tech4soc

I'll start my final post on the Tech4Society conference by giving thanks to the Ashoka folks for getting me here to be a part of this conference. Most of the time, even in the developing world, I'm surrounded by digital natives, or people who emigrated to the digital nation. It's an enveloping culture, one that can skew the perception of the world to one where everyone worries about things like copyrights and licenses, and whether or not data should be licensed or in the public domain. There's a big world of entrepreneurs out there just hacking in the real world. First life, if you will.…
Getting ready to head up to Tech4Society's final day. I'm on a panel called the tipping point, about how to scale social entrepreneurial success beyond a local region or state. My instinct is to say "pack your suitcase and start traveling" but that's not very helpful. Even if it's how I have been approaching the problem. Yesterday I wasn't on a panel. It was a good moment to do some listening. I sat in on a few panels, but was most moved by the trends in Africa session. In other trends panels, the trends were things like "open source" - positive trends. In Africa it was all about how…
I did an interview recently where the author, clearly having done some homework, called out an old quote of mine arguing that ideas aren't like widgets or screws, that they're not industrial objets. I'd said that a long time ago, inspired by John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. Here's the money quote: "Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron…