by Paul John Lamb
CommonDreams.org

How we can we meaningfully connect bleeding edge technology with bleeding heart activism to influence positive social change? And how can we identify and support high-impact, scaleable projects that percolate from the grass roots upward?

These questions were on the minds of a diverse crowd of foundation representatives, nonprofit leaders, technology companies and techies that attended the Innovation Funders Network summit in San Francisco last week. Sponsored by the Community Technology Foundation of California, the summit highlighted a number of cutting-edge tools and services, and invited the attendees to engage in targeted discussions around the theme of ‘networks, innovation, and social change’.

The group endeavored to look beyond the typical top-down technology solutions to pressing human, environmental and social issues that too often have met with failure. For example, does anyone remember a program called PowerUP that was launched by AOL and Gateway in 2000? Announced with great fanfare on the heels of Colin Powell’s America’s Promise initiative, the program promised to provide $10 Million in seed funding, free computers and software, and volunteer tutors to 5,000 after school programs serving poor Americans. Today a Google search on ‘PowerUP’ will lead you to a variety of fine commercial retailers of power products and services. Suffice it to say the ‘PowerUP’ has long since powered down.

Having learned some valuable lessons on how not to leverage technology for the social good, many capable entrepreneurs, techies and activists have launched an impressive array of projects in recent years. Just check out some of the wonderful efforts spearheaded by benetech.org or those being initiated by a group of global social entrepreneurs at Stanford University’s Digital Vision Program. Even a book on technology for social change has just hit the shelves, authored by former Soros Foundation Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Peizer.

But despite significant progress made as heads and hearts collide, there still exists a significant disconnect between technologists and social activists. A prime example is the open source movement, which is having trouble translating the promise it offers nonprofit organizations and the everyman into a language and actual services that they can understand. A large part of the problem is that many tech geeks lack street credibility and the activists and people on the ground are unable to communicate in geekspeak. When translators with great ideas do emerge from either group or from the middle ground, these ‘technivists’ often lack the funding resources and marketing apparatus to bring their ideas to scale.

Perhaps there is something we can do about bringing the worlds of the bleeding edge and the bleeding hearts closer together in a meaningful way? Here are a few ideas:

1. Bleed together: Organize intensive training sessions that bring together community-based activists and social leaders (with little or no tech experience) with technology/innovation activists and bleeding edge techies. Part of the training would introduce the social sector folks to the latest technology tools and potential applications, and another part would further sensitize the techies to community and social issues. Toward the end of the ‘Bleeding Edge Meets the Bleeding Hearts’ summit, collaborative groups would emerge to develop specific project ideas and then present those ideas directly to funders for financial commitments.

2. Support the small ‘technivist’ in a big way: Create a think and do tank that brings together teams of talented social entrepreneurs with policy experts and funders to address major social and economic issues. Instead of the usual small-scale support for piecemeal projects that are difficult to scale, why not offer an independent environment where professional teams focus on large scale social issues and offer large scale solutions - and have access to significant funding support needed to operationalize these solutions. The Gates Foundation is pursuing this strategy successfully in the area of public health and disease. Why can’t it be done in other social arenas as well?

3. Establish an annual ‘gadgets for good’ exhibition. How about an alternative to the Consumer Electronics Show and the MacWorld expo - a Social Electronics Show that features gadgetry and tech stuff that actually matters? At a minimum, we need the organizers of these and other tech extravaganzas to put aside a little money to support a social electronics exhibition at their own events? That way at least the do-gooders can get some residual press coverage and lure potential investors.

We can do better at combining the cool with the good, the geek with the meek. But the best innovations for social change will happen only when people across the political, economic, and social spectrum agree on a clear need and come together to do something about it. Technology is the easy part.

Consultant Paul Lamb is a founder of streettech.org and a Fellow with the Community Technology Foundation of California. You can reach him at pauljlamb@gmail.com.