"Do what you're supposed to do. And don't worry about the fruits. They'll come on their own."

"It is disturbing to observe the adverse effect of some U.S. policies on the less-developed nations. Despite helpful contributions of USAID and military assistance in Mali, for instance, the grossly exorbitant cotton subsidies for mega-farms in America cost the country far more than all the combined assistance from rich nations. Malians produced more cotton last year than any other African country and it is their number one export, but they had to sell it with no profit in order to compete with the heavily subsidized U.S. crop. Also, there is a heavy-handed effort by Washington to force other countries to violate the basic premises of the newly established International Criminal Court. Our government threatens to withhold military assistance unless they will guarantee that U.S. citizens be immune to possible punishment for war crimes or other atrocities. Another interesting development has been the efforts from Washington to elevate the issue of terrorism, and American diplomatic officials are forced to participate in this over-emphasis. We were warned strenuously about the new terrorist dangers that had arisen when we planned our visit to Timbuktu and Mopti. I decided that we would take a chance, and when we met with representatives of a dozen donor agencies in Bamako, I asked if any of them had any evidence of increased violence in the area or terrorist threats. The unanimous response was laughter."

"On the 29th of March Maersk Air will open the route Copenhagen to Toulouse, which will be the first direct flight since I arrived in Toulouse. I have done a few searches and it seems like they only fly from Toulouse to Copenhagen on Mondays which is not that good since it rules out weekend visits, but the positive thing is that the trip will only take 2 hours and 15 minutes and will cost around 108 Euro per adult. Before you had to fly through Germany, Paris or Amsterdam and the cheapest tickets cost around 250 Euro."

And then Chenoweth has found, looking at the accounts, that the company’s profits, declared in Australian dollars, were A$364,364,000 in 1987, A$464,464,000 in 1988, A$496,496,000 in 1989 and A$282,282,000 in 1990. The odds that such figures were a happy coincidence are 1,000,000,000,000 to one. That little grace note in the sums is accountant-speak for ‘Fuck you.’ Faced with this level of financial wizardry, all the ordinary taxpayer can do is cry ‘Bravo l’artiste!’

Dina passes on some excellent stuff about social entrepreneurship and how it might relate to social software. Let me just post the whole thing here, that's easiest.

Judith, who has recently taken over writing at the Social Software Blog, has a neat summary of a wonderful paper - The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship by J. Gregory Dees, for the Stanford Business School's Center for Social Innovation.  Its a paper written five years ago on 'business' and 'social' entrepreneurship.  

A valuable find and timely reflection when there is so much activity around social software and social networks.  It made me reflect on who really is a true Social (Software) Entrepreneur, and provided some clues into defining the very term.    

Quoting from Judith's post :

"In this paper Professor Dees gives a brief history of the evolving definition of 'entrepreneur':

early 19th century French Economist, Jean-Baptiste Say: "The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield."

early 20th century economist Joseph Schumpeter: "the function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production." They can do this in many ways: "by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on."

Peter Drucker: "the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity." Dees goes on to interpret Drucker's definition as: "Entrepreneurs have a mind-set that sees the possibilities rather than the problems created by change."

Howard H. Stevenson, a leading theorist of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, defines the heart of entrepreneurial management as "the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled."

Professor Dees - borrowing "the notions of value creation from Say, innovation and change agents from Schumpeter, pursuit of opportunity from Drucker, and resourcefulness from Stevenson" - asserts that 'social entrepreneurs' play the role of change agents by:

* Adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value),
* Recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission,
* Engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning,
* Acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand, and
* Exhibiting a heightened sense of accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created.

In conclusion Dees states:

"Social entrepreneurship describes a set of behaviors that are exceptional. These behaviors should be encouraged and rewarded in those who have the capabilities and temperament for this kind of work. We could use many more of them. Should everyone aspire to be a social entrepreneur? No. Not every social sector leader is well suited to being entrepreneurial. The same is true in business. Not every business leader is an entrepreneur in the sense that Say, Schumpeter, Drucker, and Stevenson had in mind. While we might wish for more entrepreneurial behavior in both sectors, society has a need for different leadership types and styles. Social entrepreneurs are one special breed of leader, and they should be recognized as such. This definition preserves their distinctive status and assures that social entrepreneurship is not treated lightly. We need social entrepreneurs to help us find new avenues toward social improvement as we enter the next century."

Judith ends by asking :

"Based on Professor Dees definitions, both borrowed and advanced, of 'Social Entrepreneurship' - Who do you think are the 'Social Entrepreneurs' of the 'Social Software' movement?"

One name from India that comes to mind is Rajesh Jain.  He's a true change agent, in his success at building sustainable collaborative systems and in his vision of 'socializing' India through technology. 

Help Judith build a list - who would you choose and why - do leave a comment here or at Judith's blog.

Super. I want to be a Social Entrepreneur too.

Eric Raymond: How webbing books doesn't hurt sales. Interesting stuff about "identity goods" among other relevant arcana.

Data: Cluetrain continues to sell at Amazon (listed at that link as #928) while the whole thing is online as well.

"My four books do not a controlled experiment make, but the thirteen years of experience with simultaneous print and Web publication that I've had suggests that Web availability has boosted the sales of the print versions tremendously. And my publishers agree. Even in 1991 I didn't get resistance from MIT press, and Addison-Wesley was positively supportive of putting my most most recent one on the Web.

I'm one of a handful of technical-book writers who publishers treat like rock stars, because I have a large fan base and my name on a cover will sell a book in volumes that are exceptional for its category (for comparison my editor at AW mentions Bruce Eckel as another). I'm not certain my experience generalizes to authors who aren't rock stars. On the other hand, it's more than possible that I'm a rock star largely because I have been throwing my stuff on the Web since 1991. It's even likely — after all, I was next to an unknown when I edited The New Hacker's Dictionary."

A lot of documentaries get a rise out of their audience. Some even invoke social change, or at the least some serious reflection upon our place in the world. But I can safely say I've never seen an audience so moved, en masse, to explore actual social activism on a grand scale as the audience who watched this three hour masterwork. The first standing ovation I've seen delivered at the Vancouver Film Festival was not only deserved, but also very long, and what followed the screening overshadowed even that outpouring of emotion.

The Corporation could never have been made in the USA. It took a Canadian team to put this work together, and it'll take far more than legal threats and intimidation to kill it. An almost three hour look at the past, present and future of corporations as a business entity, you'd be forgiven for rolling your eyes and giving the thing a miss if you only had a loose synopsis to go on.

But where this documentary matters is in the details - the nasty, disgusting, gory details of what the corporation has done to this world, what it's doing today, and what we can expect it to do tomorrow if we don't get our freaking act together.

The extreme right 'love it or leave it' crowd are no doubt already starting to yell "Lefty propaganda," but this isn't an Anti-Bush attack on all things capitalist. This isn't hippy rhetoric or new age spin or a call to the communes. It isn't hoity toity technospeak or boring talking-head PBS filler. What The Corporation is, is a healthy dose of well-researched, deeply explored, stunning information that can not possibly leave you, as an audience member, in any condition but stunned, dismayed, and outraged.

Maybe you know it all already. If you're like me, you read the papers, you know who's buying who and that the unstoppable bulldozer of globalization is hurting a lot of people. If you're like me, you're disgusted that TV news has become a wrestling match to decide which party has the best 'spin', and you might have even learned enough about global politics to be sick to death of what you're seeing in the world today.

But The Corporation will teach you things you never dreamed of. it will change you. It will ruin your day, but give you reason to get up in the morning - determined to make change.

"We are training revolutionaries -- not by indoctrinating them with dogma but by exposing them to a process in which sharing culture rather than hoarding it is the norm," said Joline Blais, a professor of new media at the University of Maine and Still Water co-director.

"It's all about imagining a society where sharing is productive rather than destructive, where cooperation becomes more powerful than competition," Blais said.

"Currently the internet is very centralized. People say it isn't, but all the main functions, the DNS servers, and the main pipes all go thru major carriers and companies pipelines. The protocols for this network are governed by ICANN and soon possibly the UN itself. More and more people are getting online thru large cable and telco carriers, making access all the more centralized and controlled by the biggest players. All this is adequately described in the Digital Imprimatur above. There are good and bad reasons for the lockdown, but it still will be that - a lockdown. And there is probably little any one of us can do to stop it's inevitable occurence.

However, what is to stop you, me or anyone else from setting up our own seperate but parallel adhoc local network in our neighboorhoods?

Nothing.

Using very cheap off-the shelf hardware available at radio shack anyone will soon be able to build a GNU Radio that will be able to communicate with anyone else's GNU Radio. These radios will be general purpose wireless computing devices that communicate over the open airwaves. Regulated or not, these devices will flourish underground rapidly as there power to connect and network become apparent. It's only a matter of time before a general purpose GNU Radio ends up in the hands of anyone who wants to get one. While the internet gets more locked down, Microsoft implements strong DRM, and even more ominious lockdowns are put in place along the network itself, more and more hobbiest will be computing and communicating with these handheld units and modified laptops and other devices. The chips running from them will also be modified, cheap and out of control. Certainly they will not be as powerful as the latest Intel or AMD processors with all the DRM built into them, but they will function as general purpose devices without any of those restrictions. Their range could easily extend beyond a mile, and I also suspect you'll start seeing people add rogue (maybe at some point illegal) solar powered repeaters and routers on mountains tops to help one commuity of GNU users communicate with another community."

Blogging Is...

1. A form of unedited, authentic self-expression
2. An instant publishing tool
3. An online journal with freshly updated content
4. Amateur journalism
5. Something that will revolutionize the Web (think RSS feeds)
6. A way to create community with your voters, er... readers (think 2,200 comments posted to the Dean for America blog in one day)
7. An alternative to mainstream media (think InstaPundit by Glenn Reynolds and TalkingPointsMemo by Joshua Micah Marshall)
8. A tool to teach students how to write
9. A new way to communicate with customers (think Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove Networks)
10. A new form of knowledge management inside big companies
11. A way for a bunch of navel-gazers to communicate with one another
12. Something to keep you occupied when you’re unemployed (more people than care to admit fit into this category… have you noticed?)
13. A way to think and write in short paragraphs instead of a long essay (which no one has time to read anyway)
14. Your email to everyone, as A-list blogger Doc Searls puts it (i.e., a way to stay in touch with family and friends)
15. A silly word that’s fun to say (“Gotta go blog now….”)
16. A way of writing with a distinct voice and personality (think Halley Suitt)
17. Something to talk about at cocktail parties (“I blogged Seth Godin and he blogged me back...”)
18. A URL to add to your resume (as in TokyoTim, my 23-year-old son, who’s working as an English teacher in Japan for a year)
19. Something else to do with your mobile phone... think audio blogging and moblogging
20. Something you don’t want your mother to read: what my mother says about blogging

What are weblogs? Regularly-updated websites that typically combine some mix of first-person commentary, web links, images, and news clips, and present the blend in reverse chronological order. Some are solo journals -- personal diaries open to the world; websites that function like ultra-low-budget reality TV shows where aspiring exhibitionists can document every personal detail of daily life, from boyfriends to phone bills to what they ate for breakfast. Other blogs are like collaborative online magazines that feature multiple editorial voices. Blogs can be produced by anonymous individuals with no professional writing experience just as easily as they can by career journalists or celebrity technopundits.

"What I hear you say is that ...

Is that what you mean?"

While pondering a problem in a plant biology course at Ohio University one semester, John Withers suddenly realized something unusual was going on: This class was actually requiring him to think.

Thinking is presumed to be the bread and butter of higher education. Beyond simply getting a diploma to land a job that pays well, the promise of sharpening thinking skills still looms as a key reason millions apply to college.

Yet some say there is a remarkable paucity of critical thinking taught at the undergraduate level - even though the need for such skills seems more urgent than ever.