Sarah Davies

we have the new Facebook “like” button. Released yesterday, on the blog today. That’s how much I love you, dear dear readers and likers and tweeters.

I just installed a plugin for Twitter’s fancy new @Anywhere service on my blog that automagically links people’s twitter names if I put an @ in front of them, and it even shows (or if you prefer, “seamlessly activates”) the new hovercard so you just hover your mouse over the name, and out of nowhere will appear a picture, a bio, their most recent tweet, and a follow button, just in case you’re too lazy to actually click through to the link that it automagically put there.

Testing this plugin seems like a good excuse to promote a few of my favorite tweeters, just in case you’re looking for friends. I’ve grouped them roughly by category.

Me

@sarahdavies

Infomaniacs (those insanely obsessed with information and how it effects humans)

@emahlee

@WebEcology

@laurenpressley

@kathy_live and @kegill

@sarterus

Nonprofits

@ACLU and @ACLU_WA

@NTENorg

@vittana

@WashingtonBus

@seafreeschool

@equalrightswa

@civicactions

The Strange yet Awesome

@unicornbooty

@awesomefound

Note: If you’re reading this through rss or Facebook, this won’t work for you. You have to be on the site. Since Facebook is amazingly good at hiding what site this came from, here’s a link for all you Facebookers. http://sarahdavies.cc/2010/04/23/we-have-been-assimilated-by-the-twitter

Second note: Damn, Twitter, way to rip off Obama’s graphic design. You guys had a great cute opaque curvy thing going. You don’t need to steal other people’s style, we like you just the way you are!

Third note: Since my twitter is in the sidebar of my blog, will my @replies on twitter come back to my blog and get hovercards linking them back to twitter in an endless recursive nightmare of microbloggy madness?

Several people at TEDxSeattle last weekend mentioned Vittana to me as an up and coming nonprofit. They microfinance student loans for people in developing countries. For example:

This is Thanh-Luong Thi Nguyen. She is an eighteen year-old student in Vietnam. She would like to attend Hanoi Industrial Vocational College to get a degree in accounting which would allow her to earn an annual salary of $2,670. She needs a loan of $538 and intends to pay back the loan once she gets a job at a rate of a little over $30 per month. As of this writing, eight lenders have pledged a total of $270 in loans toward her education.

I think this is a fantastic idea. Education directly correlates with income, happiness, and family planning. It looks like they only have a few students up there currently, although whether that’s due to a lack of demand for loans or an abundance of lenders is unclear.

I’m glad that they are a nonprofit. The for-profit microlending field has always tasted a little sour to me. When you finance a loan, Vittana asks for a small optional donation to cover their costs. They are also grant-funded by the Peery Foundation, the Mitchell Kapor Foundation and the Crystal Springs Foundation.

Interestingly, the students who appear on Vittana have already received loans from banks at an interest rate of 10-15%; Vittana essentially guarantees those loans with money from people like you, so that the banks can take more risk in lending. The banks (not the lenders or Vittana) keep the interest to cover their costs. By the time a student appears on Vittana, they have typically already started their educational program.

My notes on Debra Music and Joe Whinney’s TEDxSeattle talk “Doing Well While Doing Good; The
Sweet Story of Theo Chocolate.”

They are passing out chocolate bars!

Joe started Theo with Debra about five years ago. He was volunteering in Central America. His first day at the foundation, he was asked to harvest cocoa with indigenous Mayans. He knew nothing about harvesting chocolate. They went out into the rainforest, and they would cut the pods off the tree and he would chase them as they rolled down the hill. They were about the size of a football. Then they scooped the seeds out of the pod, and chewed on them as they were working. The flavor of the seeds was amazing. As a kid, Joe only had only known the processed commodity version of chocolate.

He wanted to create a company that had heart and sole and wanted to create commerce where they could transparently prove that no one was harmed, including the planet. We hope that people will buy it the first time because it says organic and fair trade, but we hope you will continue to eat it because it’s so good.

Debra and Joe married about twenty years ago and they’ve been divorced nearly as long.

At Theo, they believe they can make something that people really want, where everyone in the process benefits from making the product. Joe refers to it as “enlightened capitalism.” All businesses need to go in this direction if we are going to sustain life on this planet.

The cocoa industry trades about 3 million tons annually. Of that, theo buys about 300 tons, about .01%, but they’ve still been disruptive in the market. There are very few companies in the US that buy the beans and make their own chocolate. Theo is the only organic fair trade chocolate company. They’ve set a new standard for behavior. By doing that, they’ve been able to illuminate the practices of their competitors.

Theo works closely with cocoa farmers where they live. They provide them with education, resources, and tools to grow quality cacao. Most chocolate farmers have no idea what happens to the beans after they leave the farm. They’ve never had chocolate before. They went to the farm and explained the process and gave chocolate to them and their families. Farmers need to understand what Theo is looking for when they are quality testing.

Once the beans are fermented and dried, they are sent to the Theo factory. There they can set the quality by doing all of their own manufacturing. They source everything that goes into the product. They know the real value of every part of the product – cherries, hazelnuts, labels. Theo is not a nonprofit. They need to make money. Last year during the recession, they launched a new line of chocolate that was more accessible and cheaper. They grew 36% last year and achieved profitability for the first time.

My notes from Morgan Dusatko and Sarah Stuteville’s TEDxSeattle talk “America in 5.”

Now more than ever, there are stories all around us that need to be told that aren’t being told. We’re in the middle of economic collapse. There are a lot of parallels between today and the 1930s. Back then, there were writing projects who sent out journalists like Dorothy Lang to tell those stories. America in 5 is doing that now.

It’s crucial to look at the stories of ourselves and our neighbors. We have more opportunity now than we ever have to document those stories. The America in 5 website has stories from all over America.

America in 5 wants to send out teams of journalists all over the country, with the goal of getting one piece of media back a day. The media has to be nonfiction and under 5 minutes.

One story they sponsored is a homeless family. They hired a cartoon artist to illustrate the story, as well as getting footage of the family telling their story. In January 2010 one homeless shelter had to turn away 700 families. This family didn’t want to take the kids out of school, so they took a three hour bus ride each way to get from the shelter to the school.

America in 5 needs investors to start this project.

My notes on Ben Huh’s TEDxSeattle talk “Convening Community & Company Direction Through Life Goals.”

19 Debts is the idea that these are the things that Ben owes it to himself to accomplish.

These are all difficult because he’s afraid, or he’s not good at them, or no one’s done it before.

The “have fun” part of the list:

1999 Graduate with a bachelor’s degree

2000 Start a startup

2001 Find the perfect woman

2008 Learn how to sail

Learn how to fly

Learn how to ride a motorcycle

Own a home outright

Sell a company for profit

Ben was the first person in his school to go to college, and it was hard during the dot com boom of 1999 to stay in school rather than joining a startup and making lots of money.

His first startup folded and he ended up $40,000 in debt. The practice of failure was important.

The “help yourself” list:

2004 Payoff all debts (excl. mortgage)

2008 Turn an annual profit

Have a net worth of $1 million

Beat the S&P 500 as a stock investor

Set aside enough money to never have to work for the rest of my life

Getting out of failure and out of debt means you are a person who has a center than cannot be shaken. When the world comes to you and says you’re an idiot and you know you’re right, those experiences help you take the heat.

Out of that failure, he built the Cheezburger network, which became profitable in 2008.

The “help the world” list:

2008 Invest in other startups

Give away $1 million to charity

Help someone go to college

Work on a political campaign

After becoming a millionaire, and knowing he can take care of the rest of his family for the rest of his life, then giving away a million dollars can help hundreds of people. Vatana is an organization that allows people to finance a college education when student loans aren’t available.

Ben has a degree in journalism. He can, in fact, spell things correctly when needed. He would love to cover or work on a political campaign. It seems like a lot of fun.

“Write a book” is shorthand for “live a life worth writing about.” If your life allows you to see into the hearts and minds of other people, then you have lived a good life.

Sarah’s commentary
I think his message of overcoming adversity is inspiring. I think it’s made him a little arrogant, though. I definitely agree with the overall message that you should live a life worth writing about.

My notes on Eugene Cho’s TEDxSeattle talk “One Day’s Wages.”

He has three children – Jubilee, Trinity, and Jedi. It’s very important that you give your spouse choice in child naming. He gave his wife the choice between Jedi and Frodo. He and his wife started dating about 15 years ago, about when email was coming into vogue. Eugene has always been a late adopter. He didn’t purchase a cell phone until his last year of grad school. He believes in the good technology can do, but it is incongruous that with all the technological advances we have, we live in a world with so much disparity.

2.6 billion people survive on less than $2 a day. 1.4 billion people live under conditions of extreme poverty – less than $1.25 a day. 900 million people don’t have access to clean water. 24,000 children under the age of five die due to preventable diseases.

#fail

Try just for a second to wrap your heart and mind around this stuff. We live in the most overrated generation in human history. We are more in love with the idea of stuff than the action. We love community, but we don’t want to sit in a chair and really listen to someone.

He took a trip to Burma in 2006. He saw the faces and stories behind the numbers. He met a family there who said that they were having difficulty with education, that they were having trouble paying the salaries of the teachers. He asked what the salaries of the teachers was, and they responded $40 a year.

One day’s wages is about 0.4% of an annual salary.

They are less than six months old, they tried to raise $5,000 for Haiti, and they raised more than $100,000 from every continent on earth.

Sarah’s commentary
This seems to be a lot of guilting and fearmongering. He says that he wants to share stories, but he’s not sharing stories. He’s telling us how much better he is than the rest of us. I’m sure that many people in the room give generously to solve problems in the third world, myself included. The theme of “one day’s wages” inherently assumes that people don’t realize how easy it is to give. Do they really think that money wouldn’t have been donated to Haiti through another channel? Do they really think that other nonprofits don’t change the world?

My notes on Amanda Koster’s TEDxSeattle talk “In Steve Biko’s Backyard.”

show + tell = action

Amanda takes pictures from all over the world. She went to Brazil, and asked Doctors without Borders if she could take photos to tell the story of the work they are doing. Doctors without Borders already had a foothold in the community, so that she could get names and stories to go with her pictures.

The people she photographs face insurmountable problems everyday with only community support and hard work. They work hard everyday and go to school everyday without any heroes to look up to. All along her career people ask to come with her. They want to travel and connect with people.

She got on MySpace in 2006. This allowed her to get her work out to the world. She created SalaamGarage, which takes teams of citizen journalists to work with NGOs to create content that can be spread worldwide.

They got funding from International YWCA to work on African women leaders. They went to South Africa, and instead of bringing a team, she built a team of locals of all different races. They interviewed an anti-apartheid activist, among others.

Robben Island is where many political prisoners have been held including Nelson Mandela. They took video footage there. They asked their tour guide what it was like to lead tours where he used to be held. He said he was shy and felt like he didn’t have anything to say. Once people started asking him questions, he realized he had a story to tell.

Sarah’s Commentary
I love how Amanda takes great projects and constantly insists on reaching more people, having more impact, scaling up and up, where other people would be happy with a successful photography career.

My notes on Ron Krabill’s TEDxSeattle talk “Beyond the Bright Shiny New Thing.”

Community media projects enable communities that are typically marginalized. Media production and consumption are being spread very widely. If you are not part of that spread, you are vulnerable to a widening digital divide, and political marginalization.

University of Washington collaborated with tent city to make a video. Tent city 4 was proposed for northeast Seattle, but there was resistance in Bothell, where they wanted to place it. UW Bothell worked with tent city 4 to produce a film and an art installation on themes of neighbor, community, and home.

Film notes:
Bothell residents are concerned that people who are homeless are that way because they make bad decisions, and they don’t want the sort of people who make bad decisions in their neighborhood with their kids.

In order to move community media projects forward, we need to think about collaboration. This summer, UW students will work on “community journals” with South African activists. South Africa will be hosting the World Cup this year.

We also need to think about sustainability. How do we think about appropriate technologies when we engage in community media projects? Even in Cape Town, people have little to no access to social technologies.

We need to take seriously the questions of who doesn’t have access to the newest technology. What is the impact of leaving some people behind? We think that these innovations will spread to everyone, but that’s not true.

Education is very important. We need greater access to media production. We need to rethink what it means to have good aesthetics in community media. We need to rethink genres, and what good high quality media should look like. The UW film intentionally used talking-head shots and very long takes to honor the stories that are being told.

Sarah’s commentary
Media production education is extremely important, not just for marginalized communities, but for all children.

My notes on David Edelstein’s TEDxSeattle talk “Innovation in Information Access: Harnessing the Potential of the Mobile Phone.”

Grameen Foundation has provided microloans to 25,000 people in the developing world for a phone and a car battery to become local communications hubs for their communities.

They assess information needs, analyze economic and information flow, identify how information is accessed, define sources of information, then do rapid prototyping and piloting in the field.

People seem to focus on health, agriculture, and weather. They went to Uganda and asked what people would ask if they could ask a question on one of these topics. They had people manually answer the questions, then someone in the field recorded how they responded to the answer. It was popular because it was cheap, fast and private. They tried several pilots and then scaled the ones that were most effective.

Providing an accurate result to an sms search query is very difficult. Unlike the web, there’s only one chance to get the answer right. This system can respond accurately to natural language. It also allows the user to respond and ask for more information.

Technology is not the be all end all. User testing is essential to succeed. You have to understand the lives and needs of the people you are working with.

Screw up early and often. Don’t hypothesize, actually test behavior.

Anyone with a phone in a village can become the local librarian. We can overcome information poverty.

Sarah’s commentary
Great project! Usability and visibility are incredibly important on the web too. Nonprofits should be more willing to fail in the process of discovering user behavior.