One of the great fears as a speakeris that you’re going to give a talk too similar to the person you’re sharing the stage with. Clay Shirky and I gave talks at an event a year or so back, and discovered that we were using two of the same stories in our presentations. (I, unfortunately, found this out by listening to Clay’s talk and frantically editing mine in response.)

That wasn’t a problem today at the seminar on the Information Society in Barcelona I’m participating in. I had the good fortune to share the stage with Carlos Domingo, who runs the R&D unit for Spanish telephone giant, Telefonica. Domingo is working hard to bring some of the most successful tools and techniques of web 2.0 into a large and often conservative telehone company. He’s a classic
early adopter, with a Nabaztag and a Pleo in his office, and a blog that he’s abandoning so he can spend more time Twittering.

Inside Telefonica, Domingo’s hoping to unlock information and increase communication between members of his team by aggresively embracing social media. Rather than trying to dig ideas out of a giant document repository, the knowledge management system that so many large companies have embraced, he’s instituted an internal video sharing service. Researchers working on projects get two minutes to explain their work to their colleagues - some break the rules and run long, but most as well-behaved, and it’s possible to get the gist of most projects with just a few seconds of video, making it far easier to surf through than a huge document repository. (I assume they’re heavily tagged and annotated to make them highly searchable.) Using Yammer, 350 members of his team share ideas on a Twitter-like network that’s closed to the company, and encourages employees to share what they’re working on and what problems they could use help with.

I’d been asked by the organizers to talk about how NGOs and social change organizations innovate, with the special challenge that I wasn’t supposed to celebrate innovative projects so much as I was to talk about the process of innovation. As I thought about this, I realized that I a) didn’t have much understanding of how social entrepreneurs innovate and b) didn’t have much confidence that social entrepreneurs generally did a good job of innovating with social media tools. Generally, I think that social entrepreneurs place far too much faith in social media tools and assume that they’ll be more popular, useful and powerful than they actually turn out to be.

So I offered a talk about some very different types of innovation - African innovations including the zeer pot, William Kamkwamba’s windmill, biomass charcoal, and endless examples of innovation using mobile phones. My argument was that innovation often comes from unusual and difficult circumstances - constraints - and that it’s often wiser to look for innovation in places where people are trying to solve difficult, concrete problems rather than where smart people are sketching ideas on blank canvases.

I offered seven rules that appear to help explain how (some) developing world innovation proceeds:

- innovation (often) comes from constraint (If you’ve got very few resources, you’re forced to be very creative in using and reusing them.)

- don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)

- embrace market mechanisms (Giving stuff away rarely works as well as selling it.)

- innovate on existing platforms (We’ve got bicycles and mobile phones in Africa, plus lots of metal to weld. Innovate using that stuff, rather than bringing in completely new tech.)

- problems are not always obvious from afar (You really have to live for a while in a society where no one has currency larger than a $1 bill to understand the importance of money via mobile phones.)

- what you have matters more than what you lack (If you’ve got a bicycle, consider what you can build based on that, rather than worrying about not having a car, a truck, a metal shop.)

- infrastructure can beget infrastructure (By building mobile phone infrastructure, we may be building power infrastructure for Africa - see my writings on incremental infrastructure.)

The most experimental part of a very experimental talk was applying these seven principles to three ICT4D experiments - One Laptop Per Child, Kiva and Global Voices. Ismael has a review of my talk including the scores I offer for each of the projects on these criteria.

The talk was pretty well received, and it’s great, great fun to try out new ideas on stage. I’m looking forward to thinking through whether these seven rules are the best way to characterise the lessons of the sorts of innovations I watch on sites like Afrigadget, and just what these rules mean for those of us trying to use internet tools for social change - thanks to my friends in Barcelona for a chance to start playing with these ideas, live on stage.

Just as it’s hard to argue with finding oneself on the shores of Lake Balaton, I’m hard pressed to find anything to complain about now that I find myself in Barcelona.

Actually, I have a single complaint about my time in Hungary - someone needs to tell these people that it’s autumn. I decided to make a concession to European formality and give my talk wearing a suit. As it’s late October, I brought a lightweight wool suit. But it was about 25C outside, and roughly 45C under the lights on stage where I gave my talk, and I spent much of my time on stage with the right hand on the mouse and my left wiping my brow with a handkerchief. One of the people who heard the speech approached me afterwards and told me, “That wasn’t public speaking, that was public sweating.” Great. I always prefer to be known for my perspiration than for my perspicacity.

I’m in Barcelona for a three-day workshop being organized by friends at CUIMPB. The course is called “Network Society: Social Changes, Organizations and Citizens“, and I’m speaking on the final day, on the general topic of “innovation”. I’m still working through what this will entail - the friend who asked me to speak suggested that I talk about innovation in the NGO sector. I spent a couple of days thinking about this and concluded that most NGOs I’ve worked with innovate really slowly, if at all, and my talk now is focusing on innovating from positions of constraint… which lets me point to lots of brilliant African examples via Afrigadget. It’ll all come into focus in the next 24 hours, I’m sure. (It better.)

Unlike Tihany, I’ve been to Barcelona before. I’ve spent almost no leisure time in Europe - I generally get to see cities in the few hours before and after business or speaking commitments - but I took myself for vacation in Barcelona a few years ago, “killing time” between a meeting in London and one in Rome with three days of Gaudí, Picasso and arroz negro. So, as I sit here outlining slides for Friday’s talk and trying to catch up on the vast pile of writing assignments I owe various people, I’m of two minds. On the one hand, I can’t tell myself, “You’ve never seen this city before - you’ve got to get out and experience the city.” On the other hand, I have a sense for just how remarkably beautiful it is, which makes me want to show up Friday with no slides at all and talk about all the gorgeous buildings I spent Thursday staring at.

Barcelona, from one of the steeples of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia, taken on a previous trip. It’s really one of those buildings you need to see before you die.

My solution so far has been to run errands and get lost in the process. I went out for a bottle of water earlier today and wandered aimlessly for an hour, encountering:
- a vast cathedral containing a cloistered garden with moss-covered fountains
- pedestrian malls crowded with teenagers with complex designs shaved into their hair
- an open air pet market
- elderly couples dancing on street corners, surrounded by a crowd of admirers
- baguettes stuffed with Iberian ham

In typical fashion, I also failed to buy a bottle of water. At the moment, that’s my only complaint.

My backyard, Lanesboro, MA

It’s so beautiful in the Berkshires this time of year that it’s a little dangerous to drive. Rachel and I went into Williamstown on Saturday to buy some groceries and get our mail, and nearly rear-ended several drivers who stopped at arbitrary intervals to gawk at the leaves.

It’s hard to blame them. I always feel like a sucker when I leave town at this time of year. I know I’m missing one of a couple dozen perfect days - warm in the sunshine, cold in the shade, crisp in the morning, filled with color.

Lake Balaton, the backyard of the hotel in which I’m currently staying.

But 19 hours after I took that first photo, I’m by the shores of Lake Balaton in the town of Tihany in southwestern Hungary. Tomorrow I speak at the Internet Hungaria conference, here in this lovely place. Nice people as well - had a lovely dinner with a set of entrepreneurs from around Central Europe, and a friendly pair of my countrymen as well.

Wednesday I fly to Barcelona, where I give a talk on Friday. On Saturday, it’s back to Boston, and then to Camden, Maine to lend a hand with the workshop to train the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows. Then a talk in Manchester a week from Tuesday. And then home, to stare at my backyard again.

In the meantime, that’s a really beautiful lake. Both of them, come to think of it.

You know how some people don’t mince words?

Chaz Maviyane-Davies doesn’t mince images. The Zimbabwean graphic designer has created some of the most striking images that comment on politics in his native country, and around the world.

In 2000, Davies created a set of images leading up to the Zimbabwean parlimentary elections, the first election in which Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party faced sustained and stiff resistance. They weren’t all easy to look at, but they were powerful, profound and memorable.

This year, Davies and friends are focused on a different election, the US presidential election. At a site called 30reasons.org, they’re offering a poster a day for the month leading up to the election with reasons to vote for Obama. Today’s poster is a hopeful one - a ladder leading from a dark hole into the green lawn of a future after election day. Davies’s poster, reproduced above, started the series and is, well, less hopeful. The good news, I suspect, is that most of us no longer have another foot to shoot.

Polymeme, my favorite source for news that’s not all Palin, all the time, led me to a fascinating set of photos this morning. They’re from Ilakaka, Madagascar, a town that’s grown from little more than a truck stop into a wild west mining town in about a decade. Ilakaka is currently the source of roughly 50% of the world’s sapphire, and it’s a fascinating case study in what happens when something very valuable can be pulled out of the ground without much capital investment - you get a gold rush.

The main street of Ilakaka, October 2008. Photo by Roberto Schmidt, AFP

What I appreciated about the Globe story - and, as it turns out, several other stories I found on Ilakaka, is that most of the authors avoided, “this is terrible, something must be done” narrative that characterises so much northern reporting about Africa. Ilakaka is clearly a tough place - Jonny Hogg writing for the BBC focuses his narrative primarily on the dangers of the town - but Schmidt’s photos are much less predetermined. He’s got shots of kids working the mines, which are hard to see, but also shots of kids playing, a reminder that mining in these towns is likely far more lucrative than other forms of employment in Madagascar, which helps explain why families are drawn to Ilakaka. I appreciate the ambiguity of the photos and of the frame Alan Taylor puts them in for the Globe.

And then there are the gem blogs. Having almost no interest in precious stones, I hadn’t realized that there were gem bloggers. The answer may be that there’s Vincent Pardieu and people who travel with him. Pardieu and Richard Wise offer a thorough sapphire and ruby tour of Madagascar, touring the forest ruby camp of Moramang as well as the desert around Ilakaka. Richard Hughes, with Pardieu and Dana Schorr, offers the excellent “Sorcerors & Sapphires“, a comprehensive look at corundum in Madagascar.

My favorite observation in this latter piece is the observation that it makes perfect geological sense that Madagascar is blessed with sapphires and rubies. So are Tanzania, Sri Lanka and parts of southern India. And if we go far enough back in geologic time, these countries are close neighbors. (Looking at this map, I’m tempted to research the possibility of gem mining on the Indian Ocean coast of Antartica.)

Perdieu also has an excellent solo article on gems in Madagascar complete with videos of mining sites and photo sets. In all three articles, there’s a good sense of humor about the difficult travel and living conditions associated with these mines - I take this as a reflection on the fact that most mining towns aren’t easy places to work, and that while Ilakaka may be a tough place, it’s got more than a little in common with northeastern Burma or parts of Afghanistan.

How do we get stories from places like Ilakaka, remote locations in Africa with no permanent press presence? Historically, we’d have to wait for something bad to happen - a mining disaster, an outbreak of disease. I see the photos in the Globe as evidence of what might be a healthier form of storytelling - a picture of a place that’s fascinating, whether or not it’s especially “newsworthy” today. The gembloggers are an interesting complement to this sort of reporting. In some corners of the world, the majority of citizen media comes not from locals, but from missionaries and aid workers living and working in these communities. Some, like Sleepless in Sudan, become important spokespeople for these communities.

The hope, of course, is that we start getting reports and perspectives from people who live and work in these communities. Our friends at FOKO Club are working with Rising Voices to help Malagasy youth report on their communities via blogs. I don’t know if it’s realistic for FOKO to work in Ilakaka, but it’s pretty exciting to think about the possibility.

Last summer, Center for Disease Control officials quarrantined a man who’d flown from Atlanta to Prague via Paris, despite being ordered not to travel. CDC officials knew - though the man did not - that he was infected with XDR-TB - extensively drug resistant tuberculosis. For the first time in over forty years, the CDC used their authority to pull the man from a plane and put him into isolation in an Atlanta hospital.

The story gained a flurry of media attention - including interviews with airline passengers furious that they’d been exposed to the disease. But it didn’t do very much to raise the profile of XDR-TB in the United States.

James Nachtwey would like to change that. A celebrated war photographer honored in 2007 with a $100,000 TED Prize, Nachtwey has spent much of the past year photographing patients with XDR-TB in locations around the world. His work helps put a face on a dangerous, frightening, poorly-understood and fully preventable disease… and many possibly help stop XDR-TB from turning into a global pandemic.

Tuberculosis is an extremely common bacterial disease - it spreads through the air and it’s quite pervasive. One third of the world’s population is infected with the TB bacillus, though only 5-10% of those people will develop the disease. (People with weakened immune systems, including AIDS sufferers, are at much higher risk to develop TB.) These cases of TB are usually treatable with drugs like rifampicin and isoniazid. If these drugs aren’t properly administered - if too little is used, or treatment is stopped too soon - the TB bacillus can become resistant to these drugs. It’s then known as multiply drug resistant TB and can then usually be treated with quinolone, kanamycin, capreomycin, or amikacin. If these drugs aren’t administered well, the disease can develop resistance to some of these drugs, too - it’s then known as XDR-TB, and it’s a very expensive and difficult disease to treat at that point.

XDR-TB came to the attention of global health professionals in 2006 with an epidemic in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In one rural hospital, out of 544 TB patients, 221 had multiply drug resistant TB, and 53 of these patients had XDR-TB. (All were HIV positive). Within a few weeks, 52 of 53 had died, including those on antiretroviral drugs. The few treatments that can cure XDR-TB are expensive, difficult to administer and have painful and dangerous side effects. The lessons learned from the XDR-TB epidemic in KZN largely have to do with limiting the spread of the disease from infected patients to highly vulnerable populations, like HIV+ people. (The good news in the KZN epidemic is that the spread appears most serious within hospital environments, where patients are close together for long periods of time - the spread of MDR-TB to people in the community who’d visited patients or interacted with them was roughly 1%.)

It’s not clear how widespread the problem of XDR-TB has become. There have been cases reported in 49 countries, including South Africa, India, Russia and the United States. It’s a very difficult disease to diagnose - while TB can be diagnosed within a day, diagnosing XDR-TB involves culturing baccili and testing their drug resistance, which can take weeks or months. In 2004, the World Health Organization estimated up to half a million cases of MDR-TB. Recent studies suggest that 15 to 20% of those cases might be XDR-TB.

Nachtwey’s photographs have examined the impact of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa, one of the epicentres of XDR-TB infection, and his network of collaborators in the medical community were able to alert him to the importance and possible impact of XDR-TB before it entered most people’s awareness. With the 2007 TED Prize, Nachtwey had the opportunity to use the money and influence of the TED community to cover the story and disseminate the images. The challenge is that Nachtwey realized that he would have far less access as a photographer if governments were aware that he was documenting XDR-TB. So his work has been clandestine, and the subject of his work supported by the TED Prize was only revealed today. Photos of patients in South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, India, Sibera and other locations will be unveiled in New York City tonight, and will be published in this week’s issue of Time Magazine in an article called The Forgotten Plague.

“Forgotten” may be the right word to describe TB, a disease that gets much less attention than HIV or even malaria, despite its enormous global impact. But XDR-TB is too new to be forgotten - it’s simply not well known or understood outside healthcare circles. Nachtwey’s intervention is a timely one - the ways to prevent XDR-TB from becoming a pervasive global threat have to do with strengthening healthcare systems in vulnerable nations. If hospitals and community health organizations can diagnose TB early and ensure compliance with treatment, the disease shouldn’t progress to multiple drug resistance.

But improving developing world hospitals is a difficult and expensive task. Eliminating pharmaceutical fakes may be even more difficult. Fake precription drugs are extremely common in developing nations, and a TB patient who is religiously taking rifampicin may only be getting the drug half the time… a prescription for creating MDR-TB. As Nachtwey raises awareness about XDR-TB, I hope that people will pay attention to innovative efforts like mPedigree, designed to combat pharma fakes using information technology and mobile phones.

Nachtwey’s campaign launches today at XDRTB.org. Here’s hoping his photographs will help draw attention not just to a treatable disease, but to the need to fix many aspects of the global healthcare system, including strengthening community hospitals and fighting drug piracy.

If you’ve been to a tech conference in the past five years, there’s a good chance you’ve also been to an “unconference“. Unconferences work to break down the barrier between speakers and audience, inviting all attendees to participate in shaping the program, offering sessions or contributing to the discussion that’s taking place. Done well - Foo Camp, the various Bar Camps, blog unconferences - they’re a great way to tap the expertise of everyone in the room, to ensure that discussions focus on topics people care about. Done badly, they’re chaotic and frustrating, dominated by the loud and self-confident (I’m both, and I’m well-aware that I need to be moderated.)

So I approached Mastermundo, a day-long conference following on the end of PICNIC with some trepidation. The conference organizers were emphatic in making the point that this was an unconventional conference, designed to break the rules of conferences as we knew them. Instead of having a stage, podium and audience, we’d meet in the modern art museum, on a train, in public spaces, moving from Amsterdam to the Hague during the day, with speakers delivering talks to an audience listening on headphones. Not an unconference as I’ve attended them before, but certainly not a conference like PICNIC, with a stage, an audience, the performative act of making your case with your words and a few sides.

What the hell. As it turned out, I was planning on spending my Saturday in Amsterdam visiting the modern art museum and taking a train to the Hague to meet a friend for dinner. Why not attend a conference while I was at it?

Two surprises about Mastermundo. First, I had a great time… and I wasn’t sure I would. Second, it’s really hard for people to break from their scripts, even if you beg them to.

Mastermundo Conference at Stedlijk Museum

At the (temporary location of) the Stedelijk Museum, we were given headsets and told that we could wander anywhere in the gallery while listening to the speakers. The first speaker, a Dutch designer, immediately broke script, asked people to sit near him, so that we could see the images on his laptop screen. When subsequent speakers encouraged attendees to wander through the galleries - showing a fantastic show of contemporary African photography - they were rapidly defeated by the short range of the headphones and the tendency of people to want to see who’s speaking to them. Try as you’d like to break this rule - when someone tells a story, people will sit and listen to her.

And despite promises of breaking all the rules, we eventually found ourselves in a conference room in the Hague, looking at the speaker in the front of the room and watching a slideshow on a giant screen. You may be creative, rebellious Dutch artists, but you are no match for the power of Powerpoint.

I’d chosen to give my talk on the train from Amsterdam to the Hague, figuring this was the only way I’d be guaranteed the opportunity to read my notes. As it turned out, I probably had the most unusual experience of all the speakers. I sat in the front seat of a train car, wedged in next to the equipment necessary to broadcast my voice via FM, looking at the end of the car or out the window. As I delivered my talk, the only person I could see was the technician, who was trying so hard to keep the transmitter attached to its battery that I couldn’t get any emotional feedback from her at all. It felt more like one of the recording sessions I’ve done for reading for the blind than like giving a lecture.

I found the whole experience so strange that when my friend Rafi took my place as the next speaker, I perched myself within his field of vision so that he’d have a face to look at and the reassurance that someone was hearing what he was saying. I don’t know whether this was helpful or simply made him more self-conscious. I simply hope he doesn’t think I’m stalking him.

A few folks seemed to connect well with the talk so I thought I’d share it here, more or less as I delivered it. Envision yourself sitting on a train looking out the window as I read this to you. Or while you’re wandering through a gallery of contemporary African photography. Or don’t. That will work too.

When I was twenty years old, I’d just finished university, and I’d won a scholarship to study in Ghana, West Africa for a year to study Ghanaian music.

I knew more about Ghana than the average American. For four years, I’d studied Ghanaian drumming in university and had worked with some of the best musicians in that country. I’d read books, magazine articles, newspapers, talked to lots of Ghanaians in the US, people who’d travelled there before.

Which basically meant that I knew nothing. As the plane from London descended, I looked out the window expecting to see the bright lights of the city of Accra, one of the largest and most populated cities in West Africa. It took me a moment or two to notice that there weren’t that many lights and that very, very few of them were on top of one another.

In that single moment, I realized that my vision for how I’d be spending this year was entirely wrong. I’d been planning on finding a part of Accra where young urban professionals lived in apartments. I’d get an apartment, make friends with the neighbors and live basically the same way that I would had I left college and moved to Boston or New York.

This, of course, turns out not to be possible. In 1993, it was pretty uncommon to rent an apartment in Ghana with less than 10 years rent in advance. And besides, people didn’t really rent apartments - they lived with their families until they were able to build their own houses. The young, up and coming Ghanaians I wanted to meet were either making their fortunes in the UK or the US, or living with their parents.

I ended up renting an apartment from a guy named Patrick Fiachie. He’d left Ghana for the Soviet Union as a youth, studied at Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University in Moscow, and eventually sought political asylum in the US, in Minnesota. For twenty years, he worked as a counselor to undergraduate students at a small college in Minnesota… which meant kids like me were very familiar to him, and he was very familiar to me.

Patrick Fiachie, Osu, Accra, Ghana. 1993

Patrick had come home to Accra, and found himself in the business of translating between the realities of Americans who’d come to study in Ghana and Ghanaian realities. He was a bridge figure - he was able to explain to the owner of the building he lived in why it made sense to make foreign visitors pay rent one month at a time… and as a result, the building she’d built as an investment filled up with international scholars who were paying far more rent than Ghanaians would have… despite the fact that I was paying $100 a month for two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and bathroom, which had power most of the time, though no running water.

Patrick acted as a bridge in different directions. I mentioned to him one night, as we were playing chess together, that I felt like a stranger in the neighborhood. The kids kept calling me “brofunyo” - white man - even though I stopped in the streets and introduced myself in Ga. A couple days later, I noticed that everything had changed - people were greeting me by name and being much friendlier. I overheard a conversation at a local market stall - a woman said to another market woman, “Oh that white man - he’s uncle Pat’s nephew.”

I didn’t make any sense in the neighborhood until someone had claimed a relationship with me. It was pretty obvious that I wasn’t Patrick’s nephew - I’m white, he’s black, we don’t look very much alike. But in introducing me to the neighborhood as his nephew, I became his respobnsibility. If I did something wrong, they could contact Uncle Pat about my behavior. And once I was connected like this, it made sense to treat me differently.

The view from my apartment window, Accra, 1994

It would have been pretty hard to figure all this out without getting on an airplane. I can tell you what it’s like to go from being a stranger, an outsider, to being part of the neighborhood. I can even tell you what it smells like when you get off the airplane, wet earth and burning plastic, but I can’t explain why it’s one of the most wonderful smells in the world, why it brings tears to my eye when I catch a whiff of it.

A few years later, I had the chance to go back to Ghana in some very different circumstances. I’d gotten very lucky in the dotcom boom in the US, and I had some money in the bank. And I wanted to do something to help this nation, which I’d fallen in love with. My bright idea was that Ghana might be able to participate in the same sort of Internet revolution that the US and Europe had been living through. I realized that one of the gaps Ghanaian businesses were dealing with was a skills gap - there were very few people who knew how to design a webpage, set up a database or manage an internet service provider. So I started raising money to bring American and European volunteers to come live and work in Ghana for a few months at a time. We called it Geekcorps because it was a little like the American Peace Corps, except it was staffed with geeks.

This worked out pretty well, actually. There are lots and lots of burnt-out geeks in the world who are excited about the chance to work in Africa. And African businesses are often pretty receptive to the idea of low-cost consulting on technical issues. It worked well enough that we ended up running projects in more than a dozen nations, mostly in Africa. Some succeeded, some failed, but I noticed something in the long run: whether or not a project was successful, it almost always had some sort of transformative effect on the volunteer’s life.

Several of the people we worked with decided to stay in Africa for good. A handful got married to people they met while they were volunteering. A large number changed the direction of their careers and a few are now leading people involved with the world of technology transfer in the developing world. Having the chance not just to visit as a tourist, but to work in countries like Ghana, Rwanda or Mongolia gave them a chance to make connections that ended up changing their lives.

Me. Dzolo-Gbogame, Volta Region, Ghana, 1994.

I don’t run that nonprofit anymore for a very simple reason - it’s really, really expensive to buy airline tickets. Not just the tickets - it’s expensive to get visas, to house people, to make sure they’ve got health insurance and enough money so they eat. But if I could find a way to do it that wouldn’t bankrupt me and destroy the environment, I’d be looking for as many opportunities as possible to take people out of their everyday context and bring them into different parts of the world where they can be helpful. This doesn’t need to cross international borders, by the way - the US is big enough and diverse enough that I’ve seen people get a full dose of cross-cultural contact by going urban to rural or vice versa. But it needs to be for a long time, and it needs to be in the course of doing a project, otherwise you’re a tourist, and it’s hard to connect in that circumstance.

What I’m looking for are the sorts of experiences that forces someone to confront the reality that the way they, personally live, isn’t the only way to live… and that it may not be the best way to live. That’s something easy to understand consciously, but it’s harder to feel. Personally, that feeling wears off for me fairly often - I need to spend a lot of time with people I admire, people who are living very different lives from my own to be reminded that my way of seeing things isn’t the only way.

Basically, what was so great about Geekcorps was that it put me in a position where I could help create xenophiles. Xenophiles are people who are fascinated by the whole world, by things other than their ordinary experience. They’re people who want to connect with people who see the world very differently. Some of these people are born this way, lots more are made - a good recipe for xenophilia is to raise a child in a culture deeply different from that of her parents - people call these kids “third culture kids”. Third culture kids have one foot in each of two cultures - the culture of the country they grew up and the culture of their parents, and as a result they don’t really live in either, but a little bit in both. Some kids hate this - many love it, and they end up bridge figures, natural xenophiles who can help translate cultures for other people. Barack Obama’s one of them.

It’s my theory that xenophiles are going to be very powerful in the future. We’re living in a world that the pro-globalization folks refer to as “flat”. That’s bullshit, obviously. The world is flat as far as stuff is concerned. In my hometown of 3000 people, I can get water from Fiji and fish from Chile, but I’m not going to encounter any Fijians or Chileans. I’m not even likely to encounter information from those countries, news, opinion or cultural influences like films or TV… not unless I very actively go looking for it. So the world’s flat in terms of stuff, but not in terms of human interaction. It’s flat, but in the least important ways - in the ways that matter, in the ways that would allow us to connect with people from other cultures, allow us to share ideas and solve problems together, the world is disconnected. It’s lumpy.

Xenophiles are good at making connections in this lumpy world. It’s a good idea to have them if you’re trying to do business in another country - some of the people who are making lots of money in this economy are people from developing nations who study in Europe or America and then return home. They can bridge between cultures in a way that helps them make smart economic decisions. They’re even more important if you’re concerned with security or with diplomacy, because their ability to cross cultures makes it far more likely that they can collaborate and create solutions with people from other cultures.

So here’s the question I’m interested now: how do we build real, productive connections with people across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries… without putting people on airplanes? Or trains? How do we efficiently manufacture xenophiles?

And since you guys can’t answer, I’ll go ahead and offer one solution that works really well - intermarriage. If you fall in love with someone from a very different culture, you’ve got a strong incentive to connect with that person’s family, learn their culture, change your perspectives. And while I’ve thought about this, it’s even harder to figure out a scheme to make intermarriage mandatory on a massive scale than it is to figure out how to put a substantial fraction of the world’s population on airplanes.

I’d been hoping the internet could be a solution to these problems. After all, it’s now possible to read the newspapers in another country, to read the blogs of people who live in these countries and hear what they’re thinking about. We can go to flickr and see the photos that people take, we can surf youtube and watch the videos that are making people laugh in other countries. Shouldn’t this help us connect with people around the world?

That’s what I thought a few years ago. I helped start a website called Global Voices, which is basically a site designed to help you find citizen media from other countries, especially the developing world. Want to know what people in China are talking about online? We filter through thousands of Chinese blogs, try to find the conversations that are interesting, translate them into English… and then into over a dozen other languages. If you read the site, you’ll end up getting a much better sense for what the hot topics are in other parts of the world… and you may find yourself emotionaly invested in someone else’s blog, and by extension in their life and ideas.

But you probably won’t. That’s one of the biggest things we’ve discovered with the project - it’s hard to care, even if you want to. I can point you to a lively conversation taking place in another corner of the blogosphere and even if you can read the language, you’re probably not going to connect with the conversation. You don’t have the context. And beyond that, you don’t have any connection to the people or events involved.

It’s not your fault. Human beings are tribal by nature. There’s a sociological phenomenon called “homophily” - it’s the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together. Let people organize themselves and people will form into groups, usually by race, nationality, religion, level of education. In the US, there’s a lot of mobility - people move all the time - and we’re starting to see this happen politically - Bill Bishop calls it “The Big Sort”. It ends up meaning that left-leaning people live with other leftists, conservatives with other conservatives and we’ll each understand less about each other. We do this with information as well. If information affects people like us, we pay attention to it - if not, we’re almost hard-wired not to care.

It turns out that there’s an art to getting people to care. It’s about telling stories, stories that introduce us to people we care about, whose pasts we speculate about, whose future we worry about. Most of the world’s problems can’t be summed up by a single story about a single person… but unless you can attach a story to a problem, it’s likely that you won’t get anyone to pay attention to the larger problem. The problem with this art is that it can turn into a trick. The trick works by oversimplifying, turning stories into good versus evil, black and white. If we tell the story and lose the subtlety, at a certain point we’re lying.

We’ve got the infrastructure that makes it possible to connect to one another, to tell stories to one another, to share films and family photos and things that make us laugh or cry with people anywhere in the world. And so far, we’re pretty bad at using it. At the worst, we use it to hurt each other - think of the guy in Lagos who wants to rip you off while promising you millions of dollars… or the guy in London who makes sport out of humiliating and punishing him.

So here’s where I’m asking for help - we need bridge figures, people who can help build connections between cultures. We need xenophiles, people who are interested in the whole world and in building conversations that break out of the homophily trap. We need tools that let us use this infrastructure to connect. Help me figure out how to bridge people and how to build these tools.

Some impressions of the daylong Surprising Africa event at PICNIC08:

- Binyavanga Wainaina, an extraordinary Kenyan writer, talked about the problem of naming, figuring out what language we can use to describe the Africa we encounter today. He’s recently travelled to Lagos, a city that he used to think of as scary, which is now a place he’s come to love and be fascinated by. Driving from Lagos to Ibadan, he finds himself passing huge churches by the side of the road. He stops in and begins talking with people at one compound, called “Redeemer’s Camp”.

It quickly becomes clear that it’s more like a small city than a camp. There’s a huge suburb of tidy houses, and warehouse-sized churches - put together, the churches can seat hundreds of thousands. The community was built by an applied mathematician, who had apocalyptic visions and began buying property outside of Lagos in the 1980s. Members of the church - bused in from Lagos in old American schoolbuses - decided that it would make sense to live closer to the church. They came up with a novel arrangement - you could get land, power and water for free if you’d build a house with a spare room that could be used by visiting church members. Now many of the people who live here aren’t active in the church - they just wanted a quiet and safe place to live.

Lagos is huge and unfamiliar, but Binyawanga finds it filled with people looking for ways to make good, to solve problems. “to thrive in this city, people have to search for good. There’s an unbelievable quest for good.” How do we describe a place that’s so unfamiliar, is portrayed as so threatening, and is so hopeful and filled with good?

It’s always great to see Erik Hersman on stage, talking about the work he’s doing on the brilliant Afrigadget. In the best “point, don’t speak” fashion, he never talks about his hard work documenting African ingenuity - he just gets out of the way and lets the projects tell their stories.

His talk today hits some of the highlights of Afrigadget over the past couple of years: the spread of mobile phones, the amazing variety of applications developed to take advantage of them, the complex work done to localize technology into African languages, the creative solutions to the power and infrastructure problems of the continent. But, frankly, his documentation of his talk is so much better than anything I could come up with, you should just read what he has to say.

The punchline - Africa’s an amazing lab for innovation, because if it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.

Montskilelelo Veleko is a South African photographer fascinated by the ways in with South Africans are making their own fashion. She meets people in the streets of Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town who’ve made their own clothing, setting themselves apart from local styles and fashions. In some cases, their clothing serves as a walking advertisement for their services as fashion designers. The heart of her presentation is a series of photos showing at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, set to the music of BLK JKS. The track in question was so hot, I’d bought the album off iTunes before her talk was through. But that’s only because I’m not brave enough to dress like the folks she’s portraying, or talented enough to get the shots she gets.

Filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa addresses the theme of the day - how do we look at Africa in a different way - in a very direct fashion. Her film, “This Is My Africa“, is a close look at the continent through the eyes of a dozen or so Africans, who talk about their favorites colors, flavors, smells, sounds and sights on the continent. While this sounds like a recipe for sentimentality, it’s actually an exploration of the creative energy of the continent - she shows us a fifteen-minute excerpt, where her subjects show energetic paintings coming from the continent and look at the wide range of astounding music to be found between E.T. Mensah and Fela.

Saro-Wiwa plans on making the film expansible, allowing viewers to record and add their own contributions, so that no sound, sight or smell goes undocumented. You’ll be able to add the pieces you care about on her website in the near future. Can’t wait to see the film, which is screening in locations around the world.

I sat next to Francis Kéré for two hours at the PICNIC Surprising Africa conference before I learned that I was sitting next to one of my heroes. He’s one of the winners of the Aga Khan award for architecture for his inspirational Gando primary school, designed when he was an architecture student in Berlin.

Interior of Keke’s award-winning school building in Gando, Burkina Faso

Exterior of the Gando primary school. The metal roof, made from sheeting and welded rebar, protects an earth ceiling.

The building is pretty much the best example of African solutions to African problems that I can think of. Realizing that his fellow villagers in Gando were brilliantly skilled at building with clay, he looked for ways to use local techniques and materials to build practical, long-lasting structures that can be locally built and maintained. The school is cool, light and vastly superior to the structure it’s replacing.

I desperately want to show you all the images from Kéré’s talk - he shows amazing photos of Burkina, including a stunning shot of a dividing line in Ouagadougou, where the formal, rectilinear grid of the city turns into informal, unplanned and organic sprawl. He’s a critic of African tendencies to ape western building styles, showing us houses that have arbitrarily picked up Chinese or European touches, which mostly look out of place and cheap.

His designs leverage skills that have developed over generations, like the intricate process of laying and polishing a clay floor. He documents the process, which involves laying chunks of clay, pounding them into small pieces with heavy wooden hammers, breaking them more finely with hands and feet, and finally polishing with large stones. The resulting structure is cool, beautiful and affordable for his friends and neighbors.

But local ways aren’t without their flaws. The reason Burkinabe are moving away from clay and towards concrete is because clay buildings melt in the spring rains. Kéké’s solution is to build second roofs, soaring structures made from welded rebar and corrugated sheets. These materials are common in any African context, but Kéké turns them into practical structures with shapes worthy of Eero Saarinen. To his credit, Kéké is clear that it’s his team - 25 guys from Burkina Faso, some from his village, with a variety of metalwork and clayworking skills - that do the hard work.

Talking with Francis afterwards, he told a small group of us that, even though he was honored with the Aga Khan Prize, it’s hard to convince the authorities in Burkina Faso to give him commissions. Because he’s a local boy, they have a hard time believing that he’s an internationally known architect. The fact that he sleeps outside with his crew while working on a project just confuses them even more.

I told Francis that he’s someone who has long inspired me. My experience has taught me that most solutions imported into Africa fail… badly. The most revolutionary solutions to African problems come from the people who are living with those problems. Francis’s architecture is a beautiful manifestation of this design principle.

My dream is that the vocabulary he’s developed for Gando - already expressed in two school buildings, a health clinic and housing for teachers - will be replicated and spread throughout the region. Already his primary school in Gando has received the ultimate compliment. He designed the school for 120 pupils, and it now has over 500. He doesn’t claim credit for the school’s growth, but I don’t think the building’s success and the school’s expansion are coincidental. Who wouldn’t want to go to school in a building that looks like that?

The Hotel Lloyd in the eastern docklands of Amsterdam, is a beautiful place. It’s got a handsome exterior, beautiful common spaces, and a great location on the waterfront. Unfortunately, it’s infested with designers.

I was in New York a few weeks ago, staying in a “boutique” hotel. One of my colleagues, staying in the same hotel, had a wonderful rant about her trouble with “designer” hotels - “Why the hell don’t they have any drawers? I like to put my underwear away, not have it sitting out there in plain view.”

She shouldn’t stay at the Lloyd. I’m fond of the hotel that she found troubling and I think perhaps I’m not cut out to stay at the Lloyd.

The shtick of the hotel is that each room is custom-designed and unique, somehow transcending the character of the building as a former prison hospital. The website mentions that some rooms feature toilets in the middle of the room, rather than tucked away in a separate room, and that other rooms feature four-meter wide beds, or beds that tuck into the walls.

My toilet, thankfully, isn’t front and center. Instead, it’s part of a three-piece folding unit that features a toilet room, a tub/shower and a sink unit. Made of avocado-green fiberglass, it’s really all you see when you walk into the room, and is clearly the dominant feature of the space. Tucked behind it is a reasonably comfy bed, a TV on an institutional mount, and a rug and curtains in a shade of orange from the 1970s which clashes just perfectly with the odd green bath unit. I get the sense that the designer dropped the green thing in the middle of the room, added some orange to offset it, and then realized s/he’d need to add a bed and TV if anyone hoped to rent this as a hotel room.

Mere mortals couldn’t design a space this ugly. You need professional designers, preferably with PhDs, to achieve this level of ugliness.

I have realized certain advantages. Because the bathroom folds up, it’s possible to barricade yourself in the room by moving the sink unit to block the only egress. I guess that will come in handy if the 1970s colors send me into an uncontrollable, murderous rage and Dutch police come to arrest me.

Fortunately, I’m here to attend a conference full of people I like very much. If all goes well, I’ll see as little of this room as possible… which, frankly, would be just fine by me.