kip/bot/blog

Inspiring morning about invention, innovation, design, and the cognitive surplus. It started with reading Clay Shirky’s web2.0 expo talk on the blog White African (“where Africa and technology collide!”). On White African I read an interview of the founder of CraftSkills, Simon Mwacharo. I’m having one of the moments where accessible technology + surplus time + application to small aspects of big problems == something amazing.
Craftskills focuses on bringing affordable energy to parts of Kenya that are currently off the grid. It has a special focus on wind power because it’s more readily available and less prone to theft than solar equipment. My favorite part of the interview is the origin story. The founder knew that he wanted to do something with wind turbines, and got it moving thus:

I started with two workers. I could not afford to hire trained people so I decided to train myself first then train my two boys. Then I got a friend who repairs radios and TVs in Kibera to help me design and put together a charge controller.

There are so many powerful dynamics in that simple story.

• cognitive surplus: he saw something he wanted to do and trained himself in the skills he needed to do it

• physically accessible technology: he collaborated with friends to acquire the basic skills needed

• intellectually accessible technology: those basic skills (managing electrical power) already existed, just in another place (TV and radio repair) and partly obscured. (Intellectually accessible, doesn’t mean that it’s simple. Rather, it refers to the fact that this technology is transferable among non-experts, without need of a lab or deeper training.)

• small aspect of big problem: the problem of getting people on the grid was defined as simply as: I need to figure out how to build a charge controller

And just like that, Mwacharo is transforming the lives of thousands of people directly, and many thousands more indirectly through the promotion of an industry.

Some time last year, I got sick of listening to people complain about the negative effects of technology.  It may have been when I got my Sony book reader, but I think it goes back earlier to when some ninny sent me a Thomas Friedman column, in which Friedman suggested that we had gone too far with technology.  The column was nauseating NY liberalism at its snooty self-important worst:

I arrived at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport the other night and was met by a driver sent by a French friend. The driver was carrying a sign with my name on it, but as I approached him I noticed that he was talking to himself, very animatedly. As I got closer, I realized he had one of those Bluetooth wireless phones clipped to his ear and was deep in conversation. I pointed at myself as the person he was supposed to meet. He nodded and went on talking to whomever was on the other end of his phone.

When my luggage arrived, I grabbed it off the belt; he pointed toward the exit and I followed, as he kept talking on his phone. When we got into the car, I said, “Do you know my hotel?” He said, “No.” I showed him the address, and he went back to talking on the phone.

After the car started to roll, I saw he had a movie playing on the screen in the dashboard — on the flat panel that usually displays the G.P.S. road map. I noticed this because between his talking on the phone and the movie, I could barely concentrate. I, alas, was in the back seat trying to finish a column on my laptop. When I wrote all that I could, I got out my iPod and listened to a Stevie Nicks album, while he went on talking, driving and watching the movie.

After I arrived at my hotel, I reflected on our trip: The driver and I had been together for an hour, and between the two of us we had been doing six different things. He was driving, talking on his phone and watching a video. I was riding, working on my laptop and listening to my iPod.

There was only one thing we never did: Talk to each other.

It’s a pity. He was a young, French-speaking African, who probably had a lot to tell me. When I related all this to my friend Alain Frachon, an editor at Le Monde, he quipped: “I guess the era of foreign correspondents quoting taxi drivers is over. The taxi driver is now too busy to give you a quote!”

I found this infuriating.  The assumption that a cab driver is just dying to be a reporter’s ‘vox populi’, or that he shouldn’t be allowed to entertain himself on the job (presumably Friedman doesn’t listen to music while he writes or watch TV while doing email at night), or cabbies choosing not to talk to a passenger who means nothing to him was somehow wrong, clearly, as indicated by the incoherence of the sentence, bugged me.

What bugged me most, though, was the way Friedman was judging another person’s use of technology through his own lens.  So the Jan Chipchase article in today’s NYT, has a great, liberating moment:

This is when I voiced a careless thought about whether there might be something negative about the lightning spread of technology, whether its convenience was somehow supplanting traditional values or practices. Chipchase raised his eyebrows and laid down his spoon. He sighed, making it clear that responding to me was going to require patience. “People can think, yeah, monks with cellphones, and tsk, tsk, and what is the world coming to?” he said. “But if you wanted to take phones away from anybody in this world who has them, they’d probably say: ‘You’re going to have to fight me for it. Are you going to take my sewer and water away too?’ And maybe you can’t put communication on the same level as running water, but some people would. And I think in some contexts, it’s quite viable as a fundamental right.” He paused a beat to let this sink in, then added, with just a touch of edge, “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either.”

Finally.