Entries Tagged 'Philanthrogeeking' ↓

David Blood (ex Goldman Sachs) and Al Gore (ex Whitehouse) are the founders of a “sustainable investment” firm called “Generation”. Apparently the other partners in Generation Investment Management wouldn’t let them name the firm “Blood and Gore” which is a great pity :-)

I first ran across Generation while watching an interview they gave at the Skoll World Forum (ok, I admit it, I am seriously jealous of Jeff Skoll, not only does the guy run a Movie Studio, but he has a World Forum named after him)

Blood and Gore have this extremely devious plan for making the world a better place. They want to demonstrate to the investment market that an investment strategy which considers the attitude companies have to externalities before investing in them is going to be more profitable in the long term than an investment strategy that doesn’t, hence causing a change in the way major funds invest, hence causing a change in the way companies behave.

“In the end, we hope to be one of many firms in this emerging system that will make sustainable investing mainstream. We believe it is inevitable that the broader capital markets will eventually embrace not just the idea of research into non-traditional factors that impact performance, but also explicitly recognise that the way businesses manage the risks and opportunities related to global social, economic, environmental and political issues fundamentally impact the ability of companies to generate value for their shareholders in an enduring way.” - Al Gore.

Of course, you might say that sort of long term systems thinking is the reason Gore lost in 2000, because it’s utterly opaque to the average swing voter, but ironicly the thinking behind the 4-5 party line vote that really counted was surely even more opaque.

Musing on what might have been we have this great skit from Saturday Night Live.

PS: Check out the new Swicki in my sidebar. Developed by some friends of mine here in Christchurch, they’re pretty neat.

Another of my favourite Philanthrogeeks is Mark Shuttleworth. Mark sold his first business, Thawte, for $575m to Verisign, who thus formed a temporary monopoly on 128bit SSL certificates (vs the more common and less secure 40bit ones). Every ecommerce site needs one of these and they get renewed every year, so you can imagine the potential value, but after not long the tech bubble burst, and not long after that the browsers started accepting other brands of certificate[1] and I’m not sure if Verisign recouped its investment in the end. Versign later bought Network Solutions and thus obtained an actual monopoly on the .com namespace, but that’s another very long story, in which perhaps I will point out the stupidity of giving away extremely valuable worldwide monopolies to private corporations, who then get bought by bigger corporations.

As I recall the story goes that Mark then gave a million Rand to every one of his staff, including the gardener. Good show, I thought. Next I heard anything about him he had paid his way onto a soviet rocket and was going to be the first African in space. Well, lucky for some I thought.

A couple years later I heard he was forming his own Linux Distro. Cool, I thought, that should go well. It certainly did. Ubuntu is now the most popular linux distribution on the planet. That probably makes Mark one of the most important Benevolent Dictators in Open Source, and although not quite as Karma-laden as RMS or Linus Torvalds yet, he has the advantage of having a fortune in the bank and a few other philanthropic projects and foundations up his sleeve, so that definitely puts him in the upper eschalon of open source people who are really making a difference.

I see from his official bio that he’s an Iain Banks fan. I’ll post about Iain soon, who as well as being my favourite author is probably more than anyone responsible for my techoprogressive outlook on life.

Ubunto is apparently an African altruistic ideology of sorts and a word very difficult to translate into English, according to the Wikipedia entry - but frankly, it sounds pretty appealing, and perhaps it’s not a good sign that there isn’t a good English translation for it. English usually just steals any useful works from foreign languages, but at the moment, in English, “Ubuntu” means “popular linux distribution” and it may be a long time before any other meaning could shine through that. Apparently Nelson Mandela baked Ubuntu into the spirit of post-apartheid South Africa, which may have been part of the reason the transition actually sort of worked. Mandela is a pretty amazing statesman, I wish there were more like him on the world stage.

If/when I finally switch to Linux on the desktop (been using it server-side for many years) I’ll probably switch to Ubunto. I like the founder, I like the concept, and I like what I’ve seen of the distro so far. Can’t go wrong really.

[1] I know, I’m simplifying. But a discussion of how SSL certificates really work is way too technical for this blog.

There are rather a lot of people and groups I’m intending to talk about on this blog, the problem is that right now I’m insanely busy so it may take me a while to get around to all of them. So I thought I’d give a brief list, and if anyone wants me to write about any particular one, they can let me know in the comments.

So, not in any particular order, here are some incredibly cool people doing great things for the people of this planet:

Steven Clift whose tireless promotion of e-democracy may shortly be rewarded with an Ashoka fellowship. I have been following his do-wire mailing list for at least 5 years now and I think he’s well worthy of that honour. It’s a bit of a fluke, but the company behind the forum software he’s using for his Issue Forums is run by people here in Christchurch.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, who recently suggested that we could be a bit smarter about the way we discuss politics online and may be hoping to kickstart another revolution of sorts. Personally this is an area where the idealist and the pragmatist within me have an argument. On the one hand I’d like to see net culture transcend the pathetic sloganeering of broadcast politics, but on the other hand I’m aware that for the moment a fully integrated strategy that bows to the tyranny of the “swing voter” might be necessary in 2006.

The Omidyar Network, who support many worthy causes and have this amazing community of altruists around them.

Jeff Skoll, definitely a philanthropist after my own heart says here : “In my case, I like to support causes where “a lot of good comes from a little bit of good,” or, in other words, where the positive social returns vastly exceed the amount of time and money invested.” - or, in other words, he’s a Philanthohacker. One of the very clever things he’s doing is running Participant Productions, who are harnessing the power of the movie theatre for the sake of good with films like An Inconvenient Truth. and Syriana

Benetech, who I first spotted because they employed Brendan Nyhan who was involved with Spinsanity, an amazing blog I was following that covered the unprecedented level of media spin in the post 9/11 era, right up until they re-elected Bush, after which I guess they decided that the American public wasn’t quite ready for this whole “sanity” concept yet.

Dave Pollard who was Chief Knowledge Officer of Ernst & Young before he decided that he could do more to save the world through blogging. A fantastic blog.

The WorldChanging bloggers, who I wish I had more time to read. They are supported by the above mentioned Omidyar Network (it’s funny how often I discover something amazingly cool and then later discover the Omidyars have started funding it)

Richard Stallman, who more than anyone is responsible for the worldwide open source movement. Met him once at a party here in Christchurch. Nice guy.

The Responsible Wealth network, who definitely have a few clues.

George Monbiot - who mainly draws attention to big problems, but occasionally comes up with some very interesting solutions, unfortunately they often seem to involve the British and/or American Governments behaving responsibly, so don’t expect to see any of those solutions implemented anytime soon.

Aubrey de Grey, who’s somewhat radical proposal is that we could engineer the end of biological ageing within the next 50 years. He’s causing a bit of a stir in the biogerontology world, many of whom think he’s holding out false hopes and probably resent his grabbing all the headlines, but he’s got enough scientists supporting him that I think he has to be taken seriously. Given the acceleration in scientific and medical research that is being driven by the internet and cheap computing power, I find it all remarkably plausible. It’s certainly an amazing time to be alive - the age of possibility.

…and of course I am still yet to discuss the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation in any detail.

Finally here are a few random links from my philanthrogeek bookmarks:

• Center for Inquiry Transnational
• Democracy 2.0
  
• Open The Government
  
• Oligopoly Watch

Please note that this is far from everyone who’s impressed me in a philanthrogeek capacity over the last few years, but it’s enough to talk about for the moment.

Because it’s been a great month for the future of the human race. First we saw Bill Gates deciding he was going to dedicate his collosal energy and brainpower more to his philanthropic pursuits than his technomonopolistic pursuits, and now we see one incredible side effect of this decision - his old friend Warren Buffett, the 2nd richest person on the planet, decides to give the Gates foundation the bulk of his own immense fortune, because he thinks it will be well managed there. So to some extent what we see here is the worlds most successful market competitors deciding that cooperating to help the least competitive (ie, the third world) is the best thing they can do with their fortunes, rather than competing against eachother for the top spot on the rich list, as any decent Robber Baron of old would do.

Pretty good example of how things are changing if you ask me. People are beginning to realise that we’re all in this together. I think now that we’re no longer “connected” in a mediated way via our TV sets and newspapers, but hyperconnected in a more direct fashion by way of the net, the 6 degrees of seperation are reducing to 5. Eventually everyone will be no more than 3-4 “hops” away from someone suffering under 3rd world conditions, and that has got to make a difference I think.

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If I had to pick the one person on the planet who I admire most at the moment, it would probably be George Soros. I was reminded of this when he recently poked his head up and said some intelligent things on Rocketboom - major kudos to Amanda for scoring an interview with one of the planet’s major players. One very appropriate question given her audience - how does he use the net? I was interested to discover that he uses it “through other people” - a pity, I think it’s better to get your feed unfiltered. I guess it all depends on whether your people are paid to give you the truth, or shield you from having to know the truth. ^[1]

Anway, what I admire about Soros as a philanthropist is that he has a great grasp of the complexity of human societies, just how hard it is to effect any significant change, and then he goes ahead and does his best anyway, without fear of the inevitable failures. He isn’t hoping to find easy answers or make flashy gestures, but he knows that there are things that can be done that definitely help - like investing in education and health, and monitoring government activity, that will gradually move a society in the right direction.

I think quoting Soros is the ultimate answer to naive libertarianism and free-market fanatics. It’s obvious that he has a very strong understanding of the world financial markets, from which he has made billions, but he is also very clear that markets are not enough on their own, and can do some serious damage if left unchecked.

“We need to maintain law and order. We need to maintain peace in the world. We need to protect the environment. We need to have some degree of social justice, equality of opportunity. The markets are not designed to take care of those needs. That’s a political process. And the market fundamentalists have managed to reduce providing those public goods.” - George Soros

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