Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

I am still on the Skoll high Just back from my week in Oxford with my head buzzing and Michael Franti's social change anthem "Good to be Alive Today" ringing in my ears. It's hard to explain why this is the one conference a year I always make the time for. It's a powerful mix of inspiration, singing, ideas and most importantly, peer brainstorming.  I have more than a year's worth of ideas for social good. Let me share just a few! Systems Entrepreneurship is on the Rise Jeff Walker has been making the case for what he calls "systems entrepreneurship" at Harvard's Kennedy School, Skoll and in a new SSIR article . He uses examples such as the campaign to eliminate malaria to demonstrate we need a new class of backbone organizations (borrowing from the collective impact concept identified by FSG) who are around organizing larger scale systems change with an ecosystem of players, as opposed to setting out as one organization to make the change ...

Data is a bigger and bigger topic in social change. We need to do a better job of understanding social needs, both to improve our programs and measure their ultimate impact. I spend more and more of my time talking to leaders in the sector, helping advance the use of data for action and impact. I encourage groups to begin collecting data as part of their basic program activities, and I make the claim that it will eventually allow them to connect their data to other, larger databases and maybe begin to take advantage of big data. Imagine how my mind has been blown by learning about a huge international income database that has microdata on millions of households from more than 50 countries, all harmonized to make the same kinds of analyses possible across any of these countries! This database should be critically important for understanding poverty at a detailed level. I just had the thrill of spending an hour with Janet Gornick, the Director of LIS, an international data archive...

Adopting an open source philosophy has proven to be quite effective for us at Benetech in our work furthering technology-for-good. I recently had the opportunity to give an interview for Red Hat’s online magazine, Opensource.com , and discuss Benetech’s culture of “open.” I describe the open source tools Benetech builds; clarify why it is important that cybersecurity tools in particular are open; explain how Benetech’s culture of “open” shapes its product development as well as broadly serves its social mission; and reflect on the reasons why the open source ethos is well suited for creating social impact. Ultimately, we believe that open source is more about transparency and innovation than about releasing software. Being transparent leads to the best possible outcomes from our work and helps us further our mission goals. The open source methodology also helps stimulate innovation. It allows us to build and improve upon the knowledge of predecessors, as well as to make knowledg...

“What would you do with a billion dollars to combat economic inequality?” asked Chris Anderson, head of TED, at the closing session of this year’s conference . More specifically: “how would you audaciously reinvest that amount of money to best help the world’s 3.5 billion poorest people?” he probed. Having just heard the new director of MIT’s Media Lab, Joi Ito , present the Labs’ latest approach to innovation—“Deploy or Die”—I was inspired to answer the question. Bottom-Up Innovation Joi’s new motto underscores the need for more than just tech demos to change the world. To make them truly count, we must put our technology innovations into the hands of real people and see what actually works. Technology has advanced to a point where it is easy to do so. Whether it’s software, hardware, or even biotech, the cost of prototyping and deploying new tools, then adapting them and iterating, is now extremely low. As I previously described in a Huffington Post op-ed , it ...