Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

I’m on the plane heading back to the U.S. after my first visit to the country of Qatar. It was a lightning visit of only two days (Sunday and Monday), with a focus on attending the World Economic Forum's Global Redesign Summit 2010 (the GRI). The government of Qatar hosted the conference, and underwrote travel and accommodation. This meeting was a follow-up for me from my attendance earlier this year at the main WEF meeting in Davos , where I presented my proposal as part of the GRI. My proposal was on ensuring that all of humanity benefits from the incredible knowledge and technology. We need to encourage limitations and exceptions (like the one in the U.S. that makes Bookshare possible) and open licensing terms, so that people who the market will fail to address get the benefits of our incredibly rich and expanding knowledge base. One famous example of this approach is the affordable licensing and thus wider availability of drugs to combat HIV/AIDS in the developing world,...

Great to see two social enterprise bloggers, Kylie Eastley of Tasmania and Tristan Pollock from Minnesota, won Halle Tecco's contest on Huffington Post to go to the Social Enterprise Alliance Summit later this month in San Francisco. I just heard from Jerr Boschee, the interim CEO of SEA, that registrations are already well ahead of past Summits, and that over 30% of the attendees are coming from outside the United States. This year's Summit is being held in conjunction with the Social Enterprise World Forum, which was in Australia last year and Scotland the year before that. Next year it will be in South Africa. We're excited to playing host to the growing global social enterprise movement, and I'm glad that Kylie will be blogging up a storm from down under even Down Under! This Summit will be my swan song in a leadership role at the Alliance. I joined the board ten years ago, and my term limits were extended to act in the chair's role these past two years, fo...

As I head off to the WEF Summit in Davos, I'm also excited about the Social Enterprise Alliance Summit coming up in San Francisco at the end of April. The membership of the Alliance are "my people," folks who speak both social and business fluently. The response to the early bird registration was incredible. We had to extend the early bird a week (actually, from last Friday to today) for member organizations to make sure everybody who wanted to register early got their double-discount (being a member and being an early bird). Benetech is sending four of our team, including me. We're really looking forward to it. This year's Summit is special because we're cohosting the Social Enterprise World Forum, which was held in Scotland and Australia the last two years (I got to go to the first one in Scotland: it was incredible to see how vibrant and successful the movement is in the UK). So, we're expecting a great turnout from our international peers in th...