Greg Cohn's Weblog » social

Raising the Bar on Hope

greg — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 06:56:44 +0000

I am inspired by Obama and his victory. It makes me feel like there is hope for this country yet.

I am inspired by his literacy, his integrity, and his quality management style. So many politicians talk about running the country like a company, but I actually believe him and think it’s more the staffing that needs to be viewed that way. (See Fred Wilson’s great blog post about what we can hope for here.) There is no substitute for talent — especially when compared to cronyism.

I am electrified by his transparency. The first twitter president. An open transition. Change.gov. This is a far cry from the guy who has been suing to keep his meetings private.

What this means most to me, as I reflect on it, is that Barack Obama is raising the bar on what it means to be president. Significantly.

He has the opportunity to inspire us to act like the citizens of the world we are capable of being. And to be proud of living up to our potential.

Here’s to hoping we can never go back. I made two more kiva loans today, both to photograhers in Nigeria named Elizabeth Olaleye and Fumilayo Fatolu, to celebrate our good fortune — and hope.

Los Angeles Voting Fiascos & Urgent Questions

greg — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 17:32:26 +0000

There might — or might not — be a way to fax in votes for folks who can’t vote at the polls tuesday and don’t have an absentee ballot (or didn’t mail it in time). Here’s my full story, with my questions at the end:

After requesting absentee ballots twice and not receiving them, I was preparing to go to LA’s only early voting location today (12400 Imperial Highway, Norwalk, CA 90650). Internet reports said lines were stretching around the building all week and would be worse today, so I called trying to request an “express ballot” (a procedure I discovered thanks to a commenter on California Faultline) to possibly bypass the line.

Suprisingly, I got through on a saturday after only a few minutes on hold. Encouraging – but not for long. After asking my name and address, the woman argumentatively told me that a ballot had been mailed to me and returned undeliverable. She did not have a record of my second request. We went back and forth a few times, her challenging me about the validity of the mailing address (it’s perfectly valid), etc., before I finally said, “Look, either way I don’t have a ballot and would like to exercise my right to vote, but I’ll be out of state tuesday. Can I do that?”

She then told me the lines were around the block, and I should use the federal postcard oath to fax in my vote. She said it was designed for overseas folks who didn’t get paper ballots in time but could be used for out of state. She told me the link for it was on the lavote.net site, but I couldn’t find it while we were talking, and she didn’t know where the link was (“people are finding it,” she said), so I asked if I could just come in.

“Well you’d better bring snacks and lunch, because the line is around the building,” she said, discouragingly. I asked about the Express Ballot. “Oh yeah, you did request that,” she said, not particularly encouragingly. I decided to dig into the fax option a bit more anyway and signed off.

I eventually found the overseas voter instructions and the oath/signature form (pdf). While the woman had clearly stated these were being used to record out of state votes, the form itself requires you to sign an oath that you are military or a US citizen residing overseas. I did check the fax number she gave me, as I thought it might be jammed with people trying to fax military ballots and whatnot, but I got right through to a fax machine.

I decided to try my luck with an express ballot. A friend and I have appointments for 2pm, and I’ll update this blog on how it turns out. For anyone else who wants to try this, the number is 1-800-815-2666 extension 2. You must ask for an Express Ballot.

But my question, for anyone who might know, is whether that overseas form would be a valid way to vote. If it were to be valid, would you have to sign it as is (ie an oath stating you reside or are temporarily overseas even if you are just out of state)? Would you modify the statement to be truthful, or would that invalidate your vote? Would it be counted if you’d already requested an absentee ballot at a U.S. address (ie, strongly suggesting that you are not in fact overseas)?

I may need to fall back on this method, and I suspect lots of voters who are not able to get to Norwalk and/or get through the lines there on time would want to know, so any information folks have will be helpful.

Thanks – and please vote!!

UPDATE: In and out in 20mins via Express Ballot. They laughed when we told them we had a reservation for 2pm, and it looked like lots of folks were waiting longer, but they looked us up by last name, our ballots were there, and we were immediately able to vote. Good thing, because the walk-up lines were heinous. Photos of that here and more to come on flickr. Still no answer on the military thing, though.

Yahoo! Opens Address Book

greg — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:59:49 +0000

This is a project I’ve been helping drive for a while, and I’m happy to see it come to fruition: Yahoo! user address books are now officially portable. (Additional coverage: TechCrunch, Techmeme, and a great interview with Joseph Smarr at Plaxo.)

Developers can build against it on a self-serve basis (no BD deal needed for basic use), enabling users to import their address books or pieces of data from it. We also have a sync interface for approved partners. Access is via bbAuth, enhancing user security (and will likely be via oAuth at some point in the future).

The key news here is Yahoo! is making this data freely available, on the assumption that it’s the users’ data – not Yahoo!’s. As you look at this alongside the openness of some of our other social API’s (e.g. MyBlogLog), there’s a consistent theme here in that Yahoo! is not trying to “own” this data, but is rather following the O’Reilly maxim of creating more value than we collect — and letting that value inure to users and the developers building stuff for them.

Watch this space — you’ll be seeing more of that theme.

Yahoo! Open Strategy (YOS) Unveiled

greg — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 05:12:26 +0000

It’s very gratifying to at last be able to talk publicly about YOS, Yahoo’s strategy for opening itself to 3rd-party developers across many of its properties and tools.

Dozens of the most talented people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with have been involved in envisioning, setting strategy for, roadmapping, developing, and rolling out the many elements of this project (and hundreds behind the scenes). It’s by far the most ambitious product initiative I’ve ever been a part of, and it’s been really fun to watch (and help) the entire company align around this — for all the potshots people take at Yahoo!, it really is an incredible market force when it gets fully behind something like this. It’s been even more fun to watch my talented product, design, and engineering colleagues get it built.

In case you weren’t following the detailed announcement at Web2.0, we announced a robust developer application platform offering distribution across many Yahoo properties and views, a suite of social API’s, and a broad initiative to wire “social” into the user experience across the entire company. Of course it’s OpenSocial compliant, as we hinted at in announcing our partnership to develop a foundation around that standard.

I recommend watching this video of Ari Balogh (Y’s CTO) and reading this YDN post if you would like to know more. Only SearchMonkey is live (signup link) so far, but there’s much more coming, and the train is gathering steam.

So stay tuned, and stay in touch if you want to be part of it!

What it takes to be an Entrepreneur

greg — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:56:40 +0000

I’m going to let this speak for itself:

Frista updte – Uganda

Frista talked exitedly to me about her brewing process. She is now able to sell over six jerry cans full of her home made brew each week. The loans have enabled her to buy a sugar cane plantation and repair her grinding machine. This has improved the flavour and the efficiency of her beer and she has increased her sales as a result. She sells each jerry can of beer for US$18. She thoroughly enjoys her work and the fact that her customers are always happy (and drunk!). The process of making the beer from sourgum takes about a week and she enthusiastically mimed to me the entire process.

She has recently has to pay the last furneral rite of her late father and now she is able to use all the loans for her business. The business is able to support her and her eight children.

Original post at kiva.org.

Yahoo! — Putting the “Open” in OpenSocial

greg — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:27:19 +0000

For those of my friends who’ve been wondering what I’ve been so heads-down on lately, I’m happy to finally share the news that Yahoo! has announced support for the development of OpenSocial, by working with MySpace and Google to set up an independent foundation for its long-term stewardship. I hope this will turn out to be OpenSocial’s best “container” yet.

OpenSocial is already in the open in the sense that it’s available for use by anyone, and has been since it first came out last November. The spec is published with a Creative Commons license, and there’s reference code put out under an Apache open-source license. There’s been lots of community collaboration on it, and Google has been a good custodian in bringing it this far along.

What putting it in a foundation does is ensure access to the future direction of the spec is open to everyone, and create a way for contributions to be protected from patent lawsuits and IP contamination (for people and companies that have to worry about those arcane but very real kinds of impediment to intellectual collaboration). Most importantly, it means application developers, containers, and would-be contributors alike can take a bet on this technology with the benefit of knowing it’s free (as in beer, and as in speech) forever, that a community of developers is out there building on it, and that they won’t get box-canyoned into proprietary code.

OpenSocial itself still has plenty of maturing to do, but millions of users of twitter, facebook and even old-skool social apps like evite know how great application experiences that tap into your social network can be. Now OpenSocial has every chance to become the Wordpress of social app platforms and yield a similarly rich ecosystem of innovation around it. Kudos to Google here – helping OpenSocial take root by putting it out in the open isn’t just a smart thing to do (even though it means giving up “ownership” of it); it’s the right thing to do.
Helping close this deal for Yahoo! has been a great experience for me personally, too. In addition to helping Yahoo! walk the talk, having a lot of fun, and learning more than I ever thought I would about patent non-assertion, I’ve also gotten to know a very smart and passionate bunch of people at Google, MySpace, and my own employer during this.

So I guess now that it’s public, it’s time to join Orkut and add some new folks to my MySpace, LinkedIn, and Plaxo networks – I’m sure they’ll be inviting me to join causes, share restaurant reviews, and throw monkeys soon!

UPDATE: Blog posts are starting to come in. You probably know where to find them, but I particularly like this quote from CNET: “It’s like the Justice League of social media”!

Kiva & Kenya

greg — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:02:15 +0000

This is the kind of update you never want to get as a microlender. Verbatim from my Kiva journal for one of my entrepreneurs, a hairdresser named Jerioth Wanjiru:

James Maina, Director of Ebony Foundation (EbF), has provided the update below for you. Due to the exceptional circumstances (including lack of reliable internet) where James is working in Kenya right now, Kiva is posting this update on his behalf.

Thank you,
Kiva Team
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Dear Kiva Lenders,

I wish to thank you for your continued concern and support during this very difficult moment in Kenya‚s history. We have been a peaceful Country in a generally troubled region and people sort of took the peace for granted.

The country is now battered almost to a pulp and blood spilt with vengeance, senseless killings and wanton destruction. Markets, food stores and shops have been looted. Hospitals are dysfunctional and health centers incapacitated by riots and barricades. The violence, death and destruction witnessed in the Country for the last couple weeks has jolted the Nation into conscience and every body is now craving normalcy.

While peace is slowly returning to all affected parts of the Country, the impact of the riots has been devastating. Hundreds of people have been killed turning thousands of innocent children into helpless orphans and over one million people have been displaced, becoming internal refugees over night.

The impact of the riots is most felt in the micro and small business sector. Over 1 million small businesses were looted and or burnt down destroying the only source of income to millions of Kenyans. Most of the fighting and destruction occurred in slum areas in Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru and Kericho in Rift Valley. These regions are home to over 70% of Ebony Foundation‚s clients and as you can imagine almost all of our clients in these regions have been affected by the riots. Only one region- (Mount Kenya) which is home to about 20% of EbF‚s clients was spared the violence. The economy in this safe region is now getting stretched as the residents have to now house the displaced population.

We have recently completed auditing the riot‚s impact on our clients and as of yesterday about 4,900 of our clients had been badly affected by the riots:

– About 1,532 of our clients were displaced and both their homes and business premises burnt down. This population is currently housed in church compounds and police stations.

– Another 2,479 clients had their business premises burnt down or looted leaving them with no source of income at all.

– 833 clients had their homes looted or burnt down and about 56 clients are missing and feared dead or critically injured.

We arrived at these figures through a survey being administered at holding grounds, police stations, and through reliable reports from groups and community leaders. Our staff and local group officials have also been committed to conducting field assessments. I am sending a photo today which you may share with the lenders. The biggest tasks at the moment are to feed and house the displaced people, and to finance the reconstruction of the small businesses that were affected in order to enable the people to reclaim their source of income. In addition, Ebony Foundation is now helping other MFI‚s audit their clients.

Eb-F has formed the following committees to address the above issues:

– A humanitarian committee that is working with the International Red Cross to provide food, shelter and medical care to the victims.

– A business reconstruction committee that is working with the affected clients to re finance and rebuild the small businesses that were looted and/or burnt down.

– A compliance committee that is studying the legal and contractual aspects of the affected loans to arrive at the best policy action.

Thus, we ask for your continued patience as many loan repayments will be late, and it even may be impossible for some loans to be repaid in full at all. Thank you for your patience as we work hard to address all of these difficult issues, to serve our borrowers and help them recover, and to repay loans as quickly and as much as is possible in the coming months.

Sincerely,

James Maina
Executive Director
Ebony Foundation

Kenya

There are many threads unfolding about this, include some good discussion of whether to waive repayments and how to support the ongoing operations of in-market kiva partners like the Ebony Foundation. I am glad to see this, but most of all am profoundly saddened by this state of affairs.

How do you listen?

greg — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:15:35 +0000

I’m absorbing a panel at the excellent Defrag conference in Denver, and thanks to the best wifi I’ve ever actually had at a conference, combined with an audience of some of most socially wired people around, finding myself exercising a learning paradigm that I’ve often experienced but rarely been able to enjoy to this degree.

In the last two sessions, I’ve looked up the company websites and blogs of several speakers, subscribed to multiple RSS feeds from people I’ve met here, added several people to my social networks, posted a question to the room via twitter, joined a Facebook group (no you can’t join) on a thread of interest created at the conference, posted a clever comment on the wall there, and discovered and followed a twitter account set up to comment the conference. After posting this, I might even link to it there.

What’s interesting to me about this is that I don’t usually do orthogonal multi-tasking well — and I don’t usually take kindly to people opening up laptops in my meetings either. But this has had the opposite effect, enhancing my experience of listening and thinking about things that are being said, rather than distracting from it. I’ve stayed completely off of email and IM and outside distractions (despite having facebook and twitter tabs open).

So it’s sort of like an IRC backchannel – only I get to decide who’s in it and how I want to flavor the experience in terms of tools. Come to think of it, I haven’t used any of the three quasi-official collaboration tools offered through the conference organizers, which validates (for me) two key themes of this show so far — that open standards and identities are going to continue to enable users to drive increasingly customized and personal experiences around idea sharing and group collaboration, and that there’s plenty more to do in the group / enterprise collaboration space.

There’s probably something interesting that could be done to enable the exchange of identities – something like what Chris Pirillo does for Gnomedex with OPML, only less “all or none”.

Defrag, and the people attending it, are changing the way I listen. How do you listen?

On Vermont and our Economy

greg — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:14:07 +0000

There’s nothing like travel to take your head out of everyday life and get you thinking about things. Amy and I headed east last weekend for some much-needed R&R in Vermont, and through some coincidence of the normal seasons and global warming, we were treated to a perfect combination of fall leaves and late-summer weather.

More ridiculously idyllic pix will eventually get posted to Flickr, but a few highlights include:

walking and driving the back roads around Brattleboro and towns around it like Newfane, Grafton, and Jamaica, watching leaves drift off the trees and flutter
visiting a graveyard with a stone turnstyle
stopping at an apple farm that grows ~70 varieties of heirloom apples on the premises — some of the best damned apples you’ve ever tasted
local cheddar cheese and beer — ditto, and ditto

Best of all, we spent much of the time hanging out with friends Tom and Cathy and their two children, who live on 18 acres with a beaver pond, can’t hear traffic from their yard, and have a box of African percussion instruments and a tree-house with a pirate flag instead of a TV.

Tom (a journalist) and I were also trading book recommendations, and I walked away with his copy of Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben — which I devoured on the plane ride home and can’t recommend highly enough. It’s about the notion that our dependence on energy subsidizes a more hidden dependency on cheap shipping and mass production, and what that does to our food chain and our communities. Because it’s cheaper to produce lettuce AND ship it a thousand miles than it is to produce it on a local farm (at least until the price of oil doubles), the price at the cash register tips the balance in favor of WalMart and WalMart-like superindustries in our food chain. And much is lost in the process — including, in many places, any semblance of an ability to be self-sustaining.

Seriously, if you care about community, local economies, or what you eat, read this book. I’m not saying I agree with everything in it (and particularly I don’t think he’s found the right proscriptive angles yet), but it certainly makes a provocative book-end next to, say, Thomas Friedman.

As I was processing all this, replaying the tape of seeing Dr. Yunus’s talk last week, and after I came home to read about having passed “peak water” in the west, I came to a decision that some things must change for me. Among other things, I’m going to be thinking a lot more about how to get serious about harnessing the web (and Yahoo!) for social purposes.

Web2.0 vs. Bangladesh

greg — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 02:10:17 +0000

Yesterday, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient and founder of Grameen Bank, spoke at Yahoo!. I was lucky enough to stake out a good seat, and was very glad I did.

There’s nothing quite like hearing from a guy who has taken hundreds of thousands of beggars out of poverty and millions of humans out of abusive, village-scale loan-sharking situations to remind you what “scalable social solutions” could really accomplish if we put some effort into it. Starting with a $27 loan to 42 women in one village, his bank has to date issued over $6.3B in loans to over 7.4 million borrowers — a veritable tidal wave of tiny payments that has changed government policies and built new infrastructure (e.g., the largest mobile phone company in the country).

In web2.0, we talk about agile development, iteration, delighting users, getting things done, and what functionality to take away to make an API more elegant. In Bangladesh, a family is considered to be moved out of poverty only if it meets 10 criteria along the lines of “all family members sleep on a bed”, and “family uses sanitary latrine”.

Anyone else wanna get stuff done and delight some users? Via Kiva.org, I just lent $25 to Margaret Namyalo, a restaurant owner in Uganda who takes care of 3 orphaned children on top of her own 3. (As of this posting, she still needs some more funds.) I also just added a payroll deduction to the Yahoo! Employee Foundation, which will be matched by our founders and distributed via employee-initiated grants to worthy organizations.

But that’s just doing my bit as an individual contributor in other people’s systems. What I’m really thinking about is how to build more systems that change The System. And how we might be able to leverage and/or hack Yahoo!’s global platform to do that.
I also feel very good about my choice to skip the latest overpriced confab. There are more important things to do. Like rethinking what innovation, incubation, and platforms – three words I rarely fail to use in a day — can really mean.