Service Science and “A Smarter Planet”

Mr. Palmisano on "A Smarter Planet"

Last summer’s NNC entry on Service Science, “NextNowNetwork and MediaX explore Service Science with Jim Sphorer,” is still one of the most-read entries.  Clearly, there’s a lot of interest in the topic.

To touch back in on Service Science, here are a couple of links Jim Sporher sent to Bill Daul today.  In a speech by IBM Chairman, President, and CEO Sam Palmisano given at the Council on Foreign Relations on the use of technology to infuse intelligence into decision-making both in systems and in individual decision making, Mr. Palmisano mentions the importance of “Services as a Science” in his answer to a question from the audience. Also follow Jim’s entry on this speech and blog thread on Service Science at SRIC (Service Research & Innovation Community).

2008 Tech Awards: “Let’s Put Poverty into A Museum” (Yunus)

Thanks to Rob Stephenson for these links covering the 2008 Tech Award events and the work of the Laureates.

Portable Light Device Credit: KVA MATx

This article has great photos of the innovations in situ:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10093164-76.html?part=rss&subj=News-CuttingEdge

This is a great article with the night’s keynote speaker, Muhammad Yunus:

VentureBeat: Interview with Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus on Micro Credit’s Long Shadow
By Dean Takahashi
http://venturebeat.com/2008/11/13/interview-with-nobel-peace-prize-winner-muhammad-yunas-on-micro-credits-long-shadow/

This article has a short video of the morning reception:

Mercury News: Tech Museum Awards Honor Low-Tech Solutions to Big Problems
By John Boudreau
http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_10968397?source=rss

Mercury News: Tech Awards Celebration Shows True Value of Technology
By Mike Cassidy
http://www.mercurynews.com/portal/business/ci_10975258?source=rss&_loopback=1

Silicon Valley Watcher: Nobel Peace Prize Winner Mohammad Yunus Challenge to Silicon Valley and beyond: Let’s Put Poverty Into A Museum
By Tom Foremski
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2008/11/nobel_peace_pri.php

Think Change India: Tech Winners Starting Small, Scaling Up
By Shital (no last name posted)
http://thinkchangeindia.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/tech-winners-starting-small-scaling-up/

Origo invites NextNow Collab to Meet 2008 Tech Laureates

Thanks to our collab partners Origo Global Business Advisors, NNC was again invited to meet the 25 Laureates of the Tech Awards.  (NextNower Rob Stephenson was also there as the Tech Museum’s Curator of The Virtual Tech). Each year The Tech Museum in San Jose honors 25 Laureates worldwide for their innovative use of technology to benefit humanity. These Laureates are acknowledged for their brilliant accomplishments in addressing some of the most critical issues facing our planet in five categories. This year, instead of a champagne reception (because of Veteran’s Day), it was an 8:30 a.m. “where’s-the-coffee?” event held at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose.

Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka Innovators for the Public and one of the original coiners of the term “social entrepreneurship” gave the final address before we were set free to visit the exhibits of each of the Laureates.  Bill appeared very soft-spoken but his speech was the most passionate.  What I heard him say that I really liked:

1. If the entire United States doesn’t want to end up as “one big Detroit,” we have to adopt an “everyone is a change-maker” model.  He estimated we have about ten years to do this.  Awareness of this is already building, but we have to get over the awareness-tipping process and into everyone becoming a change-maker at some level.  What will get us through is having the “highest proportion of change-makers working at the highest levels of change-making together.”

2. His analogy was that every human needed to become like a smart white-blood cell–we see something that needs to change, and we collaborate to change it.

3. The real role of social entrepreneurs is to be “mass recruiters and facilitators of local change-makers.”

4. Human empathy is as important as technology in creating effective social change.  The development of empathy in people is critical to developing effective change-makers, who will have to be “humans with a high level of human skills.”  We have to stop “footbinding the spirits of people” by excluding them from the process of contributing to society because they don’t have the skills.

5.  The most profound source of change is not at the symptom level but is at the level of the structure of human systems.

Here’s the list of Laureates chosen as among the best innovators “using technology to make the world safer and healthier, more prosperous and just.”  The countries in parentheses are (Laureate Country/Project Country); the winners are in bold:

2008 Intel Environment Award

Arcadia Biosciences (United States/China) deploys technology to engineer crops that need less fertilizer, so farmers can grow more food while creating less pollution.

The Cheetah Conservation Fund (Namibia/Namibia) uses technology to convert an invasive species into clean fuel while restoring habitats.

Practical Action (Peru/Peru) developed small-scale hydropower technology to bring electricity to isolated villages in Peru.

Sunlabob (Laos/Cambodia, Laos, Uganda) created technology to make solar lights commercially competitive with kerosene.

Vereinigte Werkstätten für Pflanzenöltechnologie (Germany/Galapagos, Germany, Educado) modified diesel technology to create engines that run on pure plant oil.

The Portable Light Project's Solar Bag

2008 Accenture Economic Development Award

DESI Power (India/India) helps poor villages in India build local power plants and launch micro-enterprises to alleviate poverty.

NComputing (United States/90 countries, including Afghanistan, Bulgaria, Congo, Macedonia, Mongolia, Qatar, Thailand, and Yemen) uses desktop virtualization technology that allows one computer to bring information technology to many.

The Solar Electric Light Fund (United States/Benin) powers drip irrigation with solar technology so farmers can cultivate income-generating crops year-round.

The Full Belly Project (United States/Malawi, Mali, the Philippines, Uganda, Haiti) develops technologies to help subsistence farmers increase their incomes and relieve hunger.

The Portable Light Project (United States/Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuelan and Brazilian Amazonas, South Africa) embeds flexible solar nano-technology into textiles that can harvest energy and generate light.  Rocky Mountain Institute is working with them to scale the project.

2008 Microsoft Education Award

Aaron Doering’s Go North! Adventure Learning Series (United States/30 countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, India, New Zealand, The Republic of Korea, United Kingdom, and United States) engages satellite communications and multi-media technology so students can learn about culture and climate change.

The Center for Puppetry Arts (United States/Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, United States) employs interactive video conferencing technology to bring creative, hands-on learning experiences into the classroom.

Curriki (United States/Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States) uses Internet technology so that educators can share and co-develop free, high-quality instructional materials.

Dániel Rátai (Hungary/Hungary) developed technology to provide teachers with interactive three-dimensional blackboards so that far more students can master math and science.

Digital StudyHall (India/Bangladesh, India) uses digital video technology to extend the reach of skilled teachers into underprivileged classrooms in India and Bangladesh.

2007 Katherine M. Swanson Award

Build Change (United States/China, Indonesia) designs earthquake-resistant construction technology and trains local builders and homeowners to make homes that can save lives in a disaster.

The DAISY Consortium’s (United States/45 countries, including Brazil, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, and Vietnam) AMIS project uses technology to make printed information accessible to people with disabilities around the world, free of cost.

Hany El Miniawy (Egypt/Algeria, Egypt) designs technology that allows low-income communities to move out of inhumane housing and into good quality, economical homes.

In LifeLines India project, OneWorld South Asia (India/India) employs telephone and database technology to connect poor farmers to critical agricultural information.

SKG Sangha (India/India) fuses biogas and composting technologies, empowering women to earn money and live in healthier environments.

2008 Health Award

DataDyne.org (United States/Benin, DRC, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, Senegal, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe) crafted technology so healthcare workers can quickly gather essential public health data.

Marc Koska Star Syringe (United Kingdom/41 countries including Angola, Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Denmark, Myanmar, Nicaragua, and Sri Lanka) developed non-reusable syringe technology to stop the medical transmission of blood-borne diseases.

MedMira (Canada/Europe, Sierra Leone, Romania, Russia, China, India, Indonesia) invented rapid flow-through technology so that a single test can detect HIV and Hepatitis in three minutes.

The Pesticide Action Network (United States/Germany, the Philippines, South Africa, United States) devised air-monitoring technology that allows people to detect and fight toxic pesticide exposure.

Sanoussi Diakité (Senegal/Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Chad, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo) created technology to dehull fonio, a nutritious grain that can help relieve famine in Africa.

NextNow’s Zann Gill at Stanford’s Media X

NextNow member Zann Gill will be speaking at NNC partner organization Media X at Stanford on December 4, 2008 with the specific objective of exploring the increasingly significant role Media X can play at the intersection of new media and complex, cross-disciplinary challenges. Please join the conversation, lend us your genius, and learn about raising our collaborative intelligence.

Thursday, December 4th, 6 – 7 PM at Media X — Stanford University’s Peter Wallenberg Learning Theater, Building 160, Room 124
Stanford web event listing here

There will be a no-host NextNow dinner following the talk at Jing Jing, 443 Emerson St. in Palo Alto.
RSVP by December 1st.

From zanngill.com:

Nine ECO-logical design principles for multi-agent innovation networks
Drawing from her forthcoming book, What Daedalus told Darwin, Zann Gill will describe how design thinking can harness new media to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration, citing innovation network principles and dynamics found in the origin and evolution of life with lessons for eco-sustainability.

Though we’re poised to experience the impact of what Garrett Hardin evocatively predicted in 1968 would escalate into a Tragedy of the Commons, where competition for scarce resources and “survival of the fittest” could threaten the delicate balance of Earth’s ecosystems, we’re also poised to harness web 2.0 digital media, learning systems, social networks and ubiquitous computing to reverse the downward slump — to achieve technological innovation, social change, revitalized cities and a greener economy.

This talk will describe how nine principles of ECO-logical design, illustrated in the origin and evolution of life, can “raise our collaborative intelligence.”

Program for the Future: Dec 8 AND 9

We’re all watching the election returns tonight, history in the making.  Thanks for voting!

Program for the Future

The October 27 post, Engelbart Legacy Foundation: Augmenting Collective IQ, was an invitation to SRI’s 40th Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos at Stanford on Dec. 9.  That invitation isn’t complete without including the Tech Museum interactive conference being held Dec. 8.  Together they are part of the Program for the Future, the larger and ongoing effort to accelerate the augmentation of Collective Intelligence represented by Engelbart’s work, created by NextNow members including Bill Daul, Dave Davison, Eileen Clegg, Doug Engelbart, Mei Lin Fung, Valerie Landau and Robert Stephenson and supported by NextNow Collaboratory.  This invitation just went out to the network, but is being included here for broader distribution.

Program for the Future is dedicated to Douglas Engelbart’s quest to harness technology for human betterment. Sponsored by The Tech Museum of Innovation, the MIT Museum, The New Media Consortium, and SDForum, this two-day conference is a dialog with people developing new tools, interfaces, research and methods to augment collective intelligence. It will be held December 8 and 9 in San José and Stanford, California.

Speakers on December 8 include Professor Thomas Malone, author of The Future of Work and Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google. The New Media Consortium, an example of Engelbart’s prescient concept of a networked improvement community, will be highlighed.  Professor Andries van Dam of Brown University who hosted the 50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush’s groundbreaking article “As We May Think.” will be the highlight of the December 8th Evening program. Program chairs are Professor Hiroshi Ishii, Associate Director of the MIT Media Lab, and Joel Orr, Founder of the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software.

December 9th’s morning program is a Call to Action to organize ourselves to move forward to harness the collective intelligence of our community. The afternoon program shifts to the Stanford Memorial Hall joining with the SRI commemoration of the team that created the demo.

On this, the 40th anniversary of Engelbart’s legendary “mother of all demos,” the Program for the Future will launch a global competition for new tools that improve collective Intelligence. In keeping with Engelbart’s vision of mass collaboration, this event also brings together many communities — education, business, nonprofit, social, political and technology. Together we will brainstorm ways to enhance our capability for problem-solving, decision-making, knowledge organization, and planning in every field of human endeavor.

Please see the Program for the Future website for schedule and registration details.

Global Footprint Network reports: Africa, China, India

Earlier this year, NNC attended a Global Footprint Network event at Swissnex to celebrate the completion of their recent Global Footprint Africa report.  Since then, they have completed a global footprint report on China and, collaborating with the Confederation of Indian Industry, released a business perspective report on India’s Ecological Footprint.  A critical concept of all these reports is ecological overshoot, which describes a condition where humanity’s demands on the biosphere exceed its capacity to regenerate itself.  Global Footprint Network found that all of these regions are in, or approaching, overshoot.  According to the reports:

Courtesy Global Footprint Network

While Africans per capita consume very little of the world’s biological resources, growing population is bringing the region close to reaching it’s ecological limits, according to a groundbreaking report Global Footprint Network, in conjunction with WWF, presented June 9 at the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment in Johannesburg.  The report finds the average African had an Ecological Footprint of 1.1 global hectares in 2003, well below the global average of 2.2 hectares per person. However, a growing number of African countries are now depleting their natural resources or will shortly be doing so – faster than they can be replaced. Clear dangers loom from a projected more than doubling of Africa’s population by 2050, taking it from about one eighth to nearly a quarter of the total world population. Egypt, Libya and Algeria head the list of African countries living well beyond their ecological means, with the Ecological Footprints of Morocco, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe also exceeding national biocapacity.  However, several African nations are “ecological creditors:” they produce more biocapacity than they consume. This stands in contrast to U.S. and Europe which are ecological debtors. The U.S., for example, has a Footprint more than 100 percent larger than its biocapacity. According to the report, many opportunities exist in Africa to manage and use biocapacity more effectively.  Here is a full copy of the report.

China’s Ecological Footprint has quadrupled in the last four decades, with the country now demanding more from the planet than any nation except the United States, according to a report released in June 2008 by Global Footprint Network, WWF China, and CCICED (China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development). It now takes the equivalent of more than two Chinas to provide for the country’s resource consumption and to absorb its waste. Yet China’s individual consumption remains relatively moderate on the world scale, and they have a unique opportunity to make choices that lead it to high development without a high Ecological Footprint as their infrastructure and economy grow. “China has traditionally been forward-looking in recognizing that its resource constraints pose a serious potential threat to its long-term progress,” said Global Footprint Network Executive Director Mathis Wackernagel. “China’s leaders are painfully aware that they can only secure their population’s well-being within the limits of what the planet can provide.” The report outlines a strategy by which China could reduce its total Ecological Footprint, while still helping secure a high quality of life for its citizens. It involves a dual strategy: on the one hand addressing activities that are cheap and easy to change –such as the use of energy-efficient lighting – and on the other those have the longest-term effect on resource use, such as investing in resource-efficient infrastructure. 

India now demands the biocapacity of two Indias to provide for its consumption and absorb its wastes, according to a report released by Global Footprint Network and CII (Confederation of Indian Industry). The report, India’s Ecological Footprint: A Business Perspective, was presented Monday in New Delhi to a conference that included top Indian environmental officials, leaders of Indian industry, U.S. State Department representatives and other stakeholders. India’s Ecological Footprint – the amount of productive land and sea area required to produce the resources it consumes and absorb its waste – has doubled since 1961, according to the report. Today, the country’s total demand on biocapacity is exceeded only by the United States and China. “India is depleting its ecological assets in support of its current economic boom and the growth of its population,” says Mr. Jamshyd N. Godrej, Chairman of the CII Sohrabji Godrej Green Business Centre. “This suggests that business and government intervention are needed to reverse this risky trend, and ensure a sustainable future in which India remains economically competitive and its people can live satisfying lives.”

The next post will highlight Global Footprint Network’s 2008 Living Planet Report.

About Global Footprint Network:  Our mission is to promote a sustainable economy by advancing the Ecological Footprint, a measurement tool that makes the reality of planetary limits relevant to decision-makers.

About Swissnex:  Swissnex bridges knowledge and competencies in science, education, art and innovation between Switzerland, the USA, and Canada