Blogs

Bangkok is truly infinite in all directions.

We had just turned a corner from the nuts-and-bolts district into a more open-air-marketish area. According to our maps, this was indeed the "Thieves Market" - formerly where people would fence stolen goods, now more of a market of randomness in the heart of Bangkok's Chinatown.

We'd wandered through here earlier in the day by accident, and had had our fill of browsing powertools, pirated DVD porn, dollar-store items and kitchenware, so we peeked down a side alleyway that looked likely to go through to the next block over, in our general direction of onward wandering. On a whime, we took it (the joys of careless wandering that a good sense of direction and a local SIM card in a jailbroken iPhone afford you).

THIS was the real thieves market. We had stumbled into an invisible warren of narrow sois and passageways full of everything. From Playstations to cameras to knockoff tablets to boardgames and more, densely packed in a fractaline arrangement - a market in a market in a district full of markets in a city where everything (except a decent martini) seems to be for sale at a price -- the Bangkok Post classifieds, a surprisingly family-friendly section of the paper, still has large paid adverts for liposuction (600USD) and gender reassignment (1600USD). Package deals available.

This is Bangkok, where the downtown mega-mall shopping district got so frustrated with the street-side markets and 6-lane traffic jams slowing down foot-traffic between the office-building sized malls that they built above-ground sidewalks to link them together, as if the city itself were trying to scab over its street vendors and traffic congestion.

It's unmappable. Bangkok has a perfectly understandable system of neighborhoods, main streets and side streets that make navigation - once you grok the system - natural. WikiTravel explains this system the best:

Addresses in Bangkok use the Thai addressing system, which may be a little confusing to the uninitiated. Large roads such as Silom or Sukhumvit are thanon (ถนน), [...] while the side streets branching off from them are called soi (ซอย). Sois are numbered, with even numbers on one side and odd numbers on the other side. Thus, an address like "25 Sukhumvit Soi 3" means house/building number 25 on the 3rd soi of Sukhumvit Road. While the soi numbers on each side will always advance upward, the numbers often do not advance evenly between sides — for example, Soi 55 could be across from Soi 36. Many well-known sois have an additional name, which can be used instead of the number. Sukhumvit Soi 3 is also known as "Soi Nana Nuea", so the address above might thus also be expressed as "25 Soi Nana Nuea". The extension /x is used for new streets created between existing streets, as seen in Sukhumvit's soi pattern 7, 7/1, 7/2, 9, 11. Note that some short alleys are called trok (ตรอก) instead of soi.

To make things a little more complex, some large sois like Soi Ekkamai (Sukhumvit Soi 63) and Soi Ari (Phahonyothin Soi 7) have their own sois. In these cases, an address like "Ari Soi 3" means "the 3rd soi off Soi Ari", and you may even spot addresses like "68/2 Ekkamai Soi 4, Sukhumvit Road", meaning "2nd house beside house 68, in the 4th soi of Ekkamai, which is the 63rd soi of Sukhumvit". In many sois, the house numbers are not simply increasing, but may spread around.

Markets like the thieves market exist in a mix between sois, sub-sois, and a further maze of twisty little passages, all same-same, but different. This system has driven map-makers insane. Guidebooks like the Lonely Planet and Rough Guide have taken to a neighborhood, points-of-interest approach, which is great if you never stray from the path, but confusingly fails to include all the random side-streets, so "the first street on the left" may be very, very misleading. Google seems to be building a more comprehensive map overall, with anything that a two-wheeled vehicle could manage showing up -- but it's not complete, missing some of the better hidden or poorly mapped areas altogether. Open Street Maps is focusing so far on only the larger streets, missing huge swaths of the fractal nature of Bangkok.

The low cost of entry into these markets also mean that there is immense flux - a food stall may only be there a certain chunk of days out of the week, may move, or go out of business. It may have the best fried quail eggs in wanton wrappers in Bangkok, but good luck finding it reviewed at TripAdvisor.

But that misses the point, anyhow. In preparing for the trip, the guidebooks and websites both were failing at restaurant and shopping recommendations. That's because these are not really specific destinations in Thailand, but journeys that every traveler willing to venture out beyond their 5-star hotel or the backpacker ghetto must make on their own. Everyone will choose their own adventure - it will be perfect and unique and unrepeatable. And that, in this age of commoditized experiences and peer-reviewed restaurants, may actually be the most valuable part of a trip in Thailand.

Here's one of our big ideas from last week's overview. I take the helm here and dive in to alternative currencies, like the crazy new kid on the block -- bitcoin.

Is bitcoin a key to unlocking social currency?

The earlier attempts all were centralized startups, each proposing a competing faux-currency to ease online (providing simplicity and improving trust) transactions and slowly build a virtual currency of sorts. Their business plans generally involved taking margins from the transactions or cost differentials. The early Internet currency attempts ran into regulatory problems (most countries frown upon private companies setting up alternate currencies, it turns out), and had to evolve their offerings to avoid getting shut out.

Bitcoin provides something different. Instead of a currency that has evolved from being backed by precious metals into fiat currencies, Bitcoin is backed by cryptographic algorithms, and has no company--or even an identifiable person--behind it. This shared system provides an amazing openness for a currency: Every transaction is part of a public, collaborative log. However, the people behind those transactions are known only by their account numbers, in a world where you can create as many accounts as you like.

Read the full article at Fast Co.Exist

Over at FastCoExist, my colleague and I are rolling out a series of big changes and ideas in economy - from bitcoin to DIY job creation to well-being, starting here: http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679221/5-big-ideas-for-a-new-economy

(You can guess who's the primary author behind the bitcoin piece)

My wife and I bought a new TV for ourselves this holiday season. Well, to be more accurate, we bought a large monitor (which happens to be a TV) for our media computer. We long ago gave up on our local cable monopoly, so its use is split between digging through the increasingly meager offerings of online video rental services and watching a screensaver-ified flow of our travel favorite photos. Sometimes maybe using the live 2D->3D conversion thing. I never said we weren't both dorks.

That being said, the TV comes with, as most new TVs seem to, an app store. And it sucks. By gods, the offerings are horrible, the interface is via the clunkiest of all possible remotes, reminiscent more of an 80s-era cellular phone than a 21st century Internet-enabled TV control device. Once you manage to navigate into the app store, there are but a scant few useful apps and a smattering of crappy games and info apps.

Don't get me wrong - I'm excited about new form factors of devices, and computational power showing up in more devices - but give me a device that I can use and that is multifunctional at its heart. It may have a nice skin and intended purpose, but technology changes rapidly, and I don't want to churn through hardware devices at the speed of change in software.

Part of this is that companies must accept failure -- or at least change -- as a possibility. Your framework, support, upgrades and management of a walled garden app store may be fantastic, but what if you ditch your entire business unit? (HP, I'm looking at you).

Apple has provided a solid model of the benefits of the app path, but few companies can match Apple in their abilities to keep up with the store - and even then, it suffers from being a disneyfied (http://phandroid.com/2010/03/16/iphone-is-a-sterile-disney-fied-walled-g...), tightly controlled and kid-friendly store. The Android market is certainly a bit more wild and wooley, but that creates a new foothold for innovation.

This disneyfication is unavoidable for any centralized store, since that centralization focuses responsibility on to the ones who make decisions about what goes in to the store and what stays out - which ends up being increasingly restrictive and eventually anti-competitive.

As Dave Winer points out at Scripting News, this is a classic cycle in technology over control (http://scripting.com/stories/2011/12/31/theUninternet.html). This trope affects the continuum between being able to compile your own software to being able to download whatever software you like all the way to only having access to pre-approved app-store apps, but its influence also is seen in web services and consumer electronics.

There's a value to the app store model, as there's a value to Disneyland. You know everything is tailored, tweaked, padded and sanitized. If something goes wrong, it won't be your problem -- but the cost for this level of safety is freedom. Your iPhone works great, but just try to swap out its SIM card for an affordable local provider in another country, or, really, do anything that Apple hasn't approved of, despite if it would be useful or not to you. It's not called jailbreaking for nothing.

Two years ago, in the aftermath of the January, 2010 earthquake, hackers and social activists led a charge and saved lives in Haiti from across the sea. Ushahidi remindes us of the scale of this by reposting a blog from the process. Re-reading this through me into a reflective state on how far ICT4D has come in the past few years, and how much more value it brings to the table.

The initial, amazing outpouring of support for earthquake victims in Haiti was heartwarming. The worldwide aid response, not without some hiccups and valid criticism, went well.

The one thread through the global response to the earthquake has been the supporting role that technology has played. At a basic level, SMS fundraising will no longer be seen as a pipe-dream. With deeper impact, however, was the direct role that technology played. We saw the ability of hackers with good hearts around the world to lend a helping hand through infrastructural projects like Ushahidi and Open Street Map as well as engagement tools like The Extaordinaries' iPhone app. Inveneo's ICT_Works blog goes into great detail on the The Rise of the Voluntary Humanitarian Technologist in Disaster Response:

Not a very bloggy year, but I like to think I made up for quantity with quality. By far and away, the most popular post I wrote in 2011 was Privacy, Trust, NymWars, and Social Change, in which I tried to clarify why pseudonyms are valuable in online civic discourse.

Coming in second, Monitoring and Evaluation is broken. Let's really break it. - a gripe on the somewhat depressing state of M&E, especially in the tech4dev world, based on a discussion at the DC Technology Salon.

In third place, we have my calling on the #Occupy crowd to get beyond building sustainable tent cities and get down to loca, domestic and glocal action: In the Global Mirror, the #OWS 99% looks a lot like the 1%

Following on from that, a piece calling for voting support for Changemakers' Economic Opportunity competition.

Finishing fifth, The Art of Failing, where I discuss DC's own FailFaire and the value of talking about projects that didn't go so well.

Next, Back from Dakar: How I built a Drupal 7 site in 7 days,

In seventh place, Apples that are neither green nor easy to digest., a discussion about Mike Daisey's coverage of Apple, which is thankfully back in the news and causing change!

Eight is indeed great, with my post advertising my panel at DCWeek 2011 on Tech Trends

Ninth is The Jasmine Revolution, a fascinating social media blip in China.

Finally at tenth spot is Online Activism after #ArabSpring : What's Next?, an event at IREX I moderated for the DC ICT4D Meetup.

It was, it seems, a busy year.

A rant on the tight hold "overhead" has on nonprofit financials and giving decisions I wrote with my colleague is up on Co.Exist. An excerpt:

When considering donations, people often make harsh assumptions about nonprofits that spend on marketing and overhead. But maybe those expenses means the organization is doing a good job?
Every year around this time, a batch of articles comes out talking about how to maximize your year-end giving by focusing on nonprofits with super-low overhead, so you can rest assured that every cent you donate goes directly to the cause.

But I’ve spent the better part of my career as a nonprofit tech warrior, from volunteering in the Peace Corps to a variety of domestic and internationally focused NGOs and nonprofits--small and large. I’ve had contract, full-time, pro-bono, and board positions, and have been on both the grant-requesting and grant-reviewing/giving sides of the equation, and I can tell you that this isn’t entirely fair. The problem is this overhead supports the cause, and zeroing it out means that the 99% non-overhead may be spent poorly or non-strategically, especially in smaller organizations. Programmatic costs may pay for the work, but overhead pays for the tools to do the work well.

read more.

As a follow-on, if I ever hit the jackpot, I want to build a foundation that only invests in the most boring line-items. Toilet repair? Computer upgrades? Then, pair the information about what's not getting funding with social innovators looking for unmet needs, and you create something interesting.

Look. I'm going on vacation tomorrow. I have promised myself to keep my stress levels down, so this is as much as you'll hear from me about SOPA - those in favor of being able to randomly block any site have thus far not shown anything beyond a mindless, selfish, shortsighted and childish desire to make the Internet bend to their will. The Internet works because it bends to no one private interest, and serves us all.

They're not even letting opposing viewpoints testify at the Congressional hearing: http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/sopa_testimony/?akid=1018.606560.JTkq.... If this is how they think Democracy should work, I'd hate to see how they want to re-create the Internet.

Read more at http://americancensorship.org/

I have a critical flaw - not being able to say no to helping out worthwhile projects get their technological house in order.

I've left a trail of wikis, content management system-run sites, and creative cabling across three continents. One such effort was in the pre-iPhone world of the early 2000s with a creative social enterprise that empowered artisans to realize the full market value of their goods (often undercut by middlemen taking advantage of innumeracy, a need for liquidity, or both). These goods are then shipped to the US to sell. The NGO takes a small cut for its operations and the shipping cost, and everyone benefits. Beyond dealing with the unpredictability of the Nicaraguan electrical system, they were efficient in their offline practices, but saw the need for inventory tracking. That seemingly basic task is both a key to empowering online sales and other scaling activities, but is no short order. The system must be able to know what items were stored in what locations in the US and in Nicaragua, and meet the needs for a geographically disperse set of volunteers to sell those items at events. It also has to have a simple and largely foolproof way of adding inventory from the Nica office that can absorb a backlog of work if the power or Internet connection is off.

No problem - totally doable. For the US side, we work with a Salesforce Foundation volunteer to create an online, cloud-based inventory system where the volunteers can log transactions live on the site using a re-purposed cue:cat barcode scanner -- the cue:cat itself being a dotcom-era QR code wannabe, best summed up by Jeff Salkowski of the Chigao Tribune as "You have to wonder about a business plan based on the notion that people want to interact with a soda can." and by Wired’s Leander Kahney as "a cheapo bar-code scanner that looks like a marital aid."

On the Nica side, the staff can add the inventory on a spreadsheet and batch upload it into SalesForce whenever they have power. This gives them an offline backup, and lets work continue (on a laptop) even if power cuts out. The Excel sheet automatically creates a code that can be barcode-ified for matching by the volunteer sales staff without painstaking scribbling of notes.

Perfect, right? With so much time spent on the “challenging” part of the equation in Nica, not enough thought went into the sales side - often outside, at craft markets, sometimes in the rain. Not happy environments for laptops, rarely enough electricity or battery power to last the day, and never any wifi to actually connect to the Internet to track sales in realtime.

Times have changed, and the plan, like the cue:cat itself, may have a new life in our 3G-saturated world with QR Codes and Square point-of-sale gadgets replacing the bulky laptop, but at the time, it was simply a failure.

What do you do when your project just falls flat? Moving on and hiding it is the wrong answer. The right answer is that you get up in front of a crowd of your peers, donors, and investors (past and potentially future) and spill the beans. In the startup world, some amount of failure is expected, and even welcomed. Learning from failure is, after all, the best education out there. But in the do-gooder space of non-profits and international development organizations, failure is not an option.

The challenge is that we’re in this industry if you will to save and improve lives, not make a profit. If a plan fails, it’s lives lives - not just bank accounts -- that are not enriched.

There are obviously failures in development, as evidenced by the mere fact that we’re five to six decades in to concerted global efforts, and still working on it. More ICT4D projects fail than ever scale beyond the pilot stage. The World Bank bravely released its internal study revealing that while most of its projects succeed overall, in the ICT4D category of projects, only achieve their intended outcomes 30% of the time. Some of those may be wildly successful in unanticipated ways, others just complete flops.

Katrin Verclas has done the community a huge favor in creating and open-sourcing the concept of the FailFaire.

The Failfaire celebrates and de-stigmatizes failure by loosening lips with some alcohol and then throwing people on staqe for a tightly scheduled 5 minute moment of candor. Thanks to the open-source philosophy, these have spread to internal organizational events as well as a few public failfaires, most recently one hosted by Inveneo’s Wayan Vota in DC at the World Bank itself, and another coming up this December in NYC hosted by MobileActive.

The risks of failure in development work are clearly weightier than Q3 profits,which makes the relaxed, raucousness of a failfaire that much more important. For a community that has no normal mechanism for learning across the various implementers, the only way we can advance the whole cause is through these commiserations over good goals, good people, and solid technology completely failing - and learning from them.

This was best encapsulated after the event. One presenter discussed his media-darling pedal-powered phone booth for remote villages, which was a complete failure. Another Failfaire-er approached him afterwards to commiserate on similar problems - their own popular bike-powered computer system actually took almost seven people pedaling to reliably power the system. While bikes garner tons of often-misguided warm feelings and media popularity, they aren’t necessarily silver bullets -- a lesson for the road.

This is a rough summary of my talk Tuesday night at DCWeek's Hot Tech Trends. Read more about the panel and continue the discussion over at quora

The trend I'm most interested in right now is actually as much offline as it is on. It really hit me a few weeks ago as I was reading through the minutes of an Occupy General Assembly. Here was a huge meeting with multiple viewpoints that was being successfully self-facilitated, prioritizing issues and moving quickly. This was a committee that was being collaborative, open, transparent, and still ... effective.

It really got me thinking on how we are are becoming accustomed to new social constructs in movements, government, and business. These concepts are familiar to anyone who's delved into the nuts and bolts of open source software -- like collaboration, shared or no ownership, team-building, and radical transparency -- but they're popping up everywhere offline.

So, I want to tackle the convergence of these concepts offline with the democratization of tools online

By democratization, I really mean simplicity and open to all. An important pre-condition to this is basic access, but we are increasingly living in an access-rich world, thanks to mobile. This year, Africa surpassed both European and the Americas and is now the second largest market for mobiles - behind only the Asia/Pacific region.

But beyond access, there is a new "digital divide" if you will -- the ability to create and engage in a participatory experience. Things like Twitter and blogging have long been low barriers of entry for getting your voice heard online. The exciting development in this arena is that it is mindbogglingly easy to create complex sites and apps with drupal and wordpress, at least compared to the work this would have taken 10 years ago.

This combination of a simple toolbox and open social constructs is powerful.

The past few years have been accelerating this convergence. Blogs and Wikipedia have permanently altered publishing, Twitter, Facebook and foursquare have opened up your social life, and Yelp and Tripadvisor have changed your customer service interactions with travel and dining destinations.

But more importantly, crowdfunding models like Kiva and Kickstarter are toe-in-water steps towards creating collaborative business models by seeking out customers and supporters in a very early stage and rallying their support around potential projects and products. Co-working spaces provide entry-level incubation for young startups with great perks of cross-startup networking and talent sharing. These fast prototyping models reduce overall risk and create engaged, evangelical customers and partners.

The social change sphere has jumped in to this intersection and is spawning hundereds of really exciting co-creation models. We've seen this in crisis mapping (Snowpocalypse, Haiti, Thailand), protest movements (Moldova, ArabSpring, OWS), open data mashups combining entrepreneurs and civic data (Apps4Democracy, UN Global Pulse), and even countries crowdsourcing their own constitutions (Iceleand and now Morocco)

The availability of these easy to use platforms and expectations of openness and co-creation is forcing new levels of engagement in all sectors. People are no longer OK with occasional, reactive, or superficial engagement.

My first human interaction with a brand shouldn't be after I post a negative tweet - nor should it be a annual 10 page user survey that never changes anything. I want to help build their business and be engaged at a strategic level, even though I'm "just" a consumer

If that sounds a bit insane and totally unscalable, just replace business with government and consumer with citizen and it suddenly sounds less crazy.

Business, non-profits, social enterprises, and governments will all need to open up not only their data or their superficial interactions, but begin to fully collaborate with their communities on their policies and business plans.

This means that 2012 holds a huge potential for global co-creation and new organizational frameworks, and anyone who doesn't begin to engage customers, supporters and citizens in this way is going to be shut out by organizations that aren't merely building their business with their users in mind, but building their business with their users.

With these concepts of shared ownership, highly functional teams, collaboration and transparency, combined with online structures that parallel these same values, we have a world where decentralized, democratized power structures forming across the digital/analog borders. This changes governance, economics, social change and business.

Holy shit, this is going to be a wild, fun ride.

"All the things" courtesy quickmeme with the amazing original comic by Hyperbole and a Half