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The Skoll Foundation, started by Jeff Skoll of Ebay, is focused on changing the game for social change and entrepreneurism.

In fact, the label "social entrepreneur" is the nom de guerre in the current war on poverty, disease, conflict and intolerance, with the long-time foot soldiers finally gaining popular acclaim.

Last year, the man who is oft cited as the prototype of the modern social entrepreneur was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize: Muhammad Yunus, founder and manager of Grameen Bank and its growing family of social venture businesses in Bangladesh.

Fast Company has dedicated entire issues to celebrating Social Capitalists who've used business savvy and social conscious to create successful ventures that reap an ROI tracked in the new gold standard of success: The Triple Bottom Line. Business school students are emailing their parents, declaring that they are going to take their $200,000 education and start a business selling eyeglasses to Haitians. Oh, and make a ton of money doing it.

Heck, even the Oscars were declared green this year! [details]

With all this good press, an very self-reflective and worried conversation is taking place on-line at the Skoll Foundation's project site, The Social Edge. Social entrepreneurs are having a moment of doubt as to the depth of this perceived global change.

As the topic itself becomes more popular, more mainstream, more Hollywood, will this spotlight yield practical leaders who can effectively leverage the emergent power of social media to mobilize decentralized activity in combination with true political will to lead change in policies and regulations on a global scale?

Changing the World is Not Enough
Is social entrepreneurship ready for the real challenge?
by Social Edge

As a social entrepreneur, I worry. Changing the world through the work of one social entrepreneur at a time is not good enough. Improving life for even one person is worthy. It changes the world…one heartbeat at a time. And sooner or later, as life for enough people is changed for the positive we will reach a tipping point beyond which the entire world will change itself into a better place. I believe this will happen, given time.

But what if it doesn’t happen soon enough? What if we don’t have the time it will take? What if the world tips the other way first? Some days, for every tip toward a better world there is an opposite and greater tip toward a horrific world. What if those days overpower the good days?

A new wilderness is engulfing us. How we see this forest for its trees and who leads us through it could make the difference between life and death for civilization as we know it.

Labels: social enterprise, social media

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As a kid in the 70's, I remember walking the shores of Lake Michigan and dodging the rotting piles of dead fish covered in maggots.

These small, silver fish, called alewives, grew in unchecked mega-pods because of the lack of a top predator in the lakes. Lake trout were essentially wiped out around the same time by overfishing and the invasion of the exotic, rapacious sea lamprey. For a time, alewives, which often exhibit seasonal die offs, washed up in putrid layers on the shorelines of the Great Lakes.

There was (and is) a crazy cascade of invasive species that were intentionally introduced to solve the problem. Each intentional introduction of a foreign species creates a new ecological issue that permanently altered the ecology of the Great Lakes. The most recent intruder? Massive Asian carp that can grow to be 80 to 100 pounds. They're ravenous eaters, consuming up to 40 percent of their own body weight in plankton each day. And they're bullies, pushing out weaker, native species. (Listen to NPR story.)

So... the prospect of having genetically modified organisms and micro-organisms invade my personal ecology fills me with dread. Even if measures of accountability are imposed, once the damage is done, there is no point of return. The latest book by science writer, Denise Caruso, details the threats of introducing new organisms--whether on the nano, the micro and the macro-levels--into the fragile ecology of our planet. Ecological catastrophes that would dwarf the breech of New Orleans' levees.

These potential disasters would, in the words of Caruso, "create stewardship challenges for generations into the future that are already far beyond our present scientific knowledge or capabilities."

From Worldchanging:

Denise Caruso holds a somewhat legendary status among tech journalists. A columnist for the NY Times (her old Information Industries column was a must-read for years, while her new column Re:Framing just kicked off on a bang with a piece titled Someone (Other Than You) May Own Your Genes) and founder of the Hybrid Vigor Institute (an NGO dedicated to facilitating interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to scientific problem solving), it's not going too far to say that Caruso's work has helped shape our society's thinking about the future of science.

That future may be riskier than we like to think. In her new book, Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet, Caruso lays out in chilling detail exactly why even (perhaps especially) those of us who are strong supporters of science and innovation ought to be extremely concerned about the unintended consequences of contemporary biotechnological industrial research.

Labels: biodesign, ecology, genetics

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Lots more fun photos like this. It's like the old "I'm crushing your head" skit from Kids in the Hall. 'Cept different.

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From Josh Rubin's Cool Hunting
by Ami Kealoha, 16 February 2007

It doesn't get anymore DIY than a duct tape wallet. But simple as they may seem, there's a right way and a wrong way. MyDuctbills Duct Tape Wallet Kits comes with step-by-step instructions written by the pros behind dbclay, the Portland-based company that makes quality duct and (more recently) gaffers tape wallets.

For $20, you get a booklet and all the materials you'll need, including three strips of colored duct tape for decoration.

Pick one up from myDuctbills. If you'd rather leave the crafting to the experts, you can still get a ductbill (the original duct tape wallet that preceded dbclay's gaffers tape wallets) here.

Labels: crafts

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After a year of working on MissingLink with GradientLabs, and trying to introduce it to the larger graphics and facilitation world, I identify with this Old School Brother of the Monastic Help Desk.



[Thanks to Mark Frisse]

Labels: technology, video

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This pretty much sums up what I plan on doing for my retirement: Making a big, crazy colorful mountain in the middle of nowhere.

Salvation Mountain was created by Leonard Knight, if you would like to learn more go to www.roadsideamerica.com/.

In the mid-1980s, Leonard Knight, with the aim of spreading God's word, began building a hot air balloon from bed sheets. In bold letters, he painted “God is Love” on the balloon’s face. He planned to float it high above the earth where all could see its message. Attempts to get the balloon airborne failed, however, and Knight was left in the Southern California desert with a pile of rotting linen. It was this aborted mission that led Knight to his eventual calling, the 20-year construction of Salvation Mountain. Today, Knight’s mountain is a colorful array on a neutral canvas. Built of adobe and covered in over 100,000 gallons of donated paint, Salvation Mountain forms part of the cultural landscape.

See more at PBS Travelogue.

Labels: folk art, inspiration

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Sita Magnuson sends us greetings (and some stellar pics!) from her scribing gig in Thailand.

Check out some of her fun and exotic photos.

FLICKR SET: http://flickr.com/photos/hoodsie/sets/72157594522832680/
SLIDESHOW: http://flickr.com/photos/hoodsie/sets/72157594522832680/show/

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As graphic facilitators, the tools that allow us to synthesize ideas into images--whether static or dynamic--are expanding exponentially.

In this video thought piece hosted on YouTube, Kansas State Anthropology professor Michael Welsch uses the simple, cheap digital tools at hand to weave an engaging narrative of the birth of Web 2.0.

[ via Jarrell McAlister ]

Welsch expresses the miracle of that birth, writing: "We're teaching the machine, and the machine is us. Time to rethink the world. The network is the machine; the machine is us."Digital Ethnography is a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty

dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital
ethnography.

He literally draws the path of communication evolution from handwritten, linear text to non-linear hypertext, HTML, XML, RSS and mash-ups.This is the most elegant and engaging description of where media is today. And to think, he did it without using a single bullet point!Currently Wesch is launching the Digital Ethnography working group

at Kansas State University to examine the impacts of digital technology
on human interaction.

The first outcome of this work was a short video called "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us." The video was released on YouTube on January 31st 2007 and quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere.

Labels: ethnography, Web 2.0

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