwab, and twenty five of my fellow social entrepreneurs. For those who had been at Davos before, it was clearly the best WEF meeting they had been part of. When I first attended, social issues were not top (or middle) of the agenda. But, the Schwab’s made the right call to bring us into the discussion ten years ago. Now, the social entrepreneur crowd are at the center of many of the big issues on the WEF agenda, especially the Global Redesign Initiative: global warming, sanitation and health, human rights, economic development and so on. The newbies were a bit stunned by Davos, and were like kids in a candy store talking about the contacts they had made that would advance their work.
And then, we dashed off to get some fondue, dress up for the big South Africa party, and stay out ‘til 2 listening to great music and talking shop (just a little).

Three Fabulous Conversations

The WEF is all about having a critical mass of incredible people. This enables great conversations: the serendipity effect is huge. I just wanted to highlight three conversations I had today, each of which shows why this is such a great opportunity for Benetech to attend.

Conversation One
Just as I finished my breakfast, I looked across the way and saw Larry Brilliant, the new head of the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund. That shortchanges Larry’s background: he was the key leader in the campaign to eliminate smallpox in India, cofounded the Seva Foundation and a couple of high tech companies, and was most recently running Google.org.

We then spent an hour in a wide ranging and stimulating conversation about the new Fund, its first grants, how to help social entrepreneurs we both know and admire, the energy coming from college and grad students eager to make a difference and the challenges of bringing more measured conversations back into a global society faced with enormous issues with significant uncertainty. What a great kick-off for a day!

Conversation Two
I had agreed to act as a mentor to a Global Changemaker, in this case Mousa Mousawy, an Iraqi teenager now living in Jordan. Mousa and I talked about his dream of helping centers for blind people in Iraq get the tech equipment they need. I had no idea when I agreed to the mentor gig that there would be something like this I actually know something (a lot) about. We brainstormed about people he needed to connect with like European Braille embosser makers, the Library of Alexandria (working on Arabic content for the blind) and of course Bookshare. It’s great to see someone who is not yet 20 with many creative ideas about how to help, and the drive to make it happen.

Conversation Three
When I got back late to the hotel and stopped by the bar, I found the founders of Waste Concern of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Maqsood Sinha and Iftekhar Enayetullah getting a late dinner of sandwiches. I’d visited them in Dhaka a few years back (and written a blog post), and they have a very impressive social enterprise that offers a municipality the following deal: let us haul away your waste for free. By collecting the waste and composting it using a technology that Waste Concern has created, they can access carbon credits sufficient to pay for the entire enterprise (including the capital to get the venture launched). They have expanded from Dhaka to at least ten cities, and are now wrestling with the right way to expand outside of Bangladesh.

The coolest thing was that they then explained that there was a big opportunity for someone like Benetech to write software to help them with this kind of expansion. It was a triple-play kind of opportunity: every city in the developing world needs help grappling with waste and with greenhouse gas challenges. The Waste Concern approach creates good jobs for waste pickers, keeps the city clean, reduces green house gases, and prevents corruption (the auditing process for carbon credits is rigorous and doesn’t leave much room for funny business). They just need software to help cities understand the size of their challenges around these issues. I’m going to chew on this more, but it sounded like a terrific opportunity for someone like Benetech!

Don’t get the idea that these are the only conversations that I’ve been having: but they were just a sampling of the kind of discussions I’m having every day here at the WEF. A veritable intellectual and social smorgasbord!

First day in Davos

I’m joining many other social entrepreneurs on our journey to Davos, home of the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum. The journey itself is magical: you take a series of trains getting ever smaller, until the final hour meanders through the middle of mountain villages with a foot to spare on either side of the train, through tunnels and beneath spectacular mountains. Although this is my sixth time to Davos for the WEF, the train trip never fails to enchant me.

And then we're in a small ski village in Switzerland!

The Schwab Foundation arranges for the social entrepreneurs to stay in the Schatzalp mountain hotel. This is the hotel made famous in Thomas Mann’s book The Magic Mountain: it’s 600 feet up the mountain above Davos, and you ride a funicular railroad to get to it. The benefits of collocating the social entrepreneurs in one place has been proven in past years: a large amount of the value of attending the WEF is meeting with global social entrepreneur colleagues, and trading notes about the best ways to change the world for the better. The time out from the normal grind, plus the influence of dynamic peers, often leads to a leap of creativity. I’m already getting into the spirit.

My first event was the orientation for new Schwab social entrepreneurs. A few of the more experienced SEs join the Foundation staff in helping the new attendees get the maximum value out of the conference. Every year I’m amazed at the cool SEs I’ve never heard of, each of whom seem to be changing the lives of a million people already (something I’m still aspiring towards!).

We then joined the social entrepreneurship dinner. There are roughly thirty social entrepreneurs here at the Forum, headlined by such famous leading SEs as Muhammad Yunus and Fazle Abed of Bangladesh. Hilde Schwab, co-founder of the Schwab Foundation, welcomed us to the event, and highlighted the role of social entrepreneurs in the Global Redesign Initiative (GRI) that the WEF is pursuing. Four of the social entrepreneurs then made brief presentations about their GRI proposals that had been chosen by the WEF to present to the conference.

Martin Fisher of KickStart noted that technology innovations don’t tend to be adopted by poor rural farmers: technology that could change their lives dramatically for the better. His proposal was that time-limited “smart subsidies” be used to encourage the adoption of these innovations until the adoption curve gets to the point where the commercial market takes over.

Harish Hande of Selco of India advocated passionately to involve the poor in the planning for ventures and initiatives designed to help them. I think that many social entrepreneurs get intuitively that social change is best done with people rather than to people, and hope that this is more widely adopted.

Andreas Heinecke of Dialogue in the Dark (a social enterprise that employs blind people in putting on experiences in complete darkness) joked that he had never written a business plan: that his enterprise (which has expanded to many countries) just grew organically. He did highlight the importance of dialogue, and getting people out of their comfort zone to actually explore new ideas.

I spoke on Benetech’s GRI proposal to get intellectual property to more fully benefit all of humanity, not just the top 10%. I use examples like Victoria Hale’s nonprofit pharma companies, that take drug ideas that don’t make enough money for traditional pharma, but could save hundreds of thousands of lives. We have recommendations to government, companies, universities and the media around how to bring more of the benefits of humanity’s knowledge to the bulk of the planet, while balancing that with the needs of businesses to make money in bona fide profitable enterprises.

Getting a bunch of social entrepreneurs together in one room is a great way to start the week. The room was buzzing with ideas about improving society, and taking advantage of this precious opportunity to interact with the captains of industry and government leaders. The shocks of the last year or so has heightened the interest of finding new solutions to improve the world. We know social entrepreneurs are at the leading edge of that effort!

The Mismeasure of War

Our human rights team cares deeply about the issue of truth in human rights reporting. They just posted a response to a major debate on the question of whether deaths in war have been steadily declining. I think this well captures our approach to the question of truth and are worth repeating in the Beneblog.

A guest Beneblog by By Anita Gohdes, Megan Price, and Patrick Ball

Several media organizations including Reuters, Foreign Policy and New Scientist covered the January 21 release of the 2009 Human Security Report (HSR) entitled, “The Shrinking Cost of War.” The main thesis of the HRS authors, Andrew Mack et al, is that “nationwide mortality rates actually fall during most wars” and that “today’s wars rarely kill enough people to reverse the decline in peacetime mortality that has been underway in the developing world for more than 30 years.” This claim is based in large part on the authors’ graphical representations of pre- and post-conflict mortality rates for a variety of countries, and on their critique of five surveys conducted by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 2000 and 2007.

The authors’ illustration of the technical mistakes made by the IRC is necessary and valuable for scientific advancement.

We fully agree with their assessment that some of the IRC extrapolations are inappropriate, that IRC should have calculated a population-weighted mortality estimate and that the estimates contain very high levels of uncertainty. Each of these concerns suggests a corrective process by which better estimates could be made. In their argument, however, the HSR authors did not choose this course.

We are deeply skeptical of the methods and data that the authors use to conclude that conflict-related deaths are decreasing. We are equally concerned about the implications of the authors’ conclusions and recommendations with respect to the current academic discussion on how to count deaths in conflict situations. See Andrew Gelman’s blog and the HSR’s own discussion site for an overview of this discussion. We believe that the authors should examine their own data on mortality related deaths with the same rigor with which they critique the recent IRC surveys.

If they did this, they would find that they have inadequate information to conclude anything about the trend in war-related lethality in recent decades.

The central evidence that the authors provide for “The Shrinking Cost of War” is delivered as a series of graphs. There are two problems with the authors’ reasoning.

First, the mortality estimates of children under five described in Figure 2.1 of the report should include an appropriate measure of uncertainty. The purported trend could be overwhelmed by the error of the estimates describing child mortality, but these errors are not presented in the report. Therefore, it is impossible to test the strength of the trend versus the magnitude of the error.

Second, and even more importantly, the graphs showing a worldwide decline in war-related lethality, in Figures 2.5 and 2.6 of the report, include data from the PRIO Center for the Study of Civil War, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo and the UCD/HSRP Uppsala Conflict Data Program /Human Security Report Project Dataset, the World Bank, “World Development Indicators” and the Inter-Agency Child Mortality Estimation Group (IACMEG), “Child Mortality Estimates Info.”

These datasets include expert opinions, convenience datasets, and reproducible estimates from multiple-systems estimation and probability-based surveys. The quality and uncertainty of such an incompatible collection of datasets cannot be evaluated. The plausibility of the trends presented by the authors cannot be assessed.

In particular, expert opinions about the magnitude of violence are little more than guesses. These numbers are the statistical equivalent of hearsay. It is impossible to scientifically debate speculations, and it is impossible to reproduce speculations by a principled process in alignment with the scientific method.

Some of the other sources for the authors’ conclusions are convenience samples. A convenience sample is simply data that can be conveniently observed via witness accounts, press sources, or other means. These databases may be useful collections of cases, and organizing information in this form enables many non-statistical descriptions of violence.

However, convenience samples are highly unlikely to represent the underlying statistical patterns or magnitude of conflict related deaths. They cannot be used to extrapolate to a population beyond what was observed, and they are not necessarily representative of any population. In our experience, no two convenience samples about the same country tell the same statistical story.

The core problem with both expert opinions and convenience samples is that we have no way of scientifically measuring just how unrepresentative they actually are of the population they are attempting to measure.

The HSR’s broadest claim is that “[t]he average conflict in the new millennium kills 90 percent fewer people each year than did the average conflict in the 1950s (p. 2),” and that there has been a “20-year decline in conflict numbers” (p. 7). Due to the weaknesses in the data, there is no way of reproducibly or transparently verifying or testing this claim.

In the HSR and elsewhere, the HSR authors have shown that recent conflicts have been seriously mismeasured. Certainly this debate would benefit from a scrutiny of expert opinions and convenience samples as intense as that which the HSR authors’ have brought to the study of the IRC surveys.

Perhaps earlier conflicts were as mismeasured as recent conflicts. The HSR authors’ conclusion that the number of deaths in today’s wars is declining may be right, or it might be wrong. But we just do not know much about the quality of estimates from further back in history. Therefore, the only responsible conclusion is that we simply don’t know what the trend in war-related deaths looks like. More rigorous research is needed.We welcome the authors’ contribution to the ongoing debate about measuring war-related mortality. Technical critique of existing work is at the core of the scientific process. In our opinion, the HSR authors have done the IRC and the community of human rights analysts a service by highlighting errors in the Congo survey.

The response to errors with statistical estimates must not be that we abandon science by relying on expert opinions and convenience samples. Quite the opposite. The fact that the IRC’s work has been shown by the HSR authors to be flawed should remind us to limit our conclusions narrowly to what can be defended by the most appropriate and advanced scientific methods for the question at hand.