HumanKindMedia

BigCarrot takes the prize...and does something cool with it

J. Kent Pepper's been enthralled with inducement prizes ever since the NY Times printed a story 10 years ago about Robert Zubrin's proposal for a $20 Billion Mars Prize. After that he watched as prizes for science and technology, the X prize, the military's DARPA Grand Challenge, and the Westinghouse prize, inspired scientists and middle schoolers alike to create amazing advances in many fields.

In J. Kent Pepper's opinion, prizes are the most efficient means to innovation, calling upon a large public to compete and create with freedom, under the inducement of a prize. (For a fabulous trip through a huge array of such space and technology prizes, look at SpacePrize) A cool history of prizes on the Big Carrot FAQ page attributes developments as far back as the 1700's from the food canning process and the parking meter (sigh) to NetFlix's $1M ongoing prize for a 10% improvement in their movie recommendation algorithm to prize-type challenges.

But until now, prizes have largely remained the domain of billionaires, deep-pocketed corporations, and the government.

In 2006, it dawned Pepper that, using the internet, communities of people could collaborate on their own prizes--creating together the desired solutions to challenges faced by the community, creating the design requirements, and collaborating and advocating for the funding--to inspire innovations that serve the community. He spent some time designing a process, getting a patent, and developing Big Carrot, a big-hearted open-source Inducement Prize Generator IPG (I made that up). He calls it the "democratization of innovation". I call it amazing and exciting--the prospect of pulling people together around your community or the globe to participate in solving the challenges we face. With a prize at the end!

His wildly successful beta-test of the Big Carrot concept, the not-Mac Challenge, awarded prize winner, Ben Spink, with $8600, money raised largely by 172 Mac users who were looking for an opensource integration program that normally costs users $99/year for upgrades.

Though the not-Mac challenge met a need of the Mac community, other challenges range from the small to national to global. BigCarrot now has prizes for everything from an Automotive X Prize, in the Environment category, for a super-efficient car that people will want to buy, to a prize in the Computers category to get Linus Torvald (father of Linux) a cameo on the Simpsons.

Pepper is a marketing professional by day who has participated in campaigns for Yahoo, Sun, Lexus and HP among others. He told me that he was influenced early in his marketing career by the work of Tibor Kalman, the famed designer who in the 90's pioneered the combining of marketing with a global awareness/multicultural emphasis in his founding of Beneton's "Colors" magazine.

When I asked him, "Why BigCarrot?", he gave me my very favorite answer: "To change the world." He talked about the possibilities of his current pet project, the Greywater Recycling Challenge which he hopes to see take off among on-line environmental communities. BigCarrot, he says, is a chance to facilitate "the evening out of the playing field for innovation" and gives individuals and communities the opportunity to proactively advocate for and create solutions that are most relevant to them. As he's talking, I'm imagining communities all over who might someday have simple greywater recycling programs, just because BigCarrot had a prize.(I like this idea more than parking meters.)

The possibilities for innovation are endless with this model. If anyone could be as excited about BigCarrot as J. Kent Pepper, it was me after that phone call.

And, the best news: Beginning today, BigCarrot is inviting bloggers and their communities to build their own challenges. Kent is encouraging all of us to rally our readers and communities to pick a topic, waiving the prize origination fee and offering to contribute the first $250 to the prize. The site hosts forums for discussions about potential or current prizes, too, another chance to interact with your readers--a win/win/win.

Would you be willing to contribute a little to see some geniuses tackle a problem that you or your community cares about? Please share this with your friends, your blogger friends, the geniuses in your life, and your communities. This is a Good Idea.

In fact, this gives me an idea for HumanKind Challenge #4. If you're a HumanKind reader, and have ideas for our own HumanKind Challenge #4 ala BigCarrot, email me and we can collaborate on a prize proposal. Stay tuned. This will be fun.

About that Stuff, 5 things you can do to help spread the ripples

A week or two before I met with Annie Leonard, creator of the Story of Stuff and global activist for GAIA, the Global Alliance of Incinerator Alternatives, I became excruciatingly aware of all the "stuff" in my house that is destined for the bin, sooner or later. To my chagrin, I suddenly became conscious of slightly stuffed closets, reproducing junk drawers, and my, oh, my, my shower. After reading her recent blogs about a particularly offensive packaging campaign for a new product, I counted several plastic bottles in my shower and was shocked and slightly ashamed that I had let it get so out-of-hand. I could remember back to a time where one bar of soap and some shampoo was it.

When I blurted out a confession about this, she was gracious. First she gave me a great tip about checking the toxicity of my products at Skin Deep, the cosmetics safety database. Then, she let me off the hook--slightly, by explaining, "It's not your fault, it's the system."

The system in question is the Story of Stuff (surely you've watched the whole thing by now). It's system that Anne's been studying for 20+ years (where stuff comes from and where it goes) put into a clever, entertaining, but serious examination of the materials economy.

Now, 5 months since its debut and 2.5+ million viewings on-line, the Story is rippling out, being translated into many languages, inspiring songs and parodies, and engaging people. For a while, there was even a YouTube video by a Russian in a swingset praising the Story and vowing to be an eco-warrior. (Sadly, it was gone when we looked for it.)

What inspires me most is that she's reaching schools and kids, and they're responding. In Woodside, California, when she visited, they asked for "tips" on what they could do. Her answer, "It's complicated." They responded with a parody video, and soon after that, students at Mendocino High school did their own amazing video, "What You Can Do.". Coming up soon is her follow-on podcast with the Woodside Priory students. About their request for "recommended actions", she provides a thoughtful explanation in her blog, "Why I'm Not Offering 10 Simple Steps to Get Involved."

When I asked Annie if she thought we could change the system, she said she had hope. "This is all propped up on cheap oil. The question is, are we going to resist, resist, resist for 50 years, or are we going to be proactive now?" She mentions Bill McKibben's book, Deep Economy. McKibben explores communities around the world who are creating sustainable living practices together. In his book, she tells me, he talks about decoupling "more" and "growth" from "better." Annie says wryly, "More is not better. We're not having fun, we're stressed, exhausted, debt-ridden, and filled with toxicity. We've got to separate our self esteem and self-worth from stuff."

I think the story of the Story of Stuff is just beginning. I'm hopeful that its simple message will permeate more and more arenas where the sustainability message has yet to inspire and move people. Here are some ideas I've got for creating your own ripples to help our big shift to sustainability:

1. Watch the Story, end to end. Share the Story of Stuff--show your families and friends to inspire those 10% changes for sustainability at home. Tell your friends, teachers you know, local groups and organizations. Spread the word, examine the possibilities, together.

2. Exchange your stuff, recycle your stuff, give your stuff to someone who could use it. (Annie says the most burnable consumer goods in incinerators are also the most recyclable items.) Check out Freecycle for an event near you, or hold a give-away garage sale.

3. I know it's a bumper-sticker, but seriously, think globally about our beautiful planet and and a balance of resources for all the remarkable beings on it; then, act locally--right there where you are around the people you're with. Take on a little 10% change in your consumption. Buy local food (instead of produce shipped by truck from 3,000 miles away.) Start a garden, or better yet, a community or school garden. Stop buying something you don't need. Visit your dump and recycling centers in person to see where your stuff goes. Make it a field trip.

4. Speak up, with your voice and your pocketbook. One of the most poignant moments for me when I met Annie was her genuine concern and disappointment at the response to that egregiously wasteful, stuff-laden packaging/marketing scheme of the new men's shaving gel, NXT. She even had a nightmare about it. There's a good ending to the story though. I hope you'll read it here and here, but the point is that we should never estimate the power of our voices and our purchases (or refusal to purchase) to change the possibilities in the Story of Stuff.

5. Annie's says in her blog "Why I'm Not Offering 10 Simple Steps to Get Involved," "Find any place in the system where you can intervene and follow your passion. " We can all find a way to help. Her most simple suggestions are buy less and buy less toxic stuff.

Story of Stuff: Annie's story

Annie Leonard told me she found her life's purpose standing in the middle of Fresh Kills landfill (one of two man-made structures visible from space--the second is the Great Wall of China) on Staten Island, amidst a sea in every direction of couches, refrigerators, books and banana peels.

In this blog when we began our series on sustainability, we first introduced Annie and her Story of Stuff, the clever and entertaining 20-minute film about our stuff, a short month after it premiered. For Earth Day, it seems natural to return to the sustainability message of the Story of Stuff.

Meeting Annie reminded me of why I wanted to tell stories about people who just start something and stay with it, somehow knowing it will make a difference. They inspire me to keep taking one step at a time toward what I care about. Though it's only four months and 2.5 million views ("Some of those are repeat visits by my mother," she says) since the December launch of Story of Stuff, the real story, the story of Annie the activist, researcher, educator, and mom, started when she was 6.

"MacDonald's came to our school to tell us about the new McDonald's opening in our town. They told us how much they cared about the environment, and I was so excited I did what all the other kids did. I went home and said, 'We've got to go to McDonald's.' I walked in, and in the middle of the store was a big planter with plastic flowers. I was sooo disappointed in them."

Child of "a mother with a strong moral compass" and product of an environmental education in the Northwest, Annie traces her curiosity about where stuff comes from and where it goes to the family's annual camping trip. "I looked out the window as we were driving (that was back before I-pods and DVD's in the backseat). Each year it took longer to get to the forest, and where there once was forest were strip malls."

Certain that she wanted to do something for those forests, Ann set off to New York where she studied city and regional planning. You can read more of what she's done here. What she told me was that, while she was doing graduate work in New York, she would walk from 110th to 116th every day. In the morning the curb would be piled with trash as high as she is tall, all the way down those six blocks. She started to dig around in it and found cardboard, paper, boxes--her trees! At night the piles would be gone. From Fresh Kills and beyond, she decided she would work to prevent waste, fight landfills and incineration. Her idea, and many others', were that if waste began to be harder for corporations to get rid of, "they'll stop."

But they didn't stop. What no one counted on was (the word, "sleazy" was used here) that, as the regulation increased on corporations' waste, they began shipping the waste to third-world countries. She joined Greenpeace and began to work on the UN campaign to stop shipping waste to foreign countries. "Everyone (at Greenpeace) had a piece of the work--lobbyists, researchers. Mine was sampling and documenting the waste sent to other countries--all over the world." Here's where she rattled off story after story of incinerator waste being sent to Haiti as fertilizer, PCB's shipped to a farmer's land in South Africa, of an Indian hospital with an incinerator where demonstrators posted a banner, "Cancer caused and cured here," and of a load of hazardous waste she mixed with fertilizer she tracked down to a Bangladeshi farmer. (The lowest moment she ever experienced was when the farmer asked for reassurance that her country would "fix this".)

She's got a million stories, and deep friendships around the globe--with those who explored with her "the factories where our stuff is made and the dumps where our stuff is dumped." When her daughter went through "her princess phase", she drew beautiful pictures of the prince and the princess, with the dump in the background. After 10+ years her daughter's school started asking for full attendance and she had to figure out how to keep "investigating garbage" but with less travel. It was then she began working for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA).

For 10 years, Annie's been telling the story of our stuff, fighting incinerators around the globe, and working to create awareness internationally and at home. After years of requests for a filmed version of her talk, the Tides Foundation approached her to do the Story of Stuff. Enter the creative geniuses at Free Range Studios and the rest is...or will be history.

What I love about Annie and her story is that she's just a person (ok, a very smart, cool person) who followed her curiosity and her passion step by step, to a place that will bring about awareness and change that we'll all benefit from. I predict that in a few years we'll look back on Annie and sustainability the way we look at Jeffrey Sachs and poverty or Paul Farmer and healthcare. I can't wait to see what happens.

In the next post, you'll hear the unfolding story of the Story of Stuff (as told to me by Annie). Amazing things are happening. So, if you haven't watched it yet, here's your chance. It's pretty cool. Stay tuned.

If you're a new reader, welcome to HumanKind. You can get free updates here. Wonder what we're up to? Click on the links on the upper right, or scroll through the topics and archives on the left. If you're a regular, thanks for your support! Let us know what HumanKind can do to keep the media you'd like to see coming your way. You can e-mail us at chris or liz (at) humankindmedia dot com. And please do share HumanKind with your friends.

Alison's soup

Until recently, the word "sustainability" didn't hold any meaning for me. I kept thinking about housing material, or recycling my electronic doo-dads--all many great actions people can take to minimize our impact on the resources that we all should be sharing on the planet. Then in a wonderful, odd convergence of experience, I came upon a more personal understanding of what it means for me. It all started wtih Alison's soup.

Two years ago my family ate better than ever when the "Mom brigade" brought us food 3 times a week during my chemotherapy. If you have to go through breast cancer treatment, it doesn't hurt to have friends who are gourmet cooks, or like my dear friend and neighbor, Alison, a chef of some fame. Alison loves food the way I imagine Michaelangelo loved stone. Though Alison is known as an experienced and talented chef of in our area, she's mostly famous at our house for being David's mom and someone with the biggest heart in the smallest body you've ever met. She is also acclaimed by our youngest son as an expert on latkes.

During those days, though, she made soup--broths, vegetable laden soups, hearty stews, whatever was fresh and in season went into the pot. Also, on weekends for something to do, she would take me to the Farmer's market. While strolling around talking about the food, she would take photos of the produce (click on the one shown here), talk to the vendors, and smell everything--adding to my appreciation for fruits, vegetables, and locally produced meat and eggs.

At the same time all this was going on, I was making my way sloooooowwwwwwllllyyyy through Michael Pollan's, The Omnivore's Dilemma. I usually am not a zealot, but, seriously, I think everyone ought to read this book--if not for the eye-opening look at the evolution of our relationship to food, then for the sheer enjoyment of his wonderfully written accounts of the mushroom hunter culture or the most beautiful description of a meal with friends that I have ever read or imagined. Anyone who can keep me reading a book over many months with paragraph after paragraph of detail about the food we eat is a genius. And, I'm not the only one who thinks so.

All at once, having Alison love me back to health with food, and reading Pollan's quest for the heart of food, I was getting a look at food in a way I had never thought of it before--as a cycle, as a system, and most of all, as an expression of love. So my definition of sustainability is love: Love for who and what sustains us--the earth, the growers, the people we share food with. Such love inevitably engenders a strong desire to love and act in a way that reminds us to care, share and preserve.

I asked Alison some questions about sustainability and food, and you can read what she had to say here.

For a great article about Alison's work introducing healthy food to a large hospital system here.

If you're a new reader, welcome to HumanKind. You can get free updates here. Wonder what we're up to? Click on the links on the upper right, or scroll through the topics and archives on the left. If you're a regular, thanks for your support! Let us know what HumanKind can do to keep the media you'd like to see coming your way. You can e-mail chris (at) humankindmedia dot com. And please do share HumanKind with your friends.

A wish for Will, Part I

"I wish that you -- you personally and every creative individual and organization you know -- will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have 1,000 examples of transformative change." --Dave Eggers

When I read Britt's recent post in Have Fun Do Good about last week's TED Award to Dave Eggers, the first person I thought of was Will Okun. I've been sitting on an interview with Will for several weeks, because at some deep level I knew I wanted to talk about sustainability and teaching and I knew Will's story would help me do that. Then, Hooray! Dave Eggers makes his big wish for public schools and teachers, and I knew I couldn't wait. (Here's a summary of the TED Award and Dave Eggers wish.)

While I was researching Africa and our pieces about coming to the aid of children around the world, I found Will, winner of the 2007 New York Times Trip to Africa (read his winning essay). Columnist Nick Kristof selected Will, a Chicago teacher, and Med student, Lena Wen, to go on a trip to Africa with him. You can see the video the MTV interview after their trip here. Will, Lena and Nick traveled in 3 African countries, met the President of Rwanda, visited a school (where Will has the previously unheard-of experience of having 40 kids listen quietly and intently) and played some basketball.

When he returned, he continued writing as a guest blogger on Nick's column about that other foreign country, high school--at a West Side Chicago "drop-out" high school, a last-chance program for kids who have excessive absences or are failing. Will's posts paint a picture of the dedication and the difficulty experienced by one teacher, but also illuminate the hopes for possibilities paired with the frustration at some seemingly insurmountable obstacles. His stories also provoke questions we need to answer as a global citizenry about how we will provide relevant, meaningful learning at the community level to contribute to the creation of a sustainable future.

I started to try to sum up what had affected me from his stories about teaching, but I realized every story had affected me. To keep this from being a 20-page post, I'll let you get your own glimpse. So, before I continue on to Part II next week, take a stroll through Will's posts and read about a teacher, the kids he wants to help, and the challenges that Dave Eggers, with his wish, has asked us all to join in to address. Will's topics range from the first day of school to reading and relevance and a love letter to basketball and a sad dirge for the loss of "one of our own". This week's photo-essay, "Amidst", is a beautiful testament to his appreciation for his students. His blogs offer a view you've never had before of what many communities are grappling with and why Dave made his wish for public schools.

Perusing Will's photos (more about his photography later) and reading his NYT blogs are enough to make you wish we could make a million Wills, but I'm pretty sure there are many out there, equally dedicated and passionate about their students.

I must admit that reading some of Will's posts, I was caught up in a sense of overwhelm about the issues, the difficulties, the enormity of change that will have to occur to retool our educational system, get communities involved in supporting schools, and teachers like Will. But, I should have remembered--there will be many people I haven't discovered yet, working on possibilities.. The solutions always come from somewhere you'd least expect--like a novelist and a wish for more support for those dedicated teachers. I love it.

Part II of My wish for Will coming next week. Stay tuned.

If you're a new reader, welcome to HumanKind. You can get our free updates here. Wonder what we're up to? Click on the links on the upper right or scroll through the topics and archives on the left.

If you're a regular, thanks for your support. Let us know what HumanKind can do to keep the media you'd like to see coming your way. Send us a comment!

Karli's list

Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen. --Leo Tolstoy

What do a fishing village in Egypt, a community in Capetown, South Africa, a school for orphans in Zimbabwe, and a village school in a Millennium village in Rwanda have in common? Artists. These are my favorite stories -- about people who just start where they are with whatever they have, using their talent and their connections to create, connect, and contribute.

Meet Karli, who, at only 22, is an example of why we have big hopes for the Y generation. Through a Millennium Village contact, Karli organized a project to teach art to kids at the Millennium Village in Mayange sector in Rwanda, near the epicenter of the 1994 genocide. Last summer, after graduating with honors from Parsons School of Design, she found sponsors, raised money for supplies and equipment, loaded up "a
ton of suitcases filled with supplies," and traveled to Rwanda to spend an unforgettable week teaching art to kids.

16 million African orphans; Braden takes 1,600

Last fall, my book club read There Is No Me Without You, Melissa Fay Greene's story of the beginning of the AIDS pandemic in Africa, and of the ensuing orphan crisis. It had the kind of impact on me that Mountains Beyond Mountains did a few years ago. Anything I thought I knew about Africa, AIDS, and orphans was challenged by Greene's account of one woman trying to do her part in the midst of a tragedy that will leave a continent reeling for decades or more. When I read it, I experienced a sense of shame: I had misunderstood what was happening there, to my fellow humans. I also felt disbelief that so many parents could die, and so many children be left alone in our world of advanced medicine, new technology, and relative wealth.

While reading "Without You," I kept hearing Bono's words, from the video in this post: "Where you live should not determine whether you live." That's when the status of children everywhere went onto the list of HumanKind topics.

Investing in connection: An interview with the founder of MicroPlace

When HumanKind first launched, I wrote about Kiva, a microcredit institution that lets you lend money, as little as $25 at a time, to entrepreneurs in developing countries all over the world. You don’t earn interest on your loan, but it does get repaid.

There’s a new organization that takes this idea a giant step further, turning microcredit lending into a sustainable enterprise by letting investors earn a profit. It’s called MicroPlace, and it just launched in October.

“It was really just me and a business plan when eBay brought it in-house in June 2006, and it became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay,” says Tracey Pettengill Turner, who came up with the idea for MicroPlace after doing a fellowship with the newly formed Grameen Foundation in Bangladesh in the late 90s; Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in microcredit.

Hooray! I Got My Smile Cards

A while back, the GlobalOneness Project people introduced me to CharityFocus.org co-founder Nipun Mehta. CharityFocus, founded in 1999 (I know, I'm slow to catch on), is now a giant web of "kindness ventures" centered around the giving economy, or the practice of generosity, both giving freely and receiving what is offered. I met with Nipun in a coffee shop last week, and I don't mean to be dramatic here, but he may have changed my life.

When we think of people living lives of service and giving -- well, when I think of that, I think of Mother Teresa and Ghandi, not the man who looks like a pranky grad student sitting across from me at the coffee shop. He doesn't say exactly what field he was in when he was at UC Berkeley, but I think it was computer science, since the main forum for his giving-economy ventures seems to be online. If it seems like I know too little about someone I interviewed, mea culpa. You can read more than I can tell you in his own words here. Before our meeting, he said he prefers to have agenda-less, face-to-face meetings with no time constraints (how refreshing is that?!) and he sent me the most wonderful brief on the philosophy of CharityFocus to give me background on what they're up to.

In brief, Nipun Mehta, the tennis-playing computer science/philosophy major, is Generosity Guy, but he'll be embarrassed that I put it that way.

Making that one-to-one connection

Check out our interview today with Trish Tobin, chief marketing officer for Women for Women. Before Trish took that job, she went on a trip with Women for Women to Rwanda, where she met women who were participating in the program. Looking back, she calls that making "the ultimate connection." She was so surprised by how she and the women she met related to each other that she ditched her corporate job and hasn't looked back.

Now, she's using her amazing marketing skills to try to create those moments of connection with people all over the world -- those of us who can't necessarily meet a Rwandan woman in her home, but who can connect with her another way: through global media.