RiOS INSTITUTE'S SILICON VALLEY CHALLENGE

The Paris Hilton of the Internet

2007-10-31T21:41:00.000-07:00

During today's RiOS Institute's and UC Berkeley's School of Information lecture series New Wave Social ICT Impact, this is how Craig Newmark, of Craigslist fame, described himself.

He was talking to ischool student and faculty about his work at Craiglist, where he is taking care of customer service, a job that entails taking care of spammers and haters. One of his main takeaway from his 12 years with Craigslist is that humans are overwhelmingly trustworthy and good. this is reflected in the profoundly ethical moral compass by which Craigslist is run:
- treat people how you want to be treated yourself
- live and let live
- give others a break every now and then

Craig considers himself an 'accidental social entrepreneur,' but he does want to change the world, mainly by supporting and giving exposure to people and organizations who are working on worthwhile causes. One area in which he is particularly interested is the Middle East, where he is supporting microfinance organizations such as CHF International (he is a bog fan of microfinance in general), wants to finance internet cafes in the West Bank and also sponsored a latrine in the Hisham ben Adil Malek boys' high school in Jericho (you can see pictures of it on the September 10th posting on his personal blog cnewmark.

High-tech meets low-tech. He does believe in the special power of ICT to bring about social change, through providing Americans with information about other parts of the world, finding out about needs of others and possibilities to do something about it. The internet is getting people together to help, especially with resources and also allows for international cross-pollination of knowledge.

One of his new projects is to support people fighting the 'professional disinformation workers' and their products.

So, while Craigslist's credo seems to come down to Simplicity, Sincerity and Speed, Craig believes in the global power of nerds to change the world. As a self-identified nerd, he 'blindly plunges into things because he doesn't know any better and it seems to be working.' Keep on plunging, Craig.

You can listen to a podcast of the talk thanks to ischool volunteers Kevin and Alana.

Rule of Experts

2007-10-02T20:27:00.000-07:00

Empowering Technologies for the Developing World

M. Bernardine Dias of TechBridgeWorld in an interview with Technology Reviewin how the

Helping the developing world isn't as easy as sending money and experts. Local values and customs have to be considered, and ultimately, the community has to become able to guide itself. M. Bernardine Dias is the director of Carnegie Mellon University's TechBridgeWorld, a group that partners with developing communities to create sustainable technological solutions to problems within those communities. In advance of her appearance at the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT later this week, Technology Review talked with Dias about the role that technology can play in the developing world.

She talked about TechBridgeWorld's two golden rules of operation: "We never go anywhere unless we're invited--that translates to having a strong partner within that community. Second, what we do is always framed as a sharing process. We only go in as experts of technology, not to try to dictate where the community should head or what they should be doing, or should not be doing, on a larger scale."

Sounds good.

Anthropologists like Tim Mitchell have shown that expert knowledge is never as disinterested as it they seem and that the technocratic rationality they embody often works in the interest of the powerful, be they development organizations, governments, corporations - and their lastest embodiment of Public-Private Partnerships of which the academy is also often a part.

RiOS Institute and World Summit Awards Selecting World's Best e-content

2007-06-08T20:37:00.000-07:00

NOMINATIONS FOR BEST U.S. E-CONTENT NOW OPEN
DEADLINE: JULY 20, 2007

RiOS Institute has been chosen by the World Summit Awards (WSA) to select the best in U.S. e-content. WSA is a global initiative to promote the world's best e-content and innovative ICT applications. It started in 2003 as part of the UN's World Summit on the Information Society; to date 168 countries are actively involved. WSA demonstrates the local diversity and creative use of ICT around the world, serving as a global platform to make today's information society more inclusive.

The winners of each of the eight categories below will be submitted to the global Grand Jury, which will meet in Croatia in September 2007 to select the 40 best global e-content projects. They will be honored at a winner's gala at the end of 2007.

In 2005, over 20,000 candidates from 168 countries participated, and the 40 winners were announced at a gala during the WSIS Summit in Tunis.

Best e-content will be selected for eight categories:
e-government
e-health
e-learning
e-entertainment
e-science
e-culture
e-business
e-Inclusion

RiOS is now accepting nominations.
Deadline for Nominations to be submitted: July 20, 2007

Please send your weblinks, together with a short description of your organization and its goals, to paul.braund@riosinstitute.org

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Muhammad Yunus leaves politics

2007-05-22T14:51:00.000-07:00

News from the bbc

Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize winner and micro credit expert Muhammad Yunus has announced that he has abandoned plans to form his own political party.

In an open letter to his supporters, Mr Yunus said that he did not believe he had enough support for his movement, Nagarik Shakti (Citizen's Power). His party was formally launched in February pledging to clean up politics. Mr Yunus had planned to have candidates standing in every seat in elections for which no date has yet been set.

'Losing enthusiasm'
The vote was put off in January after violence between supporters of Bangladesh's two largest political parties. "I am standing aside from my efforts to form a political party," Mr Yunus in an open letter to the public. "I have seen those who initially encouraged me gradually losing their enthusiasm. "I decided to enter into politics because of your support," he said, "but I came to understand that it is not possible and so accepting this reality I decided not to go forward," he said.

Mr Yunus and his Grameen Bank, which specialises in lifting people out of extreme poverty by giving small loans to the very poor, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October.

'Not interested'

His decision to enter politics followed the crisis in January that led to a state of emergency imposed by a military-backed interim government.

"People gave me inspiration to enter politics (but) when I contacted them I did not get much response and they were not interested in joining the party. Others would not leave their existing political party," he said in the statement.

Mr Yunus said in February that his new party would offer an alternative to the two main political parties - the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Awami League - which have dominated Bangladesh's notoriously corrupt political system for more than 30 years.

But correspondents say that many people questioned whether he had over-estimated his popularity in rural areas, where his bank's high interest rates are disliked.

They also pointed to the difficulty of breaking the Awami League and BNP's stranglehold on power. Bangladesh's interim government has said it will only hold elections once corruption has been eradicated in the country. It has arrested scores of politicians, civil servants and businessmen as part of its anti-corruption drive.

OUr question is, what are the lessons from this failure?
Surely Yunus had the support of the poor of Bangladesh, who revere him for his creation of the Grameen enterprises, the most important of which are the Grameen bank - in spite of his interest rates - and Grameen phone, which have improved the lives of thousands of poor families in the country. He surely also had the support of the world community, who honored him with the Nobel Peace Price last year and who are inspired by his sincerity and humbleness.
But that was not enough to provide a viable alternative to the entrenched power structures of Bangladesh. Goodwill, idealism and broad support, even fame, are not enough if that cannot be translated into political power. (add money for the US).
We don’t know the whole story of why he quit politics, but one thing is for sure: it is a great loss for the people of Bangladesh as well as of other countries.

UC Berkeley ischool year’s end presentations

2007-05-22T14:22:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, we attended the final project showcase of the Masters’ students at School of Information at UC Berkeley. The 15 projects, most of which entailed a software program of some form or another, spanned a wide variety of areas, reaching from more customer-friendly business registration services for the Californian government to several project to improve communication and evaluation within the university to a web-based collection browser for the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UCB to an online marketplace for the food industry.

Of particular interest to us were the two projects in the ICTD area, the Field/Mice Project by Andrea Moed and Owen Otto, which presented an English-language learning video game in which students using multiple mice on one PC learned to collaborate and take turns. With the help of Microsoft and the TIER program at UCB, Andrea and Owen went to Bangalore and tested the game in a number of government schools with 100 children aged 10 to 13.

The second project, called REACH, by Rowena Luk, and also supported by TIER, used a user-centered design approach to develop a software that allowed for social networking among Ghanaian doctors at home and abroad. The system emerged from the insights of several weeks of fieldwork in Ghana, that revealed the tight social network among doctors in Ghana, who use an informal social network to fill gaps in the existing medical infrastructure. Such a human-centered approach is also at the heart of our work, and our methodology of Human-Driven Design and Research (HDDR), which we teach through workshops and white papers.

While we enjoyed all of the presentations, and getting some hands-on playtime afterwards, we were left wanting for projects that really push the envelope in HCI and CRD. If graduate school is not the time to explore the edges of established practices, then when?

Nokia launches 'phones for the poor'

2007-05-03T15:38:00.000-07:00

As reported by fin 24 from New Zealand

But at prices of 35 to 90 Euros, they are still not affordable to many people in India.

Stockholm - Nokia on Thursday announced the launch of seven low-end, new phones at an event in New Delhi, India.

The company said the phones will be available in the second and third quarter in select markets for estimated retail prices, before applicable taxes and subsidies, of between €35 and €90 (R331.96 and R853.75 respectively).

The Nokia 1200 and Nokia 1208 include a call-time tracking feature, which helps manage airtime costs by allowing consumers and village phone entrepreneurs to preset a time or cost limit on individual calls, automatically ending the call after the limit has been reached.

A multi-phonebook lets customers set up personal phonebooks unique to that user and save specific contacts to that user's phonebook, enabling an entire family to share a phone, and for each of the family members to manage their own phonebook.

The Nokia 1200 will be available in the second quarter with an estimated retail price of €35, while the Nokia 1208 will be available in the third quarter with estimated retail price of €40.

Entry-level phone Nokia 1650 also comes with the call-time tracking feature, as well as with a flashlight, music-on-the-go via FM radio and MP3-grade ringtones. Nokia estimates that the retail price for the Nokia 1650 will be around EUR55.

The Nokia 2660 features GPRS technology for e-mail and Internet access, Bluetooth support, music on-the-go via FM radio, MP3 ring tones as well as enough memory for a 500-entry phonebook. It will cost around €85. Both the Nokia 1650 and Nokia 2660 will be available in the second quarter.

The Nokia 2630 is the thinnest handset in Nokia's portfolio at a mere 9.9 millimeter. It aims to meet the needs of emerging market consumers and features a camera combined with Bluetooth technology allows images to be sent, shared, stored and printed, as well as e-mail, MMS, calendar, a calculator and FM radio.

The Nokia 2760 features a digital camera, giving many emerging markets consumers their first experience with digital photography, and Bluetooth technology to make it easy to share the photos that they capture. The Nokia 2760 also features video recording, video playback, and FM radio, as well as GPRS.

The Nokia 2630 and Nokia 2760 will be available in the third quarter. The Nokia 2630 will cost around €85 the Nokia 2760 around €90.

The Nokia 2505 is a CDMA phone and is expected to be available in selected markets in Asia/Pacific, Middle East, Africa, China and Latin America during the second quarter.

A Loss for the UN

2007-04-11T14:54:00.000-07:00

RiOS recently received this email from a Silicon Valley social entrepreneur, with whom we had engaged in discussions about the possibilities of the UN and Silicon Valley working togther:
"I think I've invested a little bit of time in the UN so far, but it's not clear that it's worth more time. I think you've heard what I've had to say, and I'd rather move on to working on making real things happen. There are good people in the ... movement who invest tons of time in this work, and I don't think it adds anything to have me burn my limited cycles."

This is coming from somebody who is deeply rooted in the Silicon Valley culture of entrepreneurship and getting things done through real, grounded project. At the same time, he saw the importance of bringing the moral and social focus of the UN to Silicon Valley, in order to balance some of the region's zeal for profit. He was committed to working with the UN's Global Alliance for ICT and Development (GAID) in his particular area of specialization.

No longer. Part of his disillusionment came from the dynamics at the UN meets Silicon Valley Event in February at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (See our blog in late FEbruary for a summary of the event). Here are his thoughts on the day:
"The lobbyists from the tech companies (who wrote the action items that came out of the day - see our blog entry)struggled with anything that isn't on the lobbying agenda. You see lots of mentions of creating an environment where SV can compete.
Open ICT ecosystems. Best practices (read: light regulation, no telecom monopolies).
Take the session I attended: We ended up fighting a long time to move the summary a bit. Example: "Identifying local resources to support local content and delivery of devices - taking a bottoms up approach." We got the bottoms up in there, but the initial version of this bullet gave you the feeling they were looking for local sales and support of their products.
Sorry to be so cynical, but I didn't see much commitment to the MDGs or poor people in these recommendations. It really read more like the American Electronics Association global lobbying talking points."

So the UN-GAID seems to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, in order to work with (read: receive funds from) Silicon Valley institutions (read companies mainly), it needs to embrace more of the corporate values and ways of doing things. If it does so too much, it looses the people who are more socially committed and have the interests of people in developing countries at heart first and foremost, rather than developing new markets or products.

RiOS is committed to helping the UN-GAID learn to walk this tightrobe, and while we regret the loss of a fellow traveler, we take from it the need for more action and for greater attention to the needs of those the GAID was created to serve.

Global Catalyst Foundation

2007-04-05T15:25:00.000-07:00

A week weeks ago, while conducting interviews for our UN-GAID working paper, I had the pleasure of meeting Kamran and Zohre Elahian, co-founders of the Global Catalyst Foundation (GCF). One of GCF's most recent initiatives is the Ghandi project, supported by the Skoll Foundation, which screens the movie "Ghandhi," dubbed in Arabic, in Palestenian communities and refugee camps. The goal is to promote non-violent resistance, which was so successful in liberating India from British rule. In helping Palestine free itself from Israeli rule, Israel would surely benefit from a lesson in non-violence too.

Another project of note is the Kasulu and Mtabila Internet Project in Tanzania, a three-year Public-Private Partnership Program that uses ICT, through internet access centers, to provide school and health education and income generating projects. One of the project sites is the Mtabila Refugee Camp for Burundian refugees, which was so successful that when Cisco was looking for locations in the country to set up its networking academy, it chose the camp because of its many computer-literate inhabitants.

This speaks to the power of long-term, hands-on involvement of project funders to ensure the success of their creations.

UC Berkeley at Google

2007-03-24T16:10:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday, as part of the Discover Cal Series, Annalee Saxenian, Dean of UC Berkeley's School of Information, and Steven Weber, Director of UC Berkeley's Institute of International Studies spoke about Globalization and the Flow of Knowledge to an audience of about 250 Cal alumni living in the South Bay.
Saxenian drew on her latest book, The New Argonauts, to explain how immigrants returning from Silicon Valley to their home countries and opening businesses there are contributing to the development of "centers of skills" and "clusters of capabilities" that create innovation in developing countries. Rather than a zero-sum game to the detriment of Silicon Valley, Saxenian sees that as a benefit to the region.
Both speakers did acknowledge the growing inequalities in developing countries that come with an increasingly affluent class of knowledge workers. Interestingly, Saxenian argued that returning immigrants also bring progressive social changes to their home countries, and that this will ultimately contribute more to local development than the efforts of larger international development organizations. This corresponds to RiOS’ (and other) findings that homegrown solutions are often more successful than foreign imports.
Another interesting tidbit was that India recently allowed her citizens to hold double citizenship, and that google, which did a fabulous job of hosting the event, allows its employees to work on non-monetized areas for 20 percent of their time. That goes some way to explaining the company’s success, right up there with the way the company takes care of its employees.

Google Taps Rural Indian Market

2007-03-21T08:44:00.000-07:00

This just in from rediff news

Google logs into rural India

Surajeet Das Gupta & Priyanka Joshi in New Delhi | BS | March 21, 2007 | 09:08 IST

The latest company to seek a fortune in India's rural markets is Google. It is developing with local vendors a simpler search engine, as well as content tailored to the needs of rural users.

The customised content for rural customers would include weather updates, crop patterns and other local data.

"How to make the search engine simpler and uncomplicated is a big challenge, but we will have an answer soon," Google Vice-president (Asia Pacific & Latin America) Sukhinder Singh Cassidy told Business Standard.

A steadily growing number of companies in sectors like FMCG, telecom and retail are investing in the rural market owing to its growing prosperity. Google is the first global Internet giant to seek a pie of this market.

Google is also betting heavily on the mobile platform (as PC penetration is low) and plans to introduce services like Google Talk (instant chat application), and Google Maps through tie-ups with Indian mobile operators.

Following the success of Orkut, a popular social networking site, in India, Google plans to introduce it in other Indian languages online and it might integrate it with its instant messaging service, Google Talk. Further, Google is planning to launch in India a mobile version of Orkut, which will allow users to post messages to their friends online through SMS.

Google will also introduce its online advertising model, called AdWords, on the mobile platform. The advertising platform allows companies to exploit the field of mobile marketing.

Google is further looking at licensing partnerships with Indian publishers, broadcasting companies and those that own Bollywood content that could be made available on its sites.�

WRI Teams Up with IFC for BOP Research

2007-03-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

From One Billion to Four Billion

Moving from the usual one billion next customers to four billion, next Monday the World Resource Institute and the International Finance Corporation will be presenting their latest findings on the market at the base of the pyramid (see invite below).

Base is the more politically correct term for what C.K. Prahalad, who will be present, has called the bottom of the pyramid, for, as one of the participants at the recent UN meets Silicon Valley event asked the audience, would you want to live at the bottom of anything?

Invitation
The World Resources Institute and the International Finance Corporation cordially invite you to the presentation of the report:

The Next 4 Billion:

Market Size & Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid

Discussions of base of the pyramid (BOP) markets have relied principally on business case studies and rough estimates of market size. WRI, with the cooperation of the International Finance Corporation, has enjoyed unique access to national household surveys for the purpose of understanding low-income communities as economic actors. Drawing on income data from 110 countries and standardized expenditure data from 36 countries across the globe, the report is an important first look at the market opportunity represented by four billion individuals who make up the BOP. This briefing on the report and the follow-on discussion of business strategy and market research will be the first public review of the report and its data.

Date and time: Monday, March 19, 2007 at 11:00 a.m.

Location: International Finance Corporation Auditorium, 2121 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington DC, 20433

Featuring:
C.K. Prahalad, Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Corporate Strategy, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

Nariman Behravesh, Executive Vice President and Chief Economist, Global Insight, Inc.

Michael Klein, Vice President for Private Sector Development for the World Bank and IFC, and Chief Economist, IFC

Jonathan Lash, President, World Resources Institute

UN-GAID and Silicon Valley Taking Steps Forward Together

2007-03-12T14:55:00.000-07:00

These are the action items, again organized by panels, from the UN Meets Silicon Valley event. Although they are still quite general and moreover do not have any timelines and concrete responsibilities attached to them, they are hopefully the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between the UN and Silicon Valley.

Innovation Panel
• UN GAID to form working group to promote open ICT ecosystems
• Create “Environment Guidelines” to promote ICT and innovative entrepreneurs

VC Panel
• Support quality, financially sustainable mentoring of entrepreneurs to make them “Investor Ready”
• UN GAID to promote and publish best practices for ecosystem to support and scale innovation

Content Panel
• Make ALL UN and development agency publications available online and free of charge
• Open access to communication - Bring into Telecenter initiative
• Bring together KEY content providers – Form a network of Silicon Valley organizations to generate a common platform (UN GAID to catalyze)

There are programs already under way in Silicon Valley that do some of these things, such as the Reuters Digital Visions Program at Stanford University and the Global Social Benefit Incubator that are bringing social entrepreneurs from developing countries to the Valley to help them with developing and scaling their projects, respectively. Rather than reinventing the wheel, it might be helpful to go to them for some lessons learned.
RiOS Institute is looking forward to work with all interested organizations to bring these action items to life.

UN Meets Silicon Valley - Results

2007-03-12T14:32:00.000-07:00

Results from the UN Meets Silicon Valley event is slowly migrating to the web. Intel posted the pictures taken by its official photographer and also sent a summary of the panel discussions to all participants.

Here they are, interspersed with some of our thoughts. (For panel participants, see the event agenda).

Innovation Panel

• Commitment and Coordination in Private Sector: Not enough major private companies committed to developing ICT for Emerging Markets and the ones that are committed aren’t coordinated

RiOS: It seems hard to believe that the emerging markets area is not soliciting more commitment, and shows the difficulty for large corporations to work in this disruptive area, as Clayton Christensen calls it. The lack of coordination among corporations also exists because for many this is a highly strategic area, and work here is not shared with potential competitors. It will be interesting to see how the GAID can work around this.

• Identifying local resources to support local content and delivery of devices – taking a bottoms up approach

RiOS: It’s good that people are coming around to the bottom-up approach, although it only goes half way if initiatives are still developed in corporate labs, even if they are located in India or China. What is necessary is finding truly local initiatives that grow out of local needs and then putting resources (financial, human, technical) behind them to scale them.

• Enabling access to simple devices with easy user interfaces via financing and education

RiOS: This implies that such simple devices exist already. Do they? How simple is the $100 computer or Intel Classmate? Cell phones are leading the way here.

• Lack of affordable and simple broadband connectivity

Venture Capitalist Panel

• Need to create a cohesive ecosystem to drive and incubate innovation in developing countries (requires analysis of funding gaps)
• Need a phased approach toward growing businesses (e.g. need mentors to help smallest enterprises grow to be VC ready)
• Need to share best practice in measuring blended ROI; create a feedback loop to learn from failures and wins

RiOS: This last point is crucial. It is difficult enough to measure the social return on ICTD programs, in a way that goes beyond the quantitative indicators of how many users, how many hours of usage, program retention etc, which on their own are not saying much of the difference ICT really makes. If on top of that this social return has to be translated into metrics that make business sense, ie. mainly financial, this proves even more tricky. When HP tried to do it with its e-Inclusion program, the company was not all that successful, as the demise of the program in 2005 showed. Are there any good examples out there?

Content Panel

• Local production of content – Incentive, Tools, Understand why important
• Overcoming barriers to consumption of content – Accessibility, Language, Literacy
• Lack of capacity building to creating local content – Training, Teaching, Tools

For RiOS, this whole question of local content is of primary importance, because this is what ultimately results in a meaningful difference for the people using ICT. Women and children in developing countried being able to go to the UN charters that give them rights is good, but can they read them, understand them, translate them to benefit their own situations? This kind of empowerment can only happen through local organizations producing content that makes these charters relevant. This is where the work of the Committee for the Democratization of Information Technology in Brazil is so powerful, because it starts with a local situation that people want to improve. Only then comes the application of ICT for solving this problem. The other way around would be putting the cart before th horse.

RiOS named by Investor's Business Daily as a key to Bridging Digital Divide

2007-03-05T20:54:00.000-08:00

Last week, Investor's Business Daily ran an article about RiOS Institute. By bringing diverse groups of leaders and innovators in the ICTD area together, and supplying them with knowledge to which they otherwise might not have access, we are able to generate actions. The Silicon Valley Challenge Summit was one such occasion, and we continue to work in academia, with corporations, international development organizations and social benefit groups of all kinds to better harness ICTs for human and social development.
Thanks once again to Louise and Luma, our fabulous pro-bono media team at Ogilvy Public Relations.

Intel hosts the UN, RiOS informs GAID Leadership

2007-03-02T17:33:00.001-08:00

A little more than three months have passed since the Silicon Valley Challenge Summit, and the UN is already back in town. That's good news for RiOS Institute, which signed a ten-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the UN's Global Alliance for ICT and Development (GAID) back in November. As a result, RiOS Executive Director, Paul Braund, is a high-level advisor of the GAID, which was set up in 2006 by Kofi Annan as a multi-stakeholder forum to bring together all parties working globally to bridge the global digital divide. The GAID is based at UN headquarters in New York, and chaired by Dr. Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel. So there is the UN - SV connection right there. RiOS was the second official partner of the GAID here in the San Francisco Bay area, and is working to develop the largest GAID-SV network possible.

Building Common Ground
The first project of the GAID - RiOS partnership is a working paper published by RiOS for the second meeting of the GAID strategy council which took place here in SV last Tuesday (02/27/07). Entitled Building Common Ground: The UN Connecting with Silicon Valley, the paper presents a brief analysis of the relationship between the UN and SV (taking off from William Easterly's The White Man's Burden). RiOS also invited expert commentary on the topic from notables such as Annalee Saxenian, Dean of the iSchool at UC Berkeley; Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech; Zohre Elahian, co-founder of the Global Catalyst Foundation, and Djordjja Petkoski of the World Bank Institute. After Sarbuland Khan, the UN's Executive Coordinator of the GAID, read a draft of the paper, he sent a digital copy to all Strategy Council members in preparation for the meeting (which also ensured that it did not get lost in the mountain of publications that invariably accompany such events). The publication was very well received and praised for its balanced perspective. A set of recommendations for how to make the GAID successful included, amongst others, establishing clear guiding principles to ensure GAID's inclusiveness and legitimacy and launching a couple of achievable pilots with clear deliverables and high visibility to establish trust and inspire further actions. We believe that these recommendations show real possibilities for how to make the GAID work for the people in developing countries it is meant to serve, and for Silicon Valley.

The UN Meets Silicon Valley

2007-03-02T16:22:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday, February 28, 2007, Intel hosted the "The UN Meets Silicon valley" event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. The event was kicked off by Craig Barrett, who used the location to talk about the use of Information and Communication technology for Development (ICTD) as a computer input/output model. What needs to go in are accessibility, connectivity, education and content, and out come economic development, e-health, e-education and other application areas.

Los-cost Devices
Intel also showed off its Classmate PC, which is part of the company's World Ahead Program. The Classmate PC is the counterpart to the $140 computer developed by Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child organization. At this year's WEF, the standoff between Barrett and Negroponte had caused quite a stir. For Negroponte, it's about the difference between market and mission - his being mission of course, but for Taiwanese Quanta Computers, which is building them and for the suppliers of the components - Intel's rival AMD is supplying the chips - this is hard-nosed business too.
Barrett made no secret of his market ambitions, and the no-nonsense style of Silicon Valley that apparently goes with it. When, during the closing session of the event, he spoke about the ten commandments (things necessary for success), he was called on both his language - one participant joked about the IT industry going up against God - and the ideas behind it - there is no one-size-fits-all solution, as much as corporations, and techies, would like to find one. ICTD is as much a local as a global story.

Local Content, and then some
Many participants spoke about appropriateness, local relevance and local content. As Titi Akinsanmi, Program manager of the Global Teenager Project put it, put it - you don't come to my house, and I don't go to your house, with an empty box (meaning just a computer with nothing in it that's for me.) And even local content is still a high-level abstract, as Barbara Waugh, HP's self-styled corporate revolutionary and author of The Soul in the Computer, reminded the audience: What about gender?
(During a break, I stood with Barbara, Priscila Neri, the coordinator of the newly opened New York office of the Committee for the Democracy in Information Technology and Lisa Giaretto of Village Enterprise Fund, a microfinance organization, when the latter reported that at the recent Global Microcredit Summit in Nova Scotia, there were very few women speakers, which is astounding given that women are still the focus of much microfinance activities, even though apparently that's changing as microfinance is going more mainstream). Andrew McLaughlin, Head of Global Public Policy at google, said that there was a lack of meaningful financial incentives to create local content, which google is hoping to change through advertising revenue generated by its adsense program. Minutes later he was banging his head when Titi reported that on a recent trip back home to South Africa, she was surprised to find that everybody and their aunt has a blog there. People click on each other's blogs all the time exactly for this advertising revenue.

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs)
Given the theme of the meeting, PPPs were at the center of the discussion. However, for the most part they were reduced to collaborations between governments/development organizations and corporations, somewhat neglecting the nonprofit organizations/NGOs and academics who were also present and are part of such multisector partnerships. As Building Common Ground: The UN Connecting with Silicon Valley, a working paper RiOS prepared for the meeting, showed, such partnerships are much in vogue now, as each type of institutions has realized that on their own they are not making much of a dent in bridging the global digital divide. Relatively easy to set up, PPPs are not as easy to keep going however, since they usually bring together groups with different objectives, cultures, ways of doing things, resources and capabilities. It takes a lot of respect for other ways of operating and a genuine commitment to make a difference and be in it for the long run, especially by corporate participants, to make them work. There also need to be clear guiding standards to ensure inclusiveness and democratic control, and to prevent being controlled by the most wealthy and powerful participants.

The next billion
The other hot topic was "the next billion," meaning the next billion people in developing countries whom governments and international development organizations hope to get online, and whom high-tech corporations hope will become the future consumers of their products. This number comes from C.K. Prahalad's writings on the bottom of the (world economic) pyramid, where poverty can be eradicated through profits. (One attendee suggested to change the language to base of the pyramid, asking "would you like to live at the bottom of anything?). Although a popular idea with CEOs and development technocrats alike, research by RiOS Institute has shown that such a marketization of poverty cannot address its political and structural reasons and therefore only provide limited technical solutions. By only regarding the poor as potential customers, their plight gets reduced to a purely economic problem crying out for purely economic solutions. As Sarbuland Khan, the UN's executive coordinator of the GAID argued, "endemic poverty defies the market."

Moving Forward
At the end of the day, after several breakout sessions, the group came up with several next steps forward for how to involve Silicon Valley in the GAID. Foremost among them was the creation of local ecosystem to support local content providers.

Paul Braund on Worldchanging.com

2006-11-14T11:39:00.000-08:00

PaulBraund's recent interview with the nextbillion project of the WRI was picked up by Worldchanging.com (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/005294.html)

According to their website, Worldchanging.com, which is supported by TED,"works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it's here. We only need to put the pieces together." This is very much in accordance with our belief that people should start by changing their own world, by making the connections with like-minded fellow travelers.

Worldchanging last month published a book about their ways for how to change the world and is taking it on a tour around the country, including to Seattle, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, L.A., Chicago, Vancouver, Portland, D.C., The Twin Cities, Austin and Denver. Please visit http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/005027.html to see how you can connect with them.

Ogilvy and Louise Kehoe as RiOS media advisors

2006-11-13T22:49:00.000-08:00

We have been getting some great help with our media work on the Summit from Louise Kehoe, a longtime presence in the Silicon Valley media landscape. She established the Financial Times' editorial presence in the Valley and in the process became one of the best-known and respected technology journalists in the region. In her 25 years in the Valley, Louise has interviewed everybody there is to interview.
She is now at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide and together with Luma Khatib has given us a probono hand in shaping our message for the Summit. Thank you, Louise and Luma!

Jim Fruchterman in the San Jose Mercury News

2006-11-13T22:33:00.000-08:00

Jim Fruchterman, the Founder and CEO of the Benetech Foundation (www.benetech.org) and a participant in the Summit's morning panel, published an op-ed piece in today's San Jose Mercury News, entitled "Build great companies, then help build a great world." In it, he argues that "the same skills and sophistication we use to build great companies can and must be applied to the world's biggest problems. One great way to explore how you can apply your business and technical skills is to link up with other like-minded people." The Silicon Valley Challenge Summit is one opportunity to do just that.

Fruchterman received the MacArthur Genius Award for his work with Benetech, which focuses on literacy, human rights and landmine detection.

We especially like Benetech's business model: "sustainable technology solutions for
social needs with a focus on ROH - Return on Humanity." ROH instead of ROI - how might this redefine the market-driven focus of especially corporations working in the ICTD area?

Paul Braund interviewed by WRI's next billion

2006-11-11T12:29:00.000-08:00

Hello,
Paul Braund was recently interviewed by Rob Katz from nextbillion.net, a program of the World Resource Institute in Washington D.C. (www.wri.org) that is dedicated to development through enterprise. Rob asked Paul about his personal connections to his work in the ICTD area, and about the unique focus of RiOS Institute's work.
To read the entire interview, please visit http://www.nextbillion.net/blogs/2006/11/09/paul-braund-interview-the-business-of-technology-and-development

On a personal note, when we visited WRI for the first time in 2002, while we spent the summer in Washington D.C. working at the World Bank Institute, we were inspired by the people we met there, the work they do and the welcoming and creative atmosphere of their offices. A great role model.

Infosys' Kris at the Summit

2006-11-01T20:46:00.000-08:00

One of the most recent high-profile high tech people to confirm his attendance at the Summit is Kris S. Gopalakrishnan, President, Chief Operating Officer and Joint Managing Director of Infosys Technologies Ltd. As one of the founders of the company in 1981, he has played a key role in using technology and innovation continuously to maintain its leadership of the industry. An IIT Madras graduate, he is currently the Chairman of the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management (IIITM), Kerala, and Vice Chairman of the Information Technology Education Standards Board (BITES) set up by Karnataka Government.
We met Kris in 2003, when we went to India on a fact-finding trip for the Business, Competitiveness and Development group of the World Bank Institute. Kris took time out of his busy schedule to talk to us on the Infosys campus on the outskirts of Bangalore, and our conversation with him, as well as with the many other industry and government leaders we met during our time in India, made us realize the obstacles Indian entrepreneurs have to overcome in order to get their companies off the ground, which are many times those faced by their Silicon Valley counterparts.
Kris also introduced us to his wife Sudha, who is one of the trustees of the Infosys Foundation, alongside Sudha Murty, the wife of Narayana Murty, the other co-founder of the company. We were able to learn from both personally about the important work of the Foundation, which is promoted by the company, in the areas of poverty alleviation, health and education. The Foundation received the Corporate Citizen of the Year Award in 2001.
Kris is the VIP Dinner speaker at the Summit, and will share his thoughts on the needs of countries like India, and how collaborations between Silicon Valley institutions and companies like Infosys can address some of these needs.

Thanks to Muhammad Yunus

2006-10-29T21:13:00.000-08:00

Mohammad Yunus being awarded this year's Peace Nobel Price held a particular significance for us. It was after hearing him speak at the University of California at Berkeley in April 2002 that we started to think about what would a few years later become the RiOS Institute. Yunus was inspiring, his personality, his stories, his conviction, his sincerity. The most important lesson we learned was that from small beginnings can grow big things. Similarly, starting by changing one's own world is more effective than setting out to changing the world. And this is what RiOS is all about, as well as the Silicon Valley Challenge Summit.

Forget About Changing The World. Change Your World.

2006-10-26T23:11:00.000-07:00

RiOS was invited to participate and keynote at a conference on e-Content in Yerevan, Armenia.
The revelation for us was that the most inspiring projects in Information and Communications
always start with small questions, small solutions; people and groups that are trying to
change their own world. So the message to our upcoming Summit should be forget about
changing the world. Change your world first. (Thats got to already be a bumper sticker already).

RiOS and WBI e-Conference

2006-10-26T22:48:00.000-07:00

RiOS and the World Bank Institute have teamed up to put on a global e-Conference on ICT for economic development, from October 23 to November 3, 2006. Experts from public and private institutions and local participants from around the world will discuss, debate and share stories on how to improve and learn from success and failure of Information and Communications Technology in economic development. Our hope is that for people from countries around the world will take a more critical approach to ICTD and let their voice be heard by the people who make the decisions. Participation is important to upcoming conferences and events such as the Silicon Valley Challenge Summit. Please get involved.

For more information, including registration, visit www.developmentandbusiness.org/ICT

The New Argonauts

2006-09-08T21:52:00.000-07:00

One of our speakers in the morning panel, Dr. Annalee Saxenian, Dean of the School of Information at UC Berkeley, was recently featured in an article in the Mercury News (September 3, 2006). Dr. Saxenian answered questions about her recently published book, THE NEW ARGONAUTS: REGIONAL ADVANTAGE IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY.

The new argonauts are those entrepreneurs who have come to the US for an education, but have gone back to their home countries, or are actively engaged with them, for business purposes. While this is a relatively new phenomenon, having developed over the last ten years, Saxenian argues more importantly that the technology and enterprise clusters set up by the new argonauts in India, China, Taiwan and Israel are extensions of Silicon Valley. They are hybrid forms, combining innovative features of the Valley with political, cultural and corporate features of their home countries. These clusters also have the potential to become partners for Silicon Valley. According to Dr. Saxenian: "This is perhaps my rosy-eyed view of globalization that we are seeing new centers that are becoming viable partners, not just cheap labor, not just head-on competitors but partners for Silicon Valley firms."

The question is, how do these new clusters and linkages play out in the ICTD field? More generally, to what extent do entrepreneurs who return home, if they are successful, use their wealth and innovation to work towards more equitably prosperous societies in their home countries? One answer to this question can be found by looking at the Indian community in Silicon Valley, many of whose members are engaged in social development projects in India. We would like to hear from their experiences. And maybe Dr. Saxenian will provide additional answers at the Summit.

Summit Program now available

2006-09-08T21:42:00.000-07:00

We have finalized an exciting line-up of presenters, who will discuss the Summit themes in panels, interactive workshops and a town-hall style plenary.

WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS:

* Paul Locatelli, S.J. President, Santa Clara University
* James C. Morgan, Chairman, Applied Materials, Inc.
* Geoffrey C. Bowker Regis and Dianne McKenna, Professor and Executive Director, Center for Science, Technology, and Society, Santa Clara University
* Paul Braund, Executive Director, RiOS Institute

OPENING KEYNOTE:
Craig R. Barrett, Chairman of the Board, Intel Corporation Chairman, Global Alliance for ICT and Development, United Nations

Sarbuland Khan, Executive Coordinator of the Global Alliance for ICT and Development, United Nations

QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION

PANEL DISCUSSION: WHAT IS SILICON VALLEY DOING?

OPENING STATEMENT:
Manuel Castells, Wallis Annenberg Chair, Professor of Communication Technology and Society, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California

DIALOGUE:

* Akhtar Badshah, Senior Director of Community Affairs, Microsoft Corporation
* Bill Coleman, Chairman, Silicon Valley Leadership Group Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, Cassatt Corporation
* William H. Davidow, Founding Partner, MDV (Mohr Davidow Ventures)
* James R. Fruchterman, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, The Benetech Initiative
* AnnaLee Saxenian, Dean and Professor, School of Information and Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley

LUNCH KEYNOTE:
“A PLAN TO GET ICT FOR ONE HALF OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION” Dan Shine Director, 50x15 Program, AMD

CONCURRENT BREAKOUT WORKSHOPS: WHAT CAN BE DONE AND HOW CAN WE DO IT?

1. UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY COLLABORATIONS, led by Eric Brewer Director, Intel Research, and Director, Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) Program University of California, Berkeley
2. WORKING WITH MULTILATERAL DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATIONS, led by Djordjija Petkoski, Lead Specialist, Business, Competitiveness and Development Group, World Bank Institute
3. ADDRESSING THE BOTTOM OF THE PYRAMID (BOP) MARKET, led by Allen L. Hammond Vice President for Innovation and Special Projects World Resources Institute
4. LARGE INDUSTRY INITIATIVES, led by Bess Stephens, Vice President , Corporate Philanthropy, Hewlett-Packard Company
5. SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP, led by James L. Koch, Executive Director, CSTS Global Social Benefit Incubator, Santa Clara University Eric Carlson, Associate Director, CSTS Global Social Benefit Incubator and Faculty, Entrepreneur Leadership Program, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University
6. HUMAN-CENTERED RESEARCH AND DESIGN, led by Anke Schwittay, Director of Research, RiOS Institute Paul Braund, Executive Director, RiOS Institute

CLOSING PLENARY: WHAT ELSE CAN SILICON VALLEY DO? A COMMITMENT TO INNOVATION

SUMMARY REMARKS: Paul Saffo, Director and Roy Amara Fellow, Institute for the Future

CLOSING KEYNOTE: Paul Mountford President, Emerging Markets, Cisco Systems, Inc.

TOWN HALL DISCUSSION: moderated by Paul Saffo

RECEPTION

2006-09-01T17:56:00.000-07:00

"We will have time to reach the Millennium Development Goals – worldwide and in most, or even all, individual countries – but only if we break with business as usual.
We cannot win overnight. Success will require sustained action across the entire decade between now and the deadline. It takes time to train the teachers, nurses and engineers; to build the roads, schools and hospitals; to grow the small and large businesses able to create the jobs and income needed. So we must start now. And we must more than double global development assistance over the next few years. Nothing less will help to achieve
the Goals."

United Nations Secretary-General
Kofi A. Annan

2006-09-01T17:16:00.000-07:00

Inspired by our friends at NIIT in India.

2006-09-01T16:31:00.000-07:00

To help with the Global Challenge for the UN
Millennium Goals and to try and bring more
focus on the ICTD we have put a little time into
getting website and blog going.

Thanks to all our friends, colleagues and
supporters especially those in India for helping
us get up a new website. Check it out!
www.riosinstitute.org

2006-08-16T20:53:00.000-07:00

Chief of Confusion
We have finalized the program for the Summit, and have had some exciting last minute speaker confirmations.
One is John Seely Brown (also goes by JSB or Chief of Confusion), who was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its famous Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His work on the human context in which technologies operate, as written up in The Social Life of Information for example, is a guiding light for RiOS, as it connects well with our own research into how to improve ICTs for the people actually using them.
Seely and his collaborators' insights into innovation, especially in "edge places" like India and China, will bring an interesting perspective to the Summit. What can we learn from these places, important not only because of its own IT industry in the case of India, but also because they are grappling with some of the major development issues the Summit will address.
And India and China are not incidentally the emerging markets many high-tech companies are after. One of the Summit's breakout sessions will focus on the bop (that's short for bottom of the pyramid, as this corporate focus is called following the work of C.K. Prahalad), and we have recruited Al Hammond from the World Resource Institute (WRI) to lead this workshop. The WRI is an independent research institute based in Washington, and its next billion project is one of the most comprehensive databases on a wide and diverse range of bop efforts, many involving ICT. Hammond will be presenting some of the project's most recent research on Future Markets.
The whole program will be posted on the Summit's website and on this blog in the near future, so be sure to check back.
RiOS

2006-08-11T21:31:00.000-07:00

The UN in Silicon Valley?
The Silicon Valley Challenge Summit gets its name from the 2002 call by Kofi Annan for Silicon Valley institutions to take a more active role in harnessing ICT for international development. Such a role, especially if it takes place under the umbrella of large multilateral organizations such as the UN or the WB, does not sit well with many folks in the Valley, who see these institutions (and often rightly so) as too slow, too bureaucratic, too big to get things done. There are echoes here of the argument by William Easterly in White Man's Burden about the difference between the planners and the doers, and people in Silicon Valley, especially its enterprises, would certainly count themselves among the latter. They get things done, focus on the outcome, want to see tangible actions and results.
It was thus no surprise that we got some rolling eyes when we first suggested the idea of organizing an event focused on Silicon Valley's responses to the UN Challenges, but the idea got traction, and on November 16, we will see the results of 11 months of planning and hard work.
There will be a personal message of Kofi Annan to Summit attendants (of course we would have preferred it if he came in person, especially because he will not be the UN's Secretary-General that much longer, but can Kofi ever committ to anything, with the world on fire as it is?).
The latest mega UN initiative in the ICTD area is the GLobal Alliance for ICT and Development, which is the successor to the ICT Taskforce and came out of the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society. Sarabuland Khan, the Executive Coordinator of the Alliance, will be at the Summit to invite attendants, and Silicon Valley at large, to become a part of the Alliance. We hope that the institutions of the Bay Area can rise to the occasion, and moreover assume a leadership position corresponding to its wealth, influence and technological expertise. And we hope that they do it the Silicon Valley way. That's why the Summit is a call to action, not to another Summit.
There are hopeful signs. Craig Barrett, the Chairman of Intel, is serving as the first Chairman of the Alliance. According to him, “it’s time to turn the spirit of UN WSIS into action. The ICT industry has an opportunity to build from its history of creativity and innovation to further contribute to economic and social development." Sounds familiar? And Mr. Barrett will bring this message to the Summit in person, as the respondent to Mr. Khan's keynote. This high-level engagement of Valley execs, which follows on the work that John Chambers and Carly Fiorina did with the ICT Taskforce, should quieten some critics.
As to the rest, and all others interested in participating in formulating a Silicon Valley response to the UN challenges, Santa Clara University is the place to be on November 16.
RiOS

2006-07-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

Hello,
a few days ago Paul Saffo came on board for the Summit, which is great news.

Paul is a forecaster and strategist with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society. A Director and Roy Amara Fellow at Institute For The Future, Paul is Chairman of the Samsung Science Board, and serves on a variety of other boards including the Long Now Foundation, as well as the boards of several public and pre-public companies located the United States and abroad. In 2006, he was appointed a Consulting Associate Professor in the Stanford's School of Engineering and is also a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. Paul has served as an advisor and Forum Fellow to the World Economic Forum, which in the late 1990s named Paul one of its "100 Global Leaders For Tomorrow." Paul's essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Business 2.0, Fortune, The Harvard Business Review, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The New York Times and the Washington Post and Wired. Paul holds degrees from Harvard College, Cambridge University, and Stanford University.

Paul has a great inside knowledge of the Valley, and his challenging thoughts are sure to add an exciting dimension to the Summit.

2006-07-14T14:30:00.000-07:00

Hi,
Two days ago the Summit received a big boost from the announcement that Bill Gates will be receiving the 2006 Humanitarian Award at this year's Tech Museum Awards, to which the Silicon Valley Challenge Summit is linked. As the Summit is promoted through the Tech Museum's website and newsletter, this will send attendants and media attention our way too.
In keeping with the theme of the Summit, this award should also be a challenge to those in Silicon Valley who have made their fortunes thanks to the high-tech industry. To be sure, there are philanthropists here, from Hewlett and Packard to Skoll and Omidyar. But as Pauline Borsook wrote in Cyberselfish a few years back, and as many contemporary observers still contend, the libertarian culture of the Valley does not lend itself easily to sharing ones riches.
The Summit will be a call to action in this area as well.

RiOS

2006-06-22T15:09:00.000-07:00

Hi,
we are Paul Braund and Anke Schwittay; the co-founders of the RiOS Institute, which is the co-presenter of the Silicon Valley Challenge Summit. We have started this blog in order to get the debate about the role of Silicon Valley in the area of ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) going even before the actual summit.

To answer the two questions that you probably have at this point ... Who is RiOS and why do we need this event?

RiOS (www.riosinstitute.org) stands for the development of human-centered 'Research and Innovation for Organizations and Societies.' We co-founded the institute, which is dedicated to the application of social science research and design innovation to the fulfillment of the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in 2005. RiOS is a vehicle for us to continue our long-standing research into development projects that use technologies. This research, carried out in the context of Paul's many years as a designer, educator, tech consultant for Silicon Valley Fortune 500 corporations as well as start up companies, and for the World Bank Institute, as well as my Ph.D. studies in anthropology at UC Berkeley and work with the World Bank Institute and the Institute for the Future, brought us to Latin America, India and into our very own backyard in East Palo Alto. What we learned from our travails is that many projects, especially the ones involving ICTs, don't actually focus on the people they are supposed to serve, and therefore often fail. From our perspectives as an anthropologist and a designer, we realized the importance of human-centered research and design, as well as of the collaboration among people from different institutional backgrounds. And that is why we are co-organizing the Silicon Valley Challenge Summit, together with STS.

We believe that with Silicon Valley's great technological, corporate, entrepreneurial and financial success comes great responsibility. In the same way in which the region has exported its models of innovative research, entrepreneurial drive and cross-institutional collaboration, it now has the opportunity to play an exemplary role in exploring new ways to create a more equitable and sustainable future for all inhabitants of the world. The Summit will therefore bring together the valley's unique pool of talent, creativity and ambitions, to further transform it into a hub of the international network around the use of ICT for global development.
The Summit is also tied to this year's Technology Benefiting Humanity Awards, which will be hosted by San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation on November 15, 2006. The Award's Â“laureatesÂ” will be present at the Summit and showcase their work to its speakers and attendants.

We see this Summit as a call to action, and want you to help us make this happen. Post your thoughts on the topic (and we know there is much debate around what we are proposing), tell others about the Summit and this blog and start the buzz.

thanks for now,
paul and anke

2006-06-22T13:42:00.000-07:00

Mark your calendar for the Silicon Valley Challenge Summit on November 16, 2006 at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at Santa Clara University.

This unique event, which is presentented by STS and co presented by the RiOS Institute, will bring together Silicon Valley corporate, civic and academic leaders to explore how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can be harnessed for the fulfillment of the UN's Millenium Development Goals.

Through panel discussion and workshops, conference speakers and participants will answer key questions that define Silicon Valley’s role in the creation of a better future for all:

- What is Silicon Valley doing?
- How is Silicon Valley doing it?
- What else can Silicon Valley do?

Confirmed speakers include:
· José Antonio Ocampo, United Nations Under Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs
· Manuel Castells, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California
· William T. Coleman III, Chairman, Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Cassatt Corporation
· AnnaLee Saxenian, Dean of School of Information, University of California, Berkeley
· James R. Fruchterman, Founder and CEO, The Benetech Initiative
· Djordjija Petkoski, Head of Private Sector Development, World Bank Institute