Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

It's amazing how time flies so quickly these days. I blinked and the Skoll Forum was already in the past. It's worth recapping some of the events that stuck in my brain. On the opening evening, my favorite section was when Pat Mitchell (former head of PBS) moderated Dr. Nafis Sadik, Karen Tse and Jody Williams. Dr. Sadik has worked on women's health for many years in the UN system and mentioned her unsuccessful audience with the Pope (I assume John Paul II) on some of the policies coming out of the UN's Population and Development conference in Cairo in the 1990s. Jody Williams was bold and outspoken (I assume, as usual) and funny: she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on the campaign to ban landmines. And, Karen Tse, one of my fellow Skoll social entrepreneurs, gave such a dramatic and inspirational remark near the end that Pat Mitchell simply declared the session done and we floated out of the room looking forward to changing the world after being insp...

I'm coming home from my annual pilgrimage to Oxford for the Skoll World Forum. The Forum has become the international event for social entrepreneurs, and has now been heavily, heavily oversubscribed for the last two years. This is my fourth time to the Forum: and each time actually gets better (as it gets harder to imagine how they'll pull it off again next year). For me, the highlights are the networking (especially peer networking) and the rockstar plenaries. The number of Nobel Peace prize winners has been just incredible: I think we had at least three speak at plenaries this year. The event kicks off with a Tuesday night dinner for grantees at Exeter College, which is what Hogwart's (in the Harry Potter movies) was modeled after. The new Skoll Award winners each get three minutes to tell us a story. Wednesday during the morning and early afternoon are sessions for the social entrepreneurs. Jeff Skoll spends an hour and a half explaining what he's been up to s...