Why is the Digital Divide so important, and what can you do about it?

Last week I had the honor of speaking at the Youth Action and Volunteering Development meeting on the day before the opening of the 18th biennial session of the IFRC General Assembly in Geneva.  My topic was "Why is the Digital Divide so important, and what can you do about it?"  Here is an expanded version of my brief remarks:

We are all aware of the digital divide in our world: those who have free access to information and the tools to make it useful for us, and those who do not.  In a recent study, we found that this divide exists in our Red Cross Red Crescent Movement.  We have an internal divide that makes it difficult for us "have equal status and share equal responsibilities" –from our very principle of universality that we so value.

Why is the digital divide so important?  I think there are three reasons.  First, information through the Internet is the great leveller; it allows all of us to learn and discover in the same school, so to speak.   Second, we have seen how with the access to technologies, the last can become first, and the first can become last.  This is the other side of levelling the field.   But the third is perhaps the most important: it is about the opportunity to lead.

Why work on the digital divide?  Because you have the opportunity to lead and to help others to lead, and be a part of this great conversation we call the Internet. This is perhaps the greatest volunteer work we can do in the digital age as digital citizens.

What can you do about it?  How can you help bridge the digital divide?  Rather than give you a specific assignment or recipe, I want to challenge you with five broad principles. Think of these as the three D's, an O and an M.

1)   Dream big 

2)   Do the homework 

3)   Dare to remove obstacles

 4)   Seek and stand on Others' work 

5)   Mash-up pieces in new ways

First, dare to dream big.  I have found that the successful efforts come from the many tries and the audacious attempts.  Take for example the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition story.  College students from over 200 countries compete each year.  I’ve been a software design judge for three of the past four years. I view this as part of my giveback to the community of IT workers in nonprofits (and beyond).  The Imagine Cup is about the IT workers of the future who focus on software that can have an impact on achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, the context for the competition.

These are big dreams.  This year, 400,000 students registered for the competition; 3,000 made it to the country competitions, and 400 of the best went to New York to compete in the finals for 27 awards.  These are the best of the best ideas.

In one week I saw more innovation than in years before.  Why is that?  These students have no business knowledge, no marketing experience, no money, and little time.  But they also have no sense of limitation.  And it is this last one that makes all the difference in world.  They dare to dream about what technology can do.  These are your peers.  Your dreams can be every bit as big.

Second, do the homework.  Think about how to make solutions sustainable, to cover their costs and deliver a valuable service to customers.  Mohamed Yunus talks about services for the poor that are economically sustainable, and which produce social good as their profit^[1].  This means thinking through the basic business case for your idea.  Interestingly, only one team in the twenty I saw in New York at Imagine Cup this year did this homework. 

Third, dare to remove obstacles.  The story of the frogs illustrates this in an interesting way.

Story of the Frogs^[2]

"Once upon a time there was a bunch of tiny frogs who decided to stage a climbing competition. The goal was to reach the top of a very high tower. A big crowd had gathered around the tower to see the race and cheer on the contestants.

The race began...

Honestly, No one in crowd really believed that the tiny frogs would reach the top of the tower. The crowd yelled statements such as:

"Oh, WAY too difficult!!!”

"'They will NEVER make it to the top.”

"Not a chance that they will succeed. The tower is too high!”

The tiny frogs began collapsing. One by one. Except for those, who in a fresh tempo, were climbing higher and higher.

The crowd continued to yell, “It is too difficult!!! No one will make it!”

More tiny frogs got tired and gave up. But ONE continued higher and higher and higher. This one wouldn’t give up!

At the end everyone else had given up climbing the tower. Except for the one tiny frog who, after a big effort, was the only one who reached the top! THEN all of the other tiny frogs naturally wanted to know how this one frog managed to do it?

A contestant asked the tiny frog how he had found the strength to succeed and reach the goal? It turned out that the winner was DEAF!"

The moral of the story?  Turn a deaf ear to the “nay-sayers,” those who say it can’t be done,   those who point to all the obstacles.   Just do it.

Fourth, seek Others' work. This is just plain old good engineering. Find those who have solved some of the problems and stand on their shoulders. Don’t fall victim to the “not invented here” syndrome. Seek out the good work and build on it. Your mantra should be “no solos.”

Our new Technology Catalogue is built on this premise. We believe there is more to gain in discovering others’ technology successes in the Movement than in building our own. We have discovered over 850 applications the process. This requires what I call “headquarters humility.” It also means being open to “good enough” solutions.

Fifth, mash-up pieces in new ways. One of the top three contestants in Imagine Cup was the team from Jordan. They took a WII receiver and duck-taped it to a PC monitor. Then they took apart a TV remote control and mounted the diode on a baseball cap. Finally, they developed a program so the WII tracked the motions of the baseball cap and caused the cursor to move on the screen. With a pause, the cursor clicked and selected an item.

No big deal, right? Except the paraplegic women who had lost the use of her arms and legs told us in a video how she had gained her life back[3]. This system allowed her to create Facebook entries and keep in touch with friends, and dial cell phone numbers in her address book to communicate with family. She had her life back. That’s the power of software.

The interesting footnote is that they didn’t create anything new. They took existing pieces off-the-shelf and put them together in a new way. The creative may be in the combinations of the existing. That’s a powerful principle in technology.

So I challenge you today to think about how you can dare to dream big, do the homework to make it sustainable, dare to remove obstacles, seek and stand on others' work and mash-up pieces in new ways. If you lead by doing this, you just may change the world!

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"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

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[1] Muhammad Yunus, “Social Business,” December 25, 2007,   http://www.muhammadyunus.org/Social-Business/social-business/

[2]See http://mylifemantras.blogspot.com/2009/12/be-deaf-to-negativity-lovely.htm

[3] See the video of this woman’s testimony on YouTube, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGmmzXHheWE

A Tale of Two Dreams

Here is a paraphrase of the remarks I made at the NetHope Tenth Anniversary celebration in Dublin, Ireland.[1]

I’d like to tell two stories.

The first is about my generation.  Ten years ago, seven NGO IT leaders got together in San Jose.  Some of my colleagues around the table tonight were there at the Cisco Campus and Dipak Basu’s dining room table in September 2001.  We all faced a common problem about how to take technology out the last mile to where our organizations work in the field.  We had a shared need.  More importantly, we believed that technology could make a difference in the work our organizations were doing in the far reaches of our programs.  We could see it working. We had connected the dots in our imaginations.  And we dared to trust each other to do something about it together; because none of us was going to succeed going it alone.  This was how NetHope got started.

Our dream was that we could bring technology to where it was most needed faster, better and cheaper if we did it together.  And we believed that as a group we could be a stronger partner with the technology companies with whom we needed to work.  Both of these goals have proven to more true than we ever imagined ten years ago.  There are more than 200 professionals here tonight, and all of you are passionate about what we are doing to bring IT where it can do the most good in the world.  But this would not have come to be if we did not dare to dream around that modest table in San Jose.

The second story is about a new generation, the college students who each year compete in the Imagine Cup Competition.  I’ve been a software design judge for three of the past four years. I view this as part of my giveback to the community of IT workers in nonprofits (and beyond).  The Imagine Cup is about the IT workers of the future who focus on software that can have an impact on the Millennium Development Goals, the context for the competition. 

These are big dreams.  This year, 400,000 students registered for the competition; 3,000 made it to the country competitions, and 400 of the best went to New York to compete in the finals for 27 awards.  These are the best of the best ideas.

In one week I will see more innovation than in years before.  Why is that?  These students have no business knowledge, no marketing experience, no money, and little time.  But they also have no sense of limitation.  And it is this last one that makes all the difference in world.  They dare to dream about what technology can do.

During the NetHope Summit this week, we took a tour of the Intel fabrication plant in Kildare.  It was truly an awesome experience—a geek’s heaven, if you will.  During the tour, our guide mentioned that at Intel they talk about the big numbers, and the small numbers.  The enormous and incredibly expensive tools that create the inexpensive, tiniest circuits we know.  I think this speaks to what we know: that big dreams with small groups can change the world.

So I have a great hope here tonight: that if we dare to dream big, like we did as a small group ten years ago, as a much larger, stronger community today, we will create the greatest use of technology for good in the next ten years.  Thank you.

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[1] The slide deck for my "NetHope Chairman's Report," NetHope Summit and Tenth Anniversary at Intel's Campus, Kildare, Ireland, November 10, 2011, is on my web page, here.

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

Scarcity

Scarcity

At breakfast today we learned that Steve Jobs had died.  The icon of business who built technology “for the rest of us” had passed.  Our group of colleagues and Fellows at the Bellagio Center offered their thoughts about how his work had changed us: “persistent innovation,” a “knack for the user,” a “brilliant designer,” a “great comeback,” “only 56.”

I remember reading his address to the graduating class at Stanford in 2005[1].  His most quoted phrase, from the back of the last issue of The Whole Earth Catalog was “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”  Yet it was his third story about confronting death that was most poignant and personal.  Having faced and beaten pancreatic cancer in 2004, he said “Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

Yesterday was my turn to give a presentation on what I was working on at Bellagio.  During the question and answers that followed, something happened that I’ve learned to look for: out of the give-and-take came a way to reformulate something, to say it in a new way.  What I said was that it’s somewhat ironic that there’s value in scarcity.  It may be a reversal of what you’d expect.  It may drive people to work together because they just don’t have the resources to go it alone.

I think Jobs was saying something similar, but perhaps in a more ultimate way: that life is the great scarce resource.  And that is a positive; it makes the status quo smaller, and opens up the possibility that change can happen before it’s too late.   Perhaps staying hungry may just be the way to dial up the creative juices and fulfill something.  Thanks Steve.

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[1] Full text is on the Stanford web site, here: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

What am I learning today?

I wrote to a friend today about life being about continuously learning. It's not always easy but it's never without its revelations.  I believe in being a perpetual student and am ever amazed about the riches in approaching even something familiar with beginners mind.  I was reminded of this watching a video by three world travelers from Australia.


LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Tom Peters tells the story about the father of his college girlfriend, excusing himself from the table to study.  "I have homework to do," the accomplished surgeon said.  Thinking he would soon graduate from the nights of homework, Tom was taken aback about the prospect of a lifetime of study.

We have an eLearning platform at the Red Cross and Red Crescent that is growing at a pace of over 2,000 registrants a quarter in more than 150 countries.  And this is happening without any advertising. The hunger to learn is universal.  And that is a hunger with which we all can live.   

My adopted aunt is in her 80's and is always learning something new, whether a master gardening course or something new on the computer.  She recently learned how to use Picasa to share photos.  "You are my hero," I tell her. You are always open to learning and approach everything with a sense of wonder.  I want to make all of my days like that.

Imagine beginning each of our days with a simple question, one of openness and possibility.  It is a question that begins all other questions: What am I learning today?


"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

Finding the Bottom Line

On the last night of the Imagine Cup[1] presentations, the judges gathered after each round to discuss what we saw, what was memorable, and what was missing.  We all took notes during the student talks and demos, and we asked as many questions as we could.  We wanted to be sure we understood the project details, why it would be successful, and what impact it would have. It was hard work, and very rewarding work.

Imagine Cup Winners, Lincoln Center, NY

An Idea in a Sentence

Between one of the early rounds, one of my fellow judges suggested asking the students if they could describe their core idea in one sentence.   We agreed.  During the Q&A for the next team, he posed the question, and got a long run-on sentence in reply.  It was not memorable.  Why is it so hard for the twitter generation to sum it up in a few words?

The Tag Line Game

During my consulting days, we developed and exercise to write a mission statement on a bumper sticker (the manual version of about half a tweet).  During the exercise, we called out memorable tag lines for products and asked the team to reply with the company name.  Here’s an updated version of the quiz for US readers to try; can you name the company?[2]

1) Think outside the bun.
2) Can you hear me now?
3) I'm lovin it!
4) Think.
5) Think Different!
6) Like a good neighbor...
7) 15 minutes can save you 15 percent ...
8) You’re in good hands with...

The interesting thing about this game is how quickly the group can name the company, and how fast the list grows with other memorable tag lines.  Can you say the same for your organization’s mission statement?

The Elevator Pitch

I recently learned of the Elevator Pitch Competition that a number of universities run.  If you search YouTube for that title, you’ll find a dozen entries.  The one that caught my eye was the 2010 Utah State winner, Josh Light.   In less than two minutes, he presents a clear and compelling business case, with the why, to whom, the how, and for how much. Brilliant!

What do you do…in seven words

A new LinkedIn group caught my eye the other day.  It asks members “What you do in exactly seven words.”   The answers are interesting:

“Helping senior executives to achieve more” (6 words),

“Develop strategy, realize benefits from outsourcing/off-shoring”

And the tongue-in-cheek stab at reductionism:

“Avoid summing myself up in seven words”

My friend and colleague James Mapes has an exercise where he asks his audience to list 15-20 qualities about themselves, and then cross off 5, then 5 more, until you are left with the one you value most.  This is less about reductionism than it is about gaining the focus of what is most important among the good.

The Umbrella Word

A few years before, another friend asked me “what’s your word?”

“My word?”

“Yes, your word.”

She said, if you had to choose a word under which you could talk about who you are, what you do and are passionate about, what would that word be?

I’ve told this story to a few colleagues and it was clear that the question is a provoking one.  Martha ran from the table saying “I need to go to the ladies room to think about it!”  When she came back, she sat down calmly and said “words.”  What I do is about “words,” finding out what people’s stories are.  She is owns an executive recruiting firm.

I wrote about this umbrella word exercise under a pen-name in 2007.  For me the word is connections, which you can read about in the article comments.

Strategy on a Page

IFRC is a writing culture.  In addition to the leading work we do on the ground and mobilizing communities of volunteers around the world, we produce thoughtful papers on ideas, research, case studies and strategy.  When I joined the organization, I sat down with my boss and outlined a series of “IT Think” papers to start the dialog about technology strategy. From that came a 30-page vision paper, and a 30 page strategic plan.  But when it came to engaging the senior management team, what caught on was a one-page summary of Q&A’s about the strategy.  It became my strategic flyer.

Tweet the Suggestion

Returning to the Imagine Cup, judges are asked to give the students written comments as part of the scoring.  This is an opportunity to tell the students how you think their presentation could improve. This form of coaching is one of the most important things we do. Student teams have come up to me later in the competition and asked "what did we do wrong?" "What was it the held us back from the next round?"  Some judges write paragraphs while others write a few lines.  In the early rounds, the judging captain needs to extract a few lines to pass on to the teams moving on to the next round.  It's a tough editing task in the early going.  18 teams move on to round two, and each have seen 4 judges. Do the math.

Software Design Judges, Imagine Cup 2011

Taking a cue from the web generation, our captain asked us to tweet him our best suggestion for each team. That helped. And it shows an important point that is memorable for students and judges alike: what's the most important thing you want your audience to remember? To act on? When you do this well, you both win.

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[1] My 2011 Imagine Cup Blog entries start here: http://eghapp.blogspot

[2] The answers are,

1)       Think outside the bun.... Taco Bell

2)       Can you hear me now?.... Verizon

3)       I'm lovin it!.... McDonald's

4)       Think..... IBM

5)       Think Different!.... Apple

6)       Like a good neighbor.... State Farm

7)       15 minutes can save you 15 percent.... GEICO

8)       You’re in good hands with... Allstate

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

Imagine Cup - Day Four

One of the things we are asked to do as judges is to pass on to the student teams some tips on how to improve their presentations.  The number one item I noted in most of the reports was the need to provide the basics of a business model.  Solving a problem with a cool application is not enough.

Here are three basic questions to answer:

1) How much does it cost to deliver your application?  What are the upfront and one-time costs, and what are the recurring costs?
2) What is the size of your potential market?  Is it a million individuals or four country governments?
3) What are your sources of revenue?  Keep in mind that in the nonprofit sector, the users are often not the ones who are the payers.

If you can't answer these questions about your project, it will never move from the cool to the viable.  In the for-profit world, profits may rule; but in the nonprofit world, we look for community and economic sustainability.

Group Photo on Ellis Island

"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."

Imagine Cup - Day Three

Foursquare CEO and entrepreneur, Dennis Crowley, told the students a few days ago that their great idea may not be at the right time yet.  Ask any comedian and they will tell you that timing is everything.  And I believe a comedian once said that all things come to he who waits... provided he works like crazy in the meantime.


One of the teams I judged today was back for the second year.  They had a new idea,they learned from their experience, and they were wiser. They made the final round this time.  We asked another team when they began their project--last September.  The teams that made it to New York had worked long and hard, even while "waiting" for a second chance.

We narrowed the field in the software design category from 18 teams to 6 today--just 10% of the teams who made the finals in Imagine Cup this year.  For those who like doing the math, we started with 350,000 applicants.[1]


As one of about 40 judges in software design, I saw only a hand-full of the teams that made it to the final round.  But I saw far more good ideas.  So to the teams that did not make the final cut, take a page from Steve Ballmer's keynote: be tenacious, ideas matter!
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[1] I've written about this competition as an incredible funnel of innovation and ideas.  And I've seen first hand that there's also an opportunity for the teams to learn from each other.


"The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent positions, strategies or opinions of any of the organizations with which I am associated."