Ruth Williams and I are at the Hewlett Foundation for a Northern California Grantmakers briefing entitled Web & Where 2.0+ There is also a webcast.

I’ll try to liveblog and so will Suki O’Kane from NCG.

Moy Eng from the Hewlett Foundation is the moderator for today.

Eskander Aseged from Radio Africa Kitchen

He starts the program by bringing in a dish of roasted coffee beans that came from Ethiopia. Smoke and smell of coffee fills the room like incense.

Moy Eng: why are you a chef? why cooking?
I started working in the kitchen three and half years ago in my garage. After 10 & 15 years of working in kitchen, I can’t wait forever. I told my friends I would start kitchen—I had a garage, I had forks and knives, and a garden. There was no menu. That caught a fire and now here we are talking in front of all these people. I came from a small town in Ethiopia.

“The roasting of the coffee is done everyday and the women get together and share ideas. My mother never had any coffee that was older than one day. It takes time—the roasting and the grinding—the idea of ‘to go’ is never heard of in Ethiopia. That is only for caffeine.”

Moy: did the internet help you not having one physical place?
E: It did, without internet, we would not be here. My belief is you can start anything with no money but with one product and being insistent. 3 years ago, most people didn’t like my food, but we experimented, it was more like a school. You don’t think you failed because you didn’t make it the first day. You start with one idea and grow it. I’m not a big technology guy, but the internet technology helped a lot. We no longer depend on traiditioanl media to talk about us. It freed up room for small guys like us to do something. “

Moy: others work in grantmakers, we should think about investing in others like you. You frame it about survival, but it is about “sensory conversation”? It goes from mundane (nutrition) to something more than that, right?”

E: “Philanthropy pours too much money, I don’t want to be too judgemental. Most money is too trendy, not small ideas that no one is unheard of—look into specific targets and support it slowly. I see it from Ethiopia, you don’t see any change. You need to go grassroots, what is happening in Mission or Noe Valley.”

Question from SocialEdge: how does storytelling play a part of the business?

E: “Can I start with name? I remember back growing up as kids, I used to listen to radio—listen to soccer if we were lucky. The important thing was supper—roasted garbanzo beans, nothing was packaged, as we listened to the radio to the music we share snacks, you’re mom made better ones than mine. I could remember how happy I was. After 20 years living here, I began losing parts of it. That was how we started the restaurant to bring back the music and conversation. I love to cook and I love the storytelling. I have nothing to lose. On top of it, we are trying to do a sustainable business, taking care of employees, neighbors, getting fish that is sustainable. The whole universe is in it. The idea of not leaving anyone behind—the fisherman, the land, the neighbors, if they need more, that is how Radio Africa operates.

Question: what you are talking about reminds me of my culture, in Calcutta, food oriented culture, and music and dance and get togethers and share poetry. It is something you don’t find here—it is part of putting together programs that cultivate this team of people hosting programs around food and music in homes. One of the themes of the web is that it is interactive.

Sheila Davis from Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition

She is here to talk about policy and the donwsides of technology.

Sheila Davis:

“I want to talk about cleantech and the impact and the new cleantech”
“Asking how many of had desktop computers in 1982? How many of you have more than one today?” (Lots of laughter)
That is the story that we are going to travel through today—we want to compare how many people had computers 25 years ago versus now—and how many that you have that don’t work. It started about tech companies that had manufacturing in the 60’s and 70’s, in the 80s the groundwater was contiminated with trichlorentine which resulted in birth defects. There was no regulation at the time.

How I got involved was interest in green jobs? There was gold and copper and plastic and there was value in them. I went to city of san francisco and oakland and did a pilot project for electronics recycling. I worked with youth training and dissemble them and make a lot of money. We got stuff into the warehouse and couldn’t take them apart. The kids tried to take them apart but it was hard. I was demoralized because I thought we could make a lot of money—in order to do it properly. Someone in China would pay for the trash, but it wasn’t very sustainable.

Unless someone was thinking about recycling when they designed it, it just ended up being trash. Whole villages in China were turned into recycling villages and there are doing the same thing. In order to recover the precious metals, you have to dump the circuit board into a vat of acid, and you dump the acid in the river. The other thing was that these were computers coming from school districts, hospitals.

This industry changes really fast. I’ve seen so much change over the last ten years. I’ll rush through the depressing pictures. The same thing happens in Nigeria.

What do the US, Haiti and Afghanistan have in common? Answer: enjoy legally exporting their hazardous waste to developing countries. The US is not a signer of the Basel treaty which forbids exporting waste.

One of the things is a computer takeback campaign. If they take the financial incentive and the responsibility, the other place to dump the computers is in the corrections systems.

I don’t mean to depress you but it is a solvable problem. Computer takeback campaign is successful, more than half the states have one.

One of the important things, you have a lot of influence in purchasing, we want to get large purchasers to buy a “green computer”—no good definition, but uses environmental sensitive materials, no prison labor in the making of the devices, We want to ask customers to ask vendors for the standard.

Nanotech is one of the innovations around the manufacturing process. Solar panels can be made via nanotechnology or you can make them thin and “paintlike” and you can “paint” solar panels on walls. The other area of innovation is in display

How is it being designed? Is it recyclable?

Nanotech is the unregulated “Cleantech II”. We don’t want to hit the repeat button—no restrictions, no clean up plans. (Sheila is showing pictures of nanotech companies.)

What can you do?

• You can ask your vendors to take their electronics back to the company.

Barry Katz from IDEO and California College for the Arts.

(He is having connection problem with Keynote on the Mac and says that he expected everyone here would be on a Mac. He is reminded—jokingly—that it is the Hewlett Foundation. :)

He is talking about the history of design in three slides. Talking about industrial designers, “All products should be as efficient as a DC-3.” (His slides are going to fast.)

Ends with a quote from Andro Mendini “What objects have the moral right to enter the 21st centry?” (1980). Barry Katz is haunted by the question.

He is showing a slide with a picture with a micropressor on the left and picture of silicon valley, calling it a macroprocessor. “The situation we find ourselves in about fifteen years ago, the products of silicon valley moved out of the labs and into the market. And that is the point where designers add value. That is part of the comprehensive integrated thing that is Silicon Valley, along with venture capital, real estate, that is part of the substrate here. There is a greater concentration of design firms here in Silicon Valley than anywhere else.

Unlike the designers of the 1930s, the period of 1980 designers were being challenged in a way after, not to improve categories of existing products but to create products that didn’t existed before. I’ll talk about Steven Jobs going to David Kelley Designs now IDEO to design the X-Y positioning device. This is what we called a mouse, but there was no catalog that they could refer to and then “make it better”. One of the designers marched across the street to Walgreen’s and puchased a butter dish for 70 cents and Ban deodorant, removed the ball from the deodarant and put it in the butter dish and the mouse.

It is an industry inventing itself in realtime.

We see this again and again, it is design and invention at the same time. It is about the human condition.

The conversation now isn’t only about money, now there is passion about third world development. Essentially pro bono, but people are learning about how to extract money through microirrigation and microfinance, designers are involved in unfathomable amount of things that don’t look like design.

Also, about sustainable. Most consultancies have an entire sustainability practice. IDEO guarantees that out of door that any product has a green sustainability practice.

The third is primary school education which is something which I could not have predicted.

The platform of today’s conversation is web-based initiatives, the imporatance of the web as a collaborative tool and feedback tool. Designers are continuously trying to get feedback, he calls it “backing and forthing”. The web is the tool for that.

The tasks that lie ahead for “design thinking”. (shows a picture of the iPhone) It is a phenomenal product. What is the relation between this product and design of the human condition?

His slide:

Don’t just think about solutions.

Think about the problems your solutions will create.

Don’t obsess over failure, obsess over success. What are the larger consequences of the use of the products?

Q: Is reducing consumption an answer to this? Is more less?

Barry: if I reduce consumption, it won’t make a rat’s ass difference. But it philosophically, I am a Maoist. Let a hundred flowers bloom, the Titanic is going down. We need to send out 100 lifeboats and one needs to make the shore. If problems are human induced, can solutions been human induced.

Q: What about the web? What about designing the web?
The phrase “mass customization” become popular a few years ago. The conversion of making things by hand, we made large things at once, maybe one of the promise about making things one at time. Rather using sophisticated web-based tools, it is a big, big issue.

Q: Does the Tata car have the moral right to exist?
China and India are the major centers of populations. The situation we are in and the Chinese bring this to our attention is making the nasty cars, and refridgerators and the thought that we could run out of these things is ridiculous. And now we are running out of air and water. Do we have the right to tell them they don’t have the right to enjoy the same thing? The lesson is that we have squandered the opportunity to invest green technologies in the production of the consumer cars.

Gordon Knox from Stanford Humanities Lab

Amateur is about love of what they do. Profession is the vow that one takes when entering a sect or group.
Today the difference between amateur and professional is purely based on renumeration. This is reflection of our society. An amateur is defined by their motivation and their exclusion from professional orders.

Amateurs are defined by their lateral motion—admission is defined by declaration-“I am doing this.” It is then a much more heterogenous conversation that results from amateurs. The dialogue between amateur exists a freedom to fail—(maybe a freedom to experiment).

Amateurs are many. Professionals are few.

Professionals are far more focused, have efficiency and advance specific ideas, explore deep theories. At the same time, they create walls, houses, lineages, after a while you preserve the edifice of the institution rather than the issue.

Amateurs do not have a stake in preserving the status quo. Amateurs can view a topic which is typically not attainable for a professional.

Charles Darwin is the classic amateur. Darwin and his band of amateurs were the VJs and hackers of the period, assembling and reassembling bits of information from different fields. This is the Web 2.0 issue of today.

In the sea of circulation, the best system of distribution is improvisation. Improvisation requires certain ingredients: shared sense of responsibility, willingness to fail. Improvisation is more likely the way the world works.

Gordon starts talking about project in Brazil: Cultural Hotspots
Under the ministry of Culture of Brazil, they have identified 650 of cultural hotspots, where ideas move back and forth. It can be a cafe, shaman’s tent, school program, it needs to be identified.
They have digitized them. First they use recycled computers, a swat team will go with marginalized pre-literate communities, the idea is to use technologies to break down the Gutenberg dam. We all know this, there are scores of people, grandmas, the teams rebuild computers, dissassemble them, they pick three or four others to reassemble them, they’ll crank the hand generator, get the satellite going, and download opens ource software and teach kids.

They teach kids to upload before they download.

It is much easier for people from the 19th century to jump to the 21st century and they don’t have to unlearn the 20th century. Native Americans from one community in the Amazon are connecting with other tribes that haven’t talked to each other in thousands of years, but share the same issues and land. With this technology, education takes place, sustainability takes place, ecommerce. Perspective, angles of inquiry from points of view take place.

We are concerned that with a change in administration, we might lose this, taking care of rudimentary NGO, doing a pilot program in Central Valley, in India and Africa to show how they work and track the impact and connect and move ideally so that by the time the administration changes in Brazil a solid NGO will be there to move this system and processes out of Brazil.

Some links:
http://place.typepad.com/digitalcommons/2007/12/cultural-hotspo.html

Micropixie aka MPX

...is on Skype from Dehli and is performing a piece, now.

Moy: What inspires you to do music? In the making of your new CD, talk about your design tools.

MPX: I’m basically a storyteller, I use media to tell my stories. I design websites and make videos.

Moy: Can you talk about the role of the web?
I use computer and the web a lot. On my second album, I met my collaborator via myspace. I urged him to download skype as quickly as possible so I could work with him. Skype, myspace, I don’t have a record label, I do everything my own.There are so many tools.

Q: What are you doing around intellectual property? Do you use creative commons?
When CD first came out, we put it on CDBaby and it is doing alright there. You can also buy tracks individually on iTunes. A few friends already on CDBaby. They handled getting our music onto iTunes. Don’t use creative commons, but don’t have anything against it.

If there were grants for individual artists, I would apply for it. It would be a shorter way of getting my story out, if philanthropists would do it, there would be more stories. If more artists doing and a rise in funding, I would welcome it.

Zavin Demerjian, UC Berkeley / Professor Marc Smith

Zavin is taking about “Mobile Spatial Interaction”. He is unfolding a rug. “I like to call it a magic carpert. It is one of the oldest types of art. It is a caucasian Armenian rug.”

I’d like to represent kids that have been diagnosed with ADD and extensive creative disorder. As a kid, I had an active imagination, we’d play Solomon’s treasures or Indiana Jones. We don’t have a lot of toys, but we had lots of imagination. Everytime we moved, I would leave notes for people who would come after to tell people how I experienced it. Space is abstract. Place is also abstract.

“Place” can be:

• physical
• experiential
• cultural: “history took place here.”

• social: “We are all here and we are connecting.”

Lunch was catered by Eskander from Radio African Kitchen. We excused ourselves after lunch so I missed the second half which including WiserEarch and Kevin Kelly.