Last year we highlighted five extraordinary women in the Pop!Tech community.  Well, the idea was such a good one we decided to do it again.  This week’s Friday Five looks at some of the amazing women that made Pop!Tech 2008 special.

Photo by Kris Krug

HEATHER FLEMING, Catapult Design

Some speakers use animated graphics to make their point; others rely on high-tech demos (or in the case of Kelly Dobson, repurposed home appliances).  True to her spirit of ingenuity, however, Heather Fleming introduced the Pop!Tech audience to the Hippo Project with the help of a naked Barbie.  Fleming, a 2008 Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow, told the audience that she followed what she thought was a straight-forward career path: she got a degree in engineering, dutifully worked for a design firm creating “stuff”, all the while patiently waiting for Martin Fisher to call and offer her job so she could do work that really mattered to her.  She never received that call, so instead she founded Catapult Design, where she’s using her engineering expertise to solve problems for the developing world such as low-cost wind turbines and innovative cookstoves.

Photo: Sheila Kennedy

SHEILA KENNEDY, Portable Light Project

Sheila Kennedy is an architect and associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She was a speaker Pop!Tech ‘07, where she first introduced the Portable Light Project: a non-profit initiative that’s creating new ways to deliver renewable power and light to the developing world by embedding flexible photovoltaic materials, digital electronics and solid state lighting in textiles, enabling people in the developing world to create and own energy harvesting textile blankets, bags and clothing.  I had a chance to catch up with Sheila, see the latest prototype (shown above) and hear the good news: that the Portable Light project was selected as one of 25 laureates in this year’s Tech Awards sponsored by the Tech Museum of Innovation.  (Side note: another one of my favorite projects, the Solar Electric Light Fund, led by two-time Pop!Tech speaker Bob Freling, is also a nominee).

Photo by Kris Krug

MARIAN BANTJES, Artist

I’m not sure how to describe Marian Bantjes.  She’s a graphic designer, an artist, a typographer, a writer … maybe a better word would be a modern day “graphicographer”.  The definition is fitting for one whose work defies convention, for an artistdesignergraphictypographer who brings letters to life, creating as one person described “thoughtful art and artful thought.”  She left the field of graphic design because she “didn’t want to spend her life making landfill.” That’s bad news for landfills, which will most surely never see the beautiful, inspiring and provocative works she does today.

Photo by Kris Krug

SUZANNE SEGGERMAN, Games for Change

Suzanne Seggerman thinks that digital games and teenagers have a lot in common:  both are just growing up and they are often misunderstood.  While 97% percent of all teenagers play video games, contrary to popular belief the two most popular are puzzle and racing games - not violent games as most would assume.  Seggerman is president and co-founder of Games for Change (G4C), an umbrella organization which supports individuals and organizations using digital games for social change. The website is a virtual encyclopedia of games that tackle social issues such as human rights, poverty, environment, global conflict and politics. Games like Peacemaker which challenges players create a workable solution for peace in the Middle East by becoming one of the leaders in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or Food Force, a game that helps players understand the challenges of dispensing emergency aid in war zones. Seggerman is steadfast in her belief that video games can change the world for the better by creating environments that teach young people to see complex social issues from multiple perspectives. 

Photo by Kris Krug

PRITI RADHAKRISHNAN, I-MAK

Priti Radhakrishnan is looking for a fight.  And not just any fight: the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow is a patent lawyer who’s taking on some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies and demanding that they make their drugs affordable to developing nations.  Radhakrishnan is the co-director of I-MAK, a non-profit team of lawyers and scientists working to strengthen patent systems and encourage innovation in new medicines by challenging unsound patent systems globally. I-MAK (which stands for Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge) reviews pharmaceutical patents to strengthen patent examination, and selectively exposes unmerited pharmaceutical patents - which drive up the cost of essential drugs and prevent them from ever being accessible in less developed countries for poor patients. Radhaskrishnan’s team is working to create technical analyses of 100 critical medicines and patents, which will help preempt the granting of unmerited patents, increase accountability and ultimately make lifesaving drugs more affordable.

 (Running notes from Pop!Tech ‘08.  For more posts and the latest release of talks, see the Pop!Tech blog.) 

 photo: Kris Krug

At first glance, David Harrison looks more like a Marine than a linguist. With his carefully cropped crew cut, impeccably tailored shirt and serious, straightforward attitude, he looks like he should be saving combat missions, not cultures.  But perhaps his physical persona is in fact fitting with his life’s mission: to protect and save the endangered languages of the world.  It’s a task that has taken him to some of the most remote corners of the planet, making him an unlikely hero: a protector of languages, a guardian of the spoken word.

Harrison is an author, professor of linguistics at Swathmore College and director of research for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. He says there are some 7000 languages spoken in the world today, which may seem like a lot until we consider that globally linguistic diversity is incredibly uneven. In fact, 83 of the most widely spoken languages account for about 80 percent of the world’s population while the 3,500 smallest languages account for just 0.2 percent of the world’s people.

In an increasingly culturally homogenous world, why should we care?  Because languages, Harrison says, are more than just a collection of sounds and words; they are “entire conceptual universes of thought.” Collectively, he says, languages represent the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled. Every language reveals some of the secrets of how humans have survived on the planet.

Every 14 days a language disappears.  Languages are much more endangered than species, and are going extinct at a much faster rate.  While 5% of the world’s fish are extinct, 8% of plants; 11% of birds, 18% of mammals - with languages the figure closer to 40%. By 2100 more than half of the world’s languages will become extinct.

from When Languages Die

What’s lost when a language goes extinct?  Harrison says when a language dies the history of a culture vanishes: we lose vital information about the natural world, plants, animals, ecosystems, and cultural traditions. For instance, the Yulik of Alaska have over 99 complex descriptive terms for describing different formations of sea ice, a technology that has aided them in hunting and in surviving in one of the world’s harshest climates, and attuning their culture to be one of the most sensitive instruments to detect the signs of climate change and global warming. We’re facing the “triple threat of extinction“: species and ecosystems are in collapse globally; but knowledge systems about those ecosystems are also in collapse because they’re often contained in small languages that are purely transmitted orally.  

Harrison’s Enduring Voices project focuses on identifying “language hotspots” to prioritize research and save endangered languages (see this previous post).  There are 24 hotspots today, including eastern Siberia, northern Australia, central South America, Oklahoma, and the U.S. Pacific Northwest.   The goal of Enduring Voices is to support indigenous community efforts at language revitalization and maintenance worldwide. Together with colleagues Greg Anderson and National Geographic photographer Chris Rainer, Harrison visits “last speakers” to document their dying languages, sometimes creating the first-ever written records.

The process can be deeply personal. He recalls a quote from one of the last speakers of the Tofa language in Siberia, an aged woman, who reflecting on her mortality, told him: “Soon I will go berry picking. And when I do, I will take my language with me.”

Note: David Harrison’s talk at Pop!Tech has been translated into 33 languages on dotSub.

Running notes from Pop!Tech ‘08.  For more posts, see the Pop!Tech blog.

photo: Kris Krug 

DR. GARY SLUTKIN, CeaseFire

Dr. Gary Slutkin asks: can put violence in the past, like we once did smallpox, by thinking about it differently? 

Specifically, by thinking of urban violence not as a moral or policy issue (that is, what’s “right and wrong”), but as a public health one.  Slutkin suggests that “violence is an infectious disease”; that it operates like a virus, following the same epidemiological patterns as health epidemics such as AIDS and tuberculosis.  He should know: Slutkin is an epidemiologist and physician who spent ten years in Africa on the frontlines of infectious diseases. Today, he’s the Executive Director of the Chicago Center for Violence Prevention. CeaseFire is the Center’s anti-violence campaign uses a public health approach to reducing shootings and killings.

If violence behaves like an epidemic, can it be cured?  Slutkin proposes that at the minimum the spread of violence can be contained (and perhaps halted) by applying the same tactics public health officers use in dealing with disease outbreaks: first: interrupt the transmission; then change social behaviors and norms. CeaseFire employs a team of “violence interrupters” - outreach workers (many of whom are ex-offenders themselves) to personally intervene and stop violent acts in the community on a case-by-case basis. Combined with a vigorous PR campaign, the aim is to ultimately change social norms - in essence, to make violence as socially unacceptable as, say, smoking.

Sound impossible?  Perhaps.  But as he points out, we once thought curing the plague was impossible too.  That was because the cause of the plague was invisible - a bacteria, inside a flea, on a rat.  By identifying the “etiologic agent” (the root cause) and making it visible, we have a better chance at finding a cure.

photo: Kris Krug

ERIK HERSMAN, Ushahidi

Erik Hersman understands the power of “making the invisible visible.”  Hersman is one of Pop!Tech’s first Social Innovation Fellows, and like most social entrepreneurs, his work is a reflection his favorite things: Africa, technology and maps.  Raised in Sudan and Kenya, Hersman is rabid techie, a web developer who writes two tech-related blogs (AfriGdaget and WhiteAfrican) and an avid map collector. He begins his talk by saying that he was born of two cultures, but lives in neither. In reality, his cultural vertigo likely fuels his ability to see opportunity where others see crisis.

Following the post-election violence that engulfed Kenya earlier this year, Hersman and fellow Kenyan bloggers created Ushahidi (the name  means “testimony” in Swahili), a website that allows users to report incidents of violence via a mobile phone text message or email.  Reports were posted to a map, creating a near-real time record of events throughout the country.   (MB note: I first wrote about Ushahidi here).

Part of the brilliance of Ushahidi is that gives voice to the myriad of stories that would otherwise be missed by the mainstream press, but its ultimate aim is more than simply a platform for citizen jpurnalism- the goal is to crowdsource crisis information. With funding from grants and a prize money from a handful of prestigious awards (including NetSquared and Knight-Batten), the plan is to build Ushahidi into a free, open source mapping tool that acts as not only as an archive, but also as an early warning system, detecting crises before they happen.

photo: Kris Krug

ERIC DAWSON, Peace Games

Slutkin and Hersman suggest that violence is not only a disease, but one that can be visualized and mapped in real time.  But the question remains: how can it be stopped from beginning in the first place?  Eric Dawson, another Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow, has an idea: teach kids “peacemaking” as a skill.  Dawson starts his talk with some sobering statistics - American children today will have witnessed 100,000 acts of violence on television before they enter the sixth grade.  His organization, Peace Games, offers a K-8 curriculum that teaches kids how to become not just victims or witnesses of violence, but peacemakers who are able to diffuse it.  The underlying theory is that violence is a learned behavior that, gone unchecked, can lead to greater acts of violence. In contrast, Dawson thinks that the skills of peacemaking can also be learned.  His goal is to have Peace Games taught as an integral part of the curriculum, alongside math and science.And it seems to be working: he says that schools that use Peace Games see a 60% reduction in violence and a 75% increase in socially peaceful behavior.

Note: these are running notes from Pop!Tech ‘08; for more posts, see the Pop!Tech blog.  I stopped liveblogging conferences (for why, see In Praise of Slow Blogging); however, I’ll have more complete (and perhaps coherent) reflections up this week. 

FRANK WARREN, curator of the world’s secrets 

Frank Warren collects secrets.  One day he printed up a few hundred self-addressed postcards, handed them out to strangers in Washington, DC and asked them to send him their secrets.  Four years and 250,000 secrets later, what started out as a community art project has turned into a hobby, a vocation and ultimately, a profession.  Of the thousand or so cards he receives each week, Frank posts a handful to his blog, PostSecret.  The blog is voyeuristically addicting; the secrets are painful, funny and profound.

While many of the secrets expose past deeds, some reveal hidden desires.  In December 2006, Frank posted this card:

Soon after, he received this email:

Sent: Sunday, December 3, 2006 8:22 AM

This Saturday evening I will be waiting for you too. This invitation does not mean that I want to do anything or talk during the movie. But when the darkness leaves the theatre, perhaps we will look into each other’s eyes, smile, decide to get a cup of coffee and share a conversation over what we just saw.

-waiting with a white hat

That email led to the creation of a PostSecret fan site called The White Hat People, which encourages people going to the movies alone to wear a white hat, and thus meet each other.   

PostSecret hits a collective nerve because it represents the paradox of the digital age: the ability to be publicly anonymous. (Or anonymously public. You choose.)  By revealing our innermost secrets to the world’s largest audience, it offers an opaque veil for the truth: one that is both staunchly impersonal and profoundly intimate. As a public confessional, perhaps Post Secret offers relief, if not absolution, by releasing people from the shackles of secrecy.

LAURA WATERS HINSON, on “radical forgiveness”

Imagine that you have a secret to confess. Now imagine that your confession is very public, and very personal. And that your crime isn’t cheating on your spouse, but that you killed your neighbor?  That you chopped off his hands and feet, until he slowly bled to death in front of you.

Is there an arena to talk about - and seek forgiveness from - such unimaginable crimes? That’s the basis of As We Forgive, a groundbreaking documentary film by Student Academy Award Winner Laura Waters Hinson that explores the human capacity for forgiveness in the most extraordinary of circumstances - the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide. 

In 1994, over the course of one hundred days nearly 800,000 Tutsis were killed by the Hutu militia and sympathizers, making the Rwanda tragedy one of the most horrific genocides in history.  As the country slowly edged toward peace and rebuilding, the new government was faced with an overwhelming backlog of genocide cases. Approximately 120,000 genocidaires were crammed into Rwanda’s prisons; it was estimated that it would take 100+ years to prosecute all of the cases.  In 2003, in an effort to decongest the prisons and promote reconciliation, President Paul Kagame ordered the release of some 40,000 prisoners back into the community.

They were free, but many remained prisoners of unending guilt and shame.  A number of religious organizations (including Prison Fellowship, which is featured in the film) have established “reconciliation programs” in an attempt to reintegrate murderers with their communities. As We Forgive explores this concept of “radical forgiveness” through the stories of two women who come face to face with the men who murdered their families, and are asked to forgive them.

Rwanda has pledged never to forget the genocide; memorials scatter the country, including this rural church (pictured above) in which 10,000 people were slaughtered.  The bodies of the victims were left in place as they died, and today the skulls and bones of the victims remain on display as a visible testament to the horror that engulfed the country.

But is forgiveness possible?  This is the backdrop to Laura’s talk at Pop!Tech: as she takes the stage she notes that “In 1994,all that was abundant in Rwanda was scarce. The scarcities were too many to count - trust, security, hope, peace … and people.”

While not everyone agrees that Rwanda has embraced forgiveness, As We Forgive is a haunting, provocative and ultimately inspiring film that asks the question: in an age of conflict, what does justice really mean?

Switzerland.
Fondue.
Chocolate.
Wicked cool people and ideas.

What’s not to love?

I go to my share of conferences (well, truth be told, more than my share) and as a result I’m turning into what could be politely described as a conference snob.  It takes a bit to get me revved up for a conference these days, but one of my absolute favorites is coming up in a couple of weeks: LIFT.

Held in Geneva, Switzerland (reason for going #1), LIFT describes itself as “three day event to explore the social impact of new technologies.” What makes it different is a thoughtfully designed program and a hip but relaxed vibe (think designers and techies, minus the black turtlenecks and the awkward geekiness).  Yes, there are traditional keynotes and panels, but in the spirit of user-generated content the program also features a number of workshops and “open stage talks” that are proposed and selected by LIFT attendees.  Accompanying all of this is “LIFT+”, a set of artistic activities, many of which are interactive (last year included gaming, a digital orchestra and a wall-sized conference ‘book’ designed by attendees).  And of course, there’s the fondue party.

Registration is here.