Non-Governmental Imagination

The Innovatorz guys just rocked the house at N2Y2. Most of the featured projects (including Maps2.0, for which I’m a project champion), have given a generic “here’s what we do” speech. Innovatorz did this crazy skit, and it expressed what they do hilariously. Kudos for them for being creative.

Tags: net2, n2y2, innovatorz

I know this is last minute, but if anyone is driving from San Francisco to the NetSquared Conference (N2Y2) in San Jose tomorrow?  If so, I’d love a ride.  Anytime between now (1:06am) and 8am tomorrow.

Tags: n2y2, netsquared, rideshare, procrastination

Peter Deitz is trying to raise $500 for each of the 21 NetSquared featured projects ($10,500) in $21 chunks, one buck per project. Help him out, $21 isn’t too much money.

Tags: foik, net2

One is the lead singer for The Cat Empire, and another is the lead singer for change.org.  Crazy, huh?

I’m at NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) right now, and tomorrow morning I’m speaking on a panel called “Not your mother’s online fundraising campaign”. We’re gonna try to make it a little contentious and interesting, so if you’re not going to any other breakout sessions here, come in for a chat.

tags:  nten ntc07

I’m back from India (I’ll post all about it) but I’m sick.  I have had a cold for the last week.  Sneezing, runny nose, and a nasty cough.  And I’m very tired from a crazy trip back.  Anyone have any tips for getting better?  I hate being home alone sick.  Know of any place in SF with mean chicken noodle soup?  Any “stand on your head and drink the blood of a virginal goat upside down” cures passed down through your family?

I really don’t have much more to say than that.

I’m in a country with hundreds of millions of poor people.  And I don’t mean the kind of poor people who have TVs and expensive jewelry.  I mean poor, poor people.

Yet I’m staying at a Radisson, which is nicer than any hotel I would ever stay at on my own dime.  I eat three ginormous meals a day that are either buffets, catered or home-cooked.  Everytime I walk into the hotel I am saluted.  I drive in cars and vehicles chauffered by others.  I eat at the nicest restaraunts in town and am doted on quite frequently.

I’m supposed to be here helping people.  Or at least helping an organization that helps people.  But I can’t help feeling like I’m becoming one of those development imperialists who live like the rich while helping the poor. 

When I was in Laos a few years ago all the UN workers parked their badass 4-wheel drives outside the nicest restaraunt in town and lived in the old French colonial mansions.  I snottily looked down on them, but it looks like I’m turning into them.

I’m very uncomfortable with it.  I feel much more at home in rickshaws, eating at darbars, not being saluted by a doorman, not having a doorman, etc.  Hopefully I don’t get too used to this pampering.  It definitely doesn’t feel like I’m in a poor country.

I have often heard the expression “one xxxx was better than the next”.  It always seemed weird to me, that the best thing ever could consistently be trumped, time and again.

Well, now I’m in India, eating Indian food cooked by or picked out by Punjabis at every meal.  Literally, every meal is better than the previous.  Can you imagine? Every bite is unbelievable.  I love India.

After a breezy 37 hrs of travelling, I’m at the hotel in Jalandhar, India.  I’ll be here for a week, other parts of India for another week and then back to the US.  Coming here was a string of annoyances and near-disasters, but now that I’m here in a near comatose state due to lack of sleep (6 hrs out of the last 48) and a full belly of Indian food (buffet!), everything is peachy. 

Our plane from London to Armritsar got rerouted to Delhi (too much fog), where we sat on the tarmac for hours before flying successfully to Armritsar.  We had a pool to see who could guess closest to our actual arrival time, which I lost.

I’ll try to update this when I can while I’m here, but no promises.

Fast Company announced their annual 2007 Social Capitalist Awards, and I was surprised to see that Kiva was not on the list.  After all, 43 groups made it, which suggests that the editors picked all they wanted and then decided the final tally, rather than cutting off a larger list of qualified orgs at 10 or some other pretty number.  I wonder what they thought Kiva did wrong, they certainly sound like the epitomy of social capitalism to me.

Tags: kiva, fast company, social capitalist awards

On Friday I will go to India via London for work, and I will be very close to the orpahange that I used to work for, live at, and help administer. I spent a couple of months there after college, and became very attached (and vice versa) to the 40 or so kids who live, play and learn there. I have the opportunity to go back and visit which would be tremendously cool for me. It’d be neat to see the kids three years later, see how everyone is doing, and splash around in the Ganga (Ganges River) like old times. They would always call me “goonda” (translates to villain or jerk) and then I would roar and throw them in the river or tickle them until they cried.  We’d sing songs, play cricket and other games, do homework, draw monsters and all kinds of other fun stuff.  Although it was really hard, unending work (we even had to put out the fires that arsonists lit to burn us off the property), I loved it, and told myself I would really try to come back to the little corner of India.

But I worry that my return might be hard on the kids. They’ve probably forgotten me or tried to, and it’s probably easier for them to just add me to relegate me to the recesses of their minds. Lots of volunteers like myself work there for a few months at a time and then leave. It’s probably hard for the kids to get so attached and then have to say goodbye. They made me promise I would come back, but what if doing so would awaken happily buried emotions? I could only stay for a day or two, and they (it they remembered me at all) would want me to stay for months.

Another wrinkle is that one of the kids has a horribly deformed hand. Rebels intentionally mangled his hand and what remains has been fashioned into two fingers and a thumb-like appendage. This is exactly the kind of thing Interplast can help, and we will be only five or six hours away by bus. Does the prospect of helping him justify my return? I have written the director of the orphanage who has not responded to my emails.

Thoughts?

Tags: dilemma, orphanage, child psychology

I checked back on the 59 smartest orgs online site today, and was surprised to see that many charities had lost votes (Interplast had gone from five to two), the bottom-dwelling groups are now at zero points instead of -1, and the option to vote down a charity was gone.

Huh. Maybe some people went a little too crazy go nuts with the downward arrows. I hope the Powers That Be didn’t take my previous post about people gaming the system as a castigation of the system.

I’d be curious to see which nonprofits would have been down based on merit (or lack thereof) alone had there not been a benefit to voting a group up. I didn’t vote any organizations down, but I wonder if there was a limit as to how many groups you could dock. If there was, there’s a greater chance of the groups at the bottom earning their rank.

Oh well. It was a great idea to have those down arrows, and it’s a shame that the system got abused. I certainly learn more from bad examples than good ones. The lesson that curling irons are hot is a particularly memorable one.

Speaking of cleverness, it was really a great idea to pick the number 59. It’s so random, arbitrary and prime that it makes the site and all related commentary super findable.

Tags: 59, net2, squidoo, charities, nptech, get active

On this trip, I have picked up a number of curious job titles:

• Principal Assistant
• El Principe de Computadore
• El Principe de Computadore y Cervezas
• Computadore Expert 
• PACU Nurse

I usually crave people. When I´m on my own, I seem to have little adventures that I rarely do when I travel with others.

Today I was walking back from the hospital after a comparatively long day. In Ecuador, we were never done before 7pm, and here, after only being here for two days I gather that 5:30pm is pretty late. So we were leaving at around 5:45pm today, and I waited awhile outside the changing room holding one of our sick nurses´ IV solution bag. Since the sickies were all taking a cab back I walked back to the hotel alone.

Two people about my age that I walked by motioned for me to come over. At first I thought they were trying to sell me something, but after giving them an uncharacteristic second look, I realized they were just curious folks.

As we walked back, we started talking. My Spanish sucks (a word I had to explain numerous times to them) as did they{re English, but we made do in the middle somehow. I needed to buy some batteries, so they taught me how to say that and took me to some places to find some. I bought them a beer for their kindness and we talked for at least 90 minutes. The girl, Gallito (I think), had this really cute sense of humor and would stick her tongue out whenever she thought anything was funny or interesting. David does security at the hospital and saw me walking in and out of the hospital on my gopher runs all day. He is more chill and understood more English, so he was often a go between.

It is really hard to learn another language. But its really gratifying to move this fast. I´ve mainly travelled in countries where the language has been extremely foreign and difficult, so to be in a place with an easy language is quite a pleasure. If I had been walking with the group or even one person, there´s no way they would have approached me.

But they did, and now I have two new friends. I need to be alone more often, in the US and abroad, to facilitate more such interactions.

I finally got around to switching over to a Feedburner feed, so if you’re reading this in an aggregator, I’d be very appreciative if you subscribed with using this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ngimagination

If you read my blog and don’t know what a feed is but would like to get all posts delivered to you automatically without having to figure out what an aggregator is, click on the link right below the orange thing on the left.  You’ll get all my posts delivered to you via email.  If you still have questions, email me at cartoonsandpenguins AT yahoo DOT com.

And no, I haven’t seen the movie with cartoon penguins dancing around.

Excellent interview with Camera Rwanda, who I think best exemplifies Flickr’s potential use as a means of spreading awareness for NGOs and other like-minded folk.

Tags: Flickr, Camera_Rwanda, nptech

So maybe 10:30pm the night before isn’t the best time to do this, but if anyone who’s going to BlogHer from San Francisco has extra space in their car tomorrow (Saturday) morning, I’d love a ride.

Thanks!

Tags: BlogHer06, rideshare, procrastination

Update: no love.  Caltrain it was. 

India’s ruling Congress party has launched the “National Rural Employment Gurantee Scheme”, which guarantees 100 days of work anually for one person in India’s 60 million rural families. Either the family member gets work or they get the equivalent amount in welfare. Needless to say this is a pretty ambitious plan, and the BBC esitmates that it will cost between $5-25 billion.

The big question of course is whether it will work or not. A number of Indian bloggers have some pretty strong doubts. The Open Window crunches some numbers and offers a convincing argument that this is simply designed to make it look like Congress is helping the poor. Santhosh simply thinks that subsidy-driven plans never work at inspiring the entrepreunrial spirit needed to drive an economy.

As much as I would love to see this program work, their doubts seem well-founded. Corruption could cripple the program, and there doesn’t seem to be stringent enough protections against corrupt panchayat and state governments from dipping their paws into the honey pot. Here’s to hoping I’m wrong.
Cross-posted at So a Hindu, a Christian and a Jew walk into a bar….