Harvard Connections
May 1st, 2008 by Eats Wombats
Clay Shirky is someone whose writing I’ve enjoyed but I hadn’t heard him speak until today when I came across this video of him speaking at Harvard about his new book, Here Comes Everybody (reviewed here). It’s worth a look. I’ll be back to see some of his other videos and I will look out for the UK edition of the book.
Sticking with Harvard for the day, this Open Challenge to Silicon Valley by Umair Haque about how the industry there is too busy partying to worry about things that will really make a difference struck a chord.
Two clicks away, BV Krishnamurthy opines
There is an urgent and crying need to improve agricultural productivity and ensure a fair price to the farmer through disintermediation. Our agricultural productivity is just about 50% of China’s. The architect of the country’s green revolution, Dr M S Swaminathan, has made several pragmatic recommendations. Since he is no longer in a position of authority, he has few listeners.
In the 90s I was a regular visitor to Silicon Valley and worked with colleagues and a small firm there to bring connectivity to agricultural researchers in international agricultural research institutes around the world. My global village moment happened when a rat, commiting suicide in a power relay station at Stanford, shut down the Internet for 400 organizations in Silicon Valley (Sun, Apple, Netscape, Cisco etc.) and international agricultural researchers from Lima to Manila. The scientists concerned were among the first Internet users in several countries. Nobody expects agricultural researchers in the 3rd world to be on the cutting edge of technology but, briefly, it happened.
Not long afterwards it became possible to execute a search across the gene banks of the world’s staple food crops thanks to changes in information systems inspired by new connectivity. The killer argument that helped raise the pittance needed for the project was this
If we do not act then children in the developed world will have better access to information than our scientists.
And every time I went to Silicon Valley I wondered what it would take to open the eyes and hearts of those who could make a stupendous difference half a world away if only they cared or knew.
Somehow there’s a glimmer of hope in Clay Shirky’s talk, and the title. If there are possibilities for freedom there must be for social justice and compassion, but I still don’t know how to get a flash mob of philanthropists on the job. Meanwhile funding for agricultural research goes down, food prices go up, and in Silicon Valley the party goes on.
