A dynamic community of global leaders coming together to discuss a big idea: the power of innovative thinking and technology to solve our greatest challenges.
BY MAGAZINE COLUMNIST JOSH POLLOCK
and MAGAZINE EDITOR SUSAN MAIER-MOUL
Website SGS at Mashable.com
Website Ericsson Networked Society
Website UN Foundation
Related Article LiveBlogging Social Good Summit Day One
Related Article LiveBlogging Social Good Summit Day Two
Related Article LiveBlogging Social Good Summit Day Three
Related Article Social Media: What’s Yoga Got To Do With It?
Related Article Social Media Is The New Authentic
Coverage continues. Watch this page for updates as Josh and Susan resume The Magazine of Yoga coverage of United Nations week from the Digital Media Lounge of the Social Good Summit.
Send your thoughts, comments, ideas to letters@themagazineofyoga.com and we’ll post them on this live blog page today.
4:15 pm Josh
And the winner of the Startups For Good Challenge is: SunSaluter.
She has a great product that could make a huge difference, recognizing the ingenuity of a young inventor is a nice way to wrap up this event. It in many ways embodies the spirit of the Social Good Summit, which has highlighted new ideas and new technologies that should give us ample reason to feel positive about the many issues we face today.
4 pm Josh
Most impressive presenter of the Startups For Good Challenge is 19 year old Eden Full, the inventer of the SunSaluter. The SunSaluter is a low cost, non-electric rotator for solar panels that allows solar panels to track the sun’s movement through out the day. The concept, which uses all passive technology, has already been shown to be effective in Kenya and can be built of bamboo or steel, increases the efficiency of solar panels. This lowers the cost of solar panel installations because it costs a fraction of traditional tracking systems and reduces the amount of panels needed. The potential for increased output of solar energy is quite impressive. Eden is a also a very impressive young woman, she built her first solar car at the age of 9 and at 19 has already dropped out of Princeton to focus on her invention.
3:40 pm Josh
More amazing innovative startups on stage for the Startups For Good Challenge. More exciting ideas than I can blog about at once. Here’s two more:
I wrote about them on day one, but I have to talk about em[power] again. They talked about the fact that many people live and work in landfills and have built communities there with schools and health clinics. Their nonprofit is working in Bangladesh and Pakistan to educate people living in these communities about how to build sustainable businesses that generate energy and biofertalizers from the waste they work with. What an amazing way to look at a problem and help the people do more within the reality of the situation they live in.
While Americans say they have no time to volunteer, we spend tons of time watching videos and using Facebook everyday. The amount of hours of human work that went into building The Empire State Building are equal to a 55th of the amount of hours Americans spend on Facebook a day. Sparked.com allows people to volunteer their expertise to non-profits to do short projects. They call it online microvolunteering. In the time it takes you to check your Facebook or update your twitter status you can help a nonprofit.
3:10 pm Josh
Another presenter in the Startups For Good Challenge Quinn Simpson of Prove My Concept, told us about their online platform for teaching entrepreneurship to students. She said that 41% of young people in the UK want to start a business, 73% of an idea for one and 56% of them do not. She believes it is because they don’t know how. The page gives students resources to help them grow their ideas and get feedback from their teachers. Using this service allows teachers to apply the skills and concepts to the lessons they are teaching in their classes which makes what they are teaching more relevant. They award $5,000 every year to the winning concept to start building and also give $5,000 to their school.
2:45 pm Josh
The Startups For Good Challenge presentations just began. The first presentation was from Awaaz.de provides Internet connectivity based on voice. They think the next three billion people who will connect to the Internet will need technologies based on voice. Literacy and language are a major barrier to people in poorer countries to use the traditional Internet. While there is a huge amount of people using mobile phones, SMS is limiting to people who are illiterate or speak a language that is not a dominate one.
They allow different organizations to set up their own voice portals based on a topic relevant to them. Users can call the service and ask a question or make an announcement, moderators tag the message with meta data and direct it to experts. Their automated service will call the person who made the original call with an answer to their question and may broadcast it to a larger audience if necessary.
I wrote about three of the finalists during our day one liveblog. I’ll write about more of contestants as the presentations go on and let you know who the winner of the $10,000 prize is, once it is announced.
2:30 pm Josh
The Startups For Good Challenge portion of the summit is about to begin. Margarita Cedeño de Fernández, (@margaritacdf) the first lady of the Dominican Republic just made a surprise appearance to accept the Social Good Award. She has almost 40,000 twitter followers. She spoke about using social media to promote education, technology and to teach about values. She sees teaching about values as a way to turn the crisis that we currently face into opportunities, with innovation and social media technology, she believes we can make a better world.
Social media is a tool to reach anyone, no matter where they are. -Margarita Cedeño de Fernández.
1:45 pm Josh
Two more interesting speakers in only fifteen minutes to tell you about. Yossi Vardi, Investor and Entrepreneur told the crowd he learned there is one way that everyone can find happiness. That is to find one person and help them for no ulterior motive. He bases his advocacy of social entrepreneurship on this. If you make money on your entrepreneurship you have a lot of worries of what to do with the money. When a nonprofit succeeds, you get the profit in the currency of joy. This happiness is expressed by chemicals in the brain that are very addictive.
Shahinaz Ahmed, the CEO of Education for Employment Foundation was interviewed via skype from Egypt. She said that social media allows anyone to influence the discussion by providing valuable content. Also it allows activists all over the world to have shared experiences. She talked about a developing gap in Egypt between online activists and on the ground activists. To bridge this gap Ahmed said that her country needs increased Internet penetration and to use social media to get people together face to face.
Social Media allows you to have a voice, regardless of status or location. It’s an opportunity for shared human experience. —Shahinaz Ahmed
1:30 pm Josh
Today’s first speaker was Barbara Bush. She is the CEO and Co-founder of Global Health Corps @ghcorps and the daughter of President George W. Bush. She told the crowd at the Social Good Summit that her life was changed by a visit to Uganda with her parents where she saw enthusiasm for new programs to treat HIV/ AIDS. She came back to the states with a passion for public health and made it her focus. Global Health Corps was modelled after Teach For America, with the goal to engage young people who may not have the traditional background in public health, but have innovative ideas in the field.
One thing about this generation is that if something doesn’t exist, then they’ve made it exist… No one should be reinventing the wheal, because we have access to so much information.
She believes young people are interested in global health because they have grown up connected to people from all over the world and want to help them. The technology has made this possible. Two of their fellows are architects, not what you think a health worker is but they built a regional hospital in rural Rwanda. The design of the hospital was mindful of air flows and built it in a way to stop the spread of airborne diseases like TB.
12:30 pm Josh
The sun sets behind the cascading hills that lead to the Dead Sea. From The Peace Caravan.
I’m sitting in the Digital Media Lounge getting ready for the start of the final day of the summit and learning about even more great projects. The people here are doing so many impressive things, it’s almost overwhelming. The Peace Caravan Project is telling the story of people living along the ancient Silk Road, in countries like Pakistan, Afganistan and Jordan. Through words and (really good) photos they hope to promote cultural exchange and understanding. Care2 is a great web site with tons of news stories on important social issues that allows you to easily take political action, sign petitions and raise money for important causes.The Isha Institute of Inner Sciences is offering classes (online and off) for raising human consciousness – fostering global harmony through individual transformation.
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© 2011, The Magazine of Yoga, LLC.
