Thinking With Our Hearts

An op-ed piece in the September 9th edition of the NY Times asserts that the standard measures of poverty in the U.S. are misleading and that significant headway has been made on improving the lot of poor people in this country. If you're anything like me, presented with selected facts from both ideological sides of the aisle on just about any issue, you can rarely get past a far from definitive "maybe". It's only when cold, hard facts hit the realm of personal emotion and intuition that we can get to a point of view. Maybe it takes a multifaceted "jolt" to view the world from a new lens. Instead of just thinking with our heads, we let our hearts get into the act.

While the aftermath of some prominent natural disasters have recently focused our attention with red-hot intensity on the seemingly wide disparities between individuals, if we're really being honest with ourselves, we realize that these disparities exist all around us. Rich and poor, minority and majority, blue collar and professional, mobile and immobile, young and old, ... most of the time, it unfortunately takes a catastrophic event to focus our attention long enough from the rush of daily living to form a thoughtful personal opinion about what is "right" and "wrong" (if anything), and what to do about it.

Much of the dialogue most recently has been between the "rich" and "poor" (although the dialogue seems to have forgotten about that vast turf called the "middle") and the implications of being in one camp or the other. Are we truly better off as a country? Have we moved the needle on poverty at all or have gigantic, government-driven efforts over the last 30-plus years been wasted? If vast government intervention is proving ineffective could a more "market-based" system, drawing on the central tenants of capitalism, prove more effective? How could the integration of social sector organizations and businesses change the game? It'll take our heads and our hearts to figure out any of these questions.

A Goldmine in Serving the Poorest Consumers

From former Accelerator staffer, Leila Berkley:

Check out a book out by a professor at the B-School at Michigan, C. K. Prahalad, titled The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, and is all about treating the world's poor as consumers (not poor) and giving them more choices, which will in turn help them. I think it (like many international development ideas) has some strong implications for our urban (or rural, for that matter) poor here in the states.

There is also an article online at changemakers.net.

From Amazon.com:

The world's most exciting, fastest-growing new market? It's where you least expect it: at the bottom of the pyramid. Collectively, the world's billions of poor people have immense entrepreneurial capabilities and buying power. You can learn how to serve them and help millions of the world's poorest people escape poverty.
It is being done-profitably. Whether you're a business leader or an anti-poverty activist, business guru Prahalad shows why you can't afford to ignore "Bottom of the Pyramid" (BOP) markets.
In the book and accompanying CD videos, Prahalad presents...

Why what you know about BOP markets is wrong A world of surprises-from spending patterns to distribution and marketing
Unlocking the "poverty penalty"
The most enduring contributions your company can make Delivering dignity, empowerment, and choice-not just products
Corporations and BOP entrepreneurs Profiting together from an inclusive new capitalism

Recovery 2.0

Ethan Zuckerman has spent his career building social networks through innovative technology.

He has been watching as the sprawling network of bloggers, technologists and working folk self-assemble tools, resources and coordinated efforts for search, rescue and recovery in the Gulf.

One massive effort is the PeopleFinder database which, according to Salesforce.com, contains over 87,000 records in the database, all entered by hand by volunteers. Imagine a state bureau trying to tackle that over Labor Day weekend!

The first design principle of PeopleFinder is "to bring people and data together."

The design aims to promote convergence: convergence of people who seek the same person, convergence of information about a person obtained from various sources, convergence of duplicated data, and ultimately convergence of missing people with their loved ones.

Zuckerman describes the timeline of tech events in conjunction with events on the ground in New Orleans and the Gulf.

The emerging story describes a virtual immune system swarming in response to the body blow of Katrina: individual groups establishing wikis and blogs; converging efforts behind a single URL (Katrinahelp.info); the use of on-line sales space Craigslist to offer shelter and supplies; AirAmerica Radio's Katrina Voicemail; amazing feats of digital heroism to link up families and account for the missing.

He identifies some guiding principles, and an evolving model for future disasters.

"Jeff Jarvis, who's done an excellent job of blogging various Katrina recovery efforts, sees an opportunity for a dialog about reactions to future natural (or, god forbid, manmade) disasters -- he's calling the idea Recovery 2.0."

From Jarvis' blog:

The goal is to be ready -- God help us -- for the next disaster so people can better use the internet -- via any device -- to better:
1. Share information,
2. Report and act on calls for help,
3. Coordinate relief,
4. Connect the missing,
5. Provide connections for such necessities as housing and jobs,
6. Match charitable assets to needs,
7. Get people connected to this and the world sooner.

Zuckerman's observations hold to just about any socially oriented effort, whether focused on acute short-term catastrophes or long-term recovery:

• People want to help.
• Sometimes code is the solution. Sometimes 2,000 loosely organized people are the solution.
• Simple tools work surprisingly well.
• It's not just your tools that need to be robust. You're dependent on everyone else's tools as well.
• Posses rock.
• Assume burnout.

As one of the core team members at Tripod in the 1990s, Zuckerman was at the center of a web-based communitity, that served as an early development lab for the blognation phenomenon.

Currently, his main affiliation is with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. In a former life, he also lead a cadre of self-proclaimed geeks into the colorful chaos of West Africa, through Geekcorps. The organization transfers skills to the Third World, or -- in the words of Jim Moore -- the second superpower.

Geekcorps' early business model was very simple: (1) Geeks beget geeks; (2) Africa needs geeks; (3) Give a geeks money to go to Africa.

His blog is even titled, My Heart's in Accra.

One project in this area is BlogAfrica, a project to help Africans learn about weblogs and to aggregate content from African weblogs. Ethan also works with anonymous blogservers for use by people in the human rights community, allowing human rights workers to blog about situations in their countries without compromising their security.