When I have the chance to reflect on this new direction my life has taken and my motivations, there’s always some new information which refines the thesis statement that acts as my driver; the prime directive for my academic and professional discipline. I use this direction to galvanize myself when I need to be focused and disciplined and to revitalize myself when I feel abject or apathetic.
I am learning how to build tools to enable the full capabilities of the globalized world solve those problems we haven’t yet.
The bottom billion, that is, the billion people on this planet earth who are in the most dire of straights; need my help - in fact they need everyone’s help.
As a geek who knows computers, communication technology and other trappings of a sophisticated internetworked world I struggle - seemingly vainly, to connect my skill set with that bottom billion. I’m not a doctor, or a geneticist or a farmer or an economist - what can I do better than anyone else that can help the people who need the most and the best assistance?
The answer to this rather tough question came by way of some depressing statistics of a different sort. I heard them first from Clay Shirkey, an author and futurist, who gave a presentation at this year’s O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference. He made some observations and parallels between the current technological change and its artifacts with that of the industrial revolution and the forgotten artifacts of that transition - namely gin.
Shirkey postulated that the Wikipedia project - in all languages and versions (discussion pages and all) constitutes about 100 million person/hours of work accumulated throughout its history.
That’s 100 million hours of volunteer time clocked to erect the controversial edifice of knowledge that is Wikipedia.
The United States of America will have watched, in 2008, 250 billion hours of television. This is almost entirely idle time (I can retrieve corroborating statistics showing qualitative viewing habits as well as frequency) spent vacuously staring at the phosphor dots.
Shirkey observed this would be approximately 2000+ wikipedia-scale projects every single year (the 100 million person/hours is total accumulated time).
The US watches about 100 million person/hours of advertisements every single weekend - that’s a wikipedia a week based on time spent being told to buy things.
The internet connected world watches over a TRILLION hours of Teevee, that’s 1,000,000,000,000!
How big is the problem of the bottom billion? 10 hours per person? That means the world would have to sacrifice 1% of their television (about 14 minutes a week per person) to solve it within one year.
The techno-savvy are the best hope of channeling that cognitive surplus to solve these problems. We are here to ensure that everyone can do something to make the progress faster, better, more sustainable and even fun (yes, starving people should have fun too).
What have Sid Meier, Mark Zuckerberg, Brin & Page and Michael Dell all failed to do that Bill Gates, Mark Shuttleworth and Nicholas Negroponte have succeeded in doing? They’ve connected being a geek to making a difference in the world where having electricity is a luxury and an iPhone is nothing more than a useless shiny brick.
Bill Gates may be the great satan to open source enthusiasts but, and this is likely to get me pinioned, I would argue that he’s doing substantially more to make the world a better place than Lawrence Lessig or Richard Stallman.
Freedom, of any sort, is obviously not un-important and I’m not saying it an either/or proposition. What I’m saying is techies, by and large, have seriously f-ed up priorities when it comes to kinds of problems they tackle. If we spent the time on developing communications standards for civil-society actors - a protocol for intercommunication and coordination, that we spent on say, the latest version of an obscure Linux distro we could have something. If we had maybe, a slightly smaller selection of wiki-software packages available and a larger collection of translation packages and platforms I think we’d be in better shape.
This is my standing challenge to geeks everywhere - what’s that trace between you and a 14 year old Malawian farm-girl? If you can’t make one and make it plainly it’s time to start thinking how you can and will.
If the geek shall inherit the earth we better damn well prove we’re smarter than everyone else who’s had a chance.