Roshan Paul

This article was the third  in a 3-part series I wrote for Forbes.com on scaling up of social entrepreneurship. The insights that led to this series came from work I did when working for Ashoka’s Globalizer program.

In this piece, we explore how many successful entrepreneurs are using a different strategy than normal in order to spread their message. Rather than building larger and larger companies, they are setting up new education programs – both formal degrees and informal training programs – to train new generations of people schooled in their beliefs and methods.

Definitely read the article, and you can do it here.

This article was the second in a 3-part series I wrote for Forbes.com on scaling up of social entrepreneurship. The insights that led to this series came from work I did when working for Ashoka’s Globalizer program.

In this article, we look at the work of Peace First, a highly successful peace education program with operations in schools on both the East and West Coasts. They believe all young people are problem solvers and creative thinkers and their strategy is to work with educators and administrators to make social-emotional learning, civic engagement and peacemaking a part of a school’s core DNA.

They do wonderful work and they’ve faced some tough questions about how to scale their work. Its worth reading more, and you can do that here.

This article was the first in a 3-part series I wrote for Forbes.com on scaling up of social entrepreneurship. The insights that led to this series came from work I did when working for Ashoka’s Globalizer program.

In this article, I interview Siegfried Woldhek, former CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, on what he learned about spreading successful ideas that have the potential to change systems. What he said was fascinating!

Read the article here.

Along with Ashoka‘s President, Diana Wells, I wrote an essay for a wonderful new book called Dream of a Nation, which is about new ideas to inspire America. The book features essays from a number of American leaders such as Al Gore, Geoffrey Canada, Alice Walker, Paul Hawken, and Marjora Carter.

The essay was called “Everyone a Changemaker”.

You can read the essay here, and you can buy the book here.

This is the third in my interview series of open-source innovators for the Stanford Social Innovation Review Blog. You can read the first two interviews in the series here, and here.

The third interview is posted here on the SSIR blog. It is also pasted below.

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This is the third and final in a series of interviews where we speak with leading innovators who are appropriating lessons from open source thinking—once purely the domain of the software engineer—for social change.

Casey Fenton is co-founder of CouchSurfing and an Ashoka Fellow in the United States.

Roshan Paul: I imagine that when many people think of CouchSurfing, they don’t immediately see the underlying social mission. Can you describe that mission?

Casey Fenton: CouchSurfing cultivates trust, inclusivity, and appreciation of difference within the global travel community by facilitating one-on-one interactions with strangers, orchestrated at mass scale. Central to our vision is the sense that building this appreciation of difference enables us to respond to diversity with curiosity and respect, thus spreading tolerance and creating a global community. We do this—achieve our mission—by creating inspiring experiences.

Today, CouchSurfing users represent every country and territory in the world, with over three million participants—not bad for a platform built by a collective of volunteers. Talk us through the early days.

We really had to bootstrap-it in the beginning. We didn’t have many resources, least of all financial. I went deep into credit card debt and mortgaged my car so I had enough to eat and could keep programming. But success couldn’t be based on how much time I could devote to it, and it wasn’t easy to find volunteers, because the nature of the task was technically complex and many volunteers couldn’t commit time over long periods.

So we created a “collective”—a group of people living and working together for three months. The first was in Montreal. We split a total cost of $3,000 for rent, servers, and food. There were 15 of us at any given time, and it was chaos. But it was highly social, which helped us philosophize. We set up these collectives in New Zealand, Costa Rica, New York, and other places. It was an amazing experience.  We were now getting hundreds of applications for each one.

What did you learn by crowdsourcing all these resources from so many volunteers?

It was always exciting. It helped us refine our mission with our audience. We were harnessing intense energy and fun. But we had to navigate around different tax structures in different countries regarding short-term employment. You obviously can’t run a large-scale operation like that. Nor can people keep up that sort of energy for long. When we hit one million members, we needed more programming support and more servers. Keeping volunteers engaged for sustained periods of time became challenging. You also can’t tell volunteers how much to work, and you can’t track hours. So in a way we were trading maximum output for flexibility.

The other important learning was putting Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to work: If people can satisfy their basic needs, they will be OK. First, you have to understand your own basic needs and how to meet them. Then, see how those needs play out in behavior, especially in the social sector. So, for example, you frame it differently for different people. For those who typically can meet their basic needs, you can appeal to altruism: Do this for a better world! For those at a different level, you might offer them chances to meet other like-minded people through volunteering, thus making friends and creating a better world for themselves. (That’s meeting two needs!) Add a third: Get appreciation from others. Add a fourth: Eat some great food while you’re here.

I also learned the importance of leadership styles and how to inspire people. From Daniel Goleman’s leadership styles, I saw that I was an ”affiliative” leader, eager to minimize conflict. If you don’t have much experience when you are starting off, understanding leadership styles (and what yours is) is useful.

Refining your mission and vision with your audience (users, beneficiaries, stakeholders)—how did you do that?

When we started out, we had so many good ideas that even the leadership team couldn’t agree on a common vision. So we went into the CouchSurfing data. When you sign up on the website, you have to enter your own personal mission statement. We took each user’s personal mission and did word clouds on them. We put the results into different categories (we called them “concept buckets”) and wrote those on note cards. Then we put them on a table, gathered around, and started to see relationships. Slowly, we saw a picture emerge: “Deep and meaningful experiences lead to cultural appreciation, which leads to a global community of people.” We narrowed it down further to get at the essence: Remove the barriers so that people can “explore and connect.”

Well, how do you do that? Through inspiring experiences that are also fun, exciting, and addictive. All of this leads to personal growth and understanding one’s place in the world.

We took two-and-a-half years to figure it out. But when we finally came to it, it was bulletproof.

What’s the next big step for CouchSurfing?

We are setting up The Cultural Exchange Research Institute, a nonprofit alongside CouchSurfing that investigates how people actually end up appreciating diversity and building tolerance. We will create and distribute intellectual products to help people embed those learnings into their own organizations and systems—for example, how do you manage wildly diverse teams by harnessing that diversity as a core strength?

Second, we are planning an annual Appreciation of Diversity index, based on CouchSurfing data, where we try to show, for example, how much Germany appreciates its own diversity or how much the Swiss appreciate the Germans. Then we can look at the trouble spots and start to do targeted work—for example, getting Finns to better appreciate Russians—always in an open and fun way, not in a way that’s dry or academic.

Finally, all this information and data will be shared with the world; it will be open and free.

This is the second in my interview series of open-source innovators for the Stanford Social Innovation Review Blog. Read the first in the series, about simply giving things away in order to scale, on the SSIR blog here.

The second interview is posted here on the SSIR blog. It is also pasted below.

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Stephen Friend is an Ashoka Fellow in the United States working to transform the culture and practice of closed information systems present in biomedical research to align with and support health outcomes by establishing a commons. He is president of Sage Bionetworks.

Roshan Paul and Alexa Clay: What is the problem with the current health care research and development (R&D) community, and how are you addressing it? 

Stephen Friend: The medical information system is closed. Scientists get funded to generate data, then they publish it, and only then do they talk about it. The same is true for R&D in pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The current system is a primitive model, a sort of hunter-gatherer approach. A single researcher or closed team of researchers go after a molecular target or cure in isolation. It’s a them-against-the-world mentality. The “medical-industrial complex” is not incentivized to share amongst each other, let alone with patients.

At Sage Bionetworks, we are building a system where molecular knowledge about diseases can be pooled together from patients, scientists, and physicians. As a result, communities with a specific interest in a disease—say Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s—can bring their data together. Once brought together, the data and models for the disease can evolve as more data is collected. For example, if someone is interested in Parkinson’s, she will be able to track and follow the evolution of the disease model. Imagine a world where citizens could follow disease-related projects, become fans, and join as followers or even funders.

Q: What challenges do you face in building communities of users? 
Given that much R&D in the health care sector has happened within the proprietary domain of big pharma or biotechs, there is a cultural shift that will need to happen. Moving from an attitude characterized by competitiveness and proprietary information to one that is pre-competitive and collaborative is a challenge. The good news is that the patients who want better therapies are poised to put pressure on the current siloed, closed system to open it up to exponential open sharing approaches.

Q: You are at the early phases of developing this platform. But what is your vision for it ultimately? 
Once there is enough information on the platform, patients paired with doctors will start to shape their own treatments. Take muscular dystrophy (MS), for example. We are considering projects that will bring together hundreds of patients to collect information about the deep molecular characteristics of their diseases, along with all the information about which molecular characteristics respond to which existing therapies. We hope this will allow us to detect molecular classifications that can get the right drug to the right patient. Thus, patients can start to see themselves as active agents in their own treatments, an evolution toward being self-responsible citizens. This will be “the democratization of medicine.”

Q: How are you using open source principles to scale your platform? 
For the platform to work, traditional definitions of what a scientist or doctor is, what a citizen or patient is, and what a funder is, need to shift. We’re building a commons—a place where everyone can contribute data, and shape new methods of disease funding and treatment. Eventually, we’ll move beyond just data sharing and create a “virtual marketplace” where funders, scientists, and patients can work together across disease classes.

Q. How do you distinguish between quality and noise? 
Similar to Amazon’s Reader Reports and standard consumer reports, we assume that the data that people first enter should not be trusted. We give it all an initial neutral rating. But as people use it over time, the better data has the opportunity to get more popular, acquire a higher quality rating, and thus gain more visibility.

Q: What inspiration do you take from the open source movement? 
There’s a great attitude within open source communities that if you assemble enough individuals to collectively problem-solve, you’ll be able to identify amazing solutions. That’s the spirit we have at Sage Bionetworks. We’re inviting all sorts of different participants to collaborate and share clinical/medical information in a collective space. Together with citizens, scientists, and funders we ask: Why can’t we, together, build models of disease in ways similar to those in other open source communities?

Open source thinking is no longer a skill reserved for software engineers, but a valuable skill for social entrepreneurs. Having become interested in open source thinking thanks to my work on the Ashoka Globalizer program, I was keen to learn firsthand from social innovators using an open source approach to developing and growing their products and work

Along with an Ashoka colleague, Alexa Clay, I interviewed a series of open source social innovators for the Stanford Social Innovation Review Blog. Read the first in the series on the SSIR blog here. It is also pasted below.

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This is the first in a series of interviews where we speak with leading innovators who are appropriating lessons from open source thinking—once purely the domain of the software engineer—for social change.

We first met Stephen Song through the Ashoka Globalizer program, where he helped us develop our framework for thinking about how to scale social innovation through an open source approach. Stephen is the founder of Village Telco, a social enterprise that aims to make starting a telephone company as easy as starting a blog.

Roshan Paul and Alexa Clay: How did the low-cost phone and Internet device Mesh Potato—the flagship project of Village Telco—come about?

Stephen Song: I had been doing advocacy for a while on the issue of the cost of access to communication in Africa. The biggest barrier is the lack of competition. Most countries have very few telecommunications operators, and they tend to operate with a fairly cozy relationship. Prices remain high. However, people with lower income levels in Africa spend as much as 50 percent of their disposable income on telecommunications—so there is a clear market for communication, and a huge need to make it cheaper and better.

On the other hand, I was aware that there were small chunks of the spectrum that were freely available for use; what is popularly known as Wi-Fi spectrum. You now find Wi-Fi devices in virtually everything—somebody told me the other day that they bought a bathroom scale with Wi-Fi. Moreover, all over the world, people are building meshed Wi-Fi networks to build their own Internet infrastructure. In Africa, however, you get much higher value if you can deliver voice and Internet services, instead of just internet.

All of these trends and forces taken together made us realize that that you can use inexpensive Wi-Fi gear to build rural telephone networks. That was what led to Mesh Potato.

Read more about the Mesh Potato project.

Why did you choose to use open source for this idea? Why not set up your own cozy, lucrative partnership with one firm, and capture the market?

What open source allows for is a fast-track toward trust. We approached a manufacturer with the design and said we would give it to them for free, on the understanding that they gave away the design for free—no patents—but that they could use it wherever and however they wanted. So there were no tricks. Everything was on the table: They got a free product, we got a deal to build the system, and we very quickly had a working relationship built on trust.

People like to contribute their ideas and energy if they know someone else isn’t going to profit from it. We benefit from an international network of over 500 people from all around the world, who help and contribute in different ways: developing the software, de-bugging it, spreading the word, testing, etc. Besides, nobody likes the big, incumbent communication companies—so we also benefited by being the little guy up against the Goliaths.

How did you turn your community into co-creators, an essential element of any open source approach?

First, when they join the community, they become the front-line for each other in terms of solving problems—how to deploy, troubleshoot, etc. The community helps to solve the problem, so they are in fact part of the technical support team. Second, they help with developing new market directions. For instance, one person wanted the technology to focus more on small businesses. So he customized the product accordingly and then shared it back with the community. Now, 30 percent of the community is actually using his product rather than the original. Thus, the community drives the technology’s growth strategically; they shape the choices we make in terms of enhancing the technology.

How much progress have you made? And what’s next?

We have sold 1,000 units so far in developing countries around the world. But we haven’t yet hit the price point we want. We’re now working on the second generation of the Mesh Potato.

We started out launching the Mesh Potato for everyone because it has so many different applications—from disaster relief to a community-wide telephone to a cyber café that wants to extend services for local businesses. So we’re presently doing further market definitions and then tailoring the technology for those markets.

How do you think this kind of open-source philosophy can apply to other sectors of social enterprise work, perhaps even non-technology applications? How could you use open-source to help protect a rainforest, for example?

When most people think about sustainability, they think “How can I make money for this? How can I generate revenue?” That’s reductionist. Sometimes you have to just give stuff away. A recent mapping project I did for free led to an invitation from Google to build a much larger map. This, in turn, introduced me to many new communities of value. If you put stuff out there and deliver value to others, it comes back to you.

Furthermore, if people feel they already get value from you, then they have less concern about entering into a business relationship with you. They trust you more. For example, in Tunis, if you go into one of their famous carpet shops, the first thing they do is offer you tea. Once you accept the tea, there is an implied transaction. You feel this obligation to give something back, but you also trust them more because they’ve given you something nice for free.

So if I were monitoring a rainforest, I’d ask, “What knowledge or resources can I offer people that would increase their engagement with me?” There may be an open source application on your phone that pulls information from the environmental database, and tells you about at-risk environments or provides general information about the forest that has been crowd-sourced from experts and local people.

Granted, the return of that value can be slow. With all open source products, the vast majority of people use it without giving anything tangible back. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because they are actually carriers of goodwill for you. Don’t forget that your network has value, and that open source is a great tool for building that community of support. So think about what you can give away, what will have value to your audience, who can in return provide value to you.

Along with my colleague Jon McPhedran Waitzer, I wrote a long essay for MIT Press’ Innovations Journal on new paradigms for scaling innovation. This was based on two years of learning and experience creating and running Ashoka’s Globalizer program, and pointed to some new directions that social entrepreneurs should think about moving – in particular, to stop thinking that business has the answers.

The essay is far too long to post here, but you can read the first page on the Innovations website and also download the whole article there. If you’d like a version from me, please email and I’d be happy to share it.

In October 2010, I led a “Storytelling for Social Change” workshop at Ashoka. The stories that emerged from it were so powerful we decided to turn a few of them into an audio blog series and share them.  Grab your headphones–and prepare to be moved.

You can skip directly to the stories delivered by my class if you scroll down to the end of this post. If you’d first like to read more about the course and why storytelling is important in social change work, keep reading.

Cross-posted from Ashoka’s blog

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Storytelling and Social Entrepreneurship

Humans interpret the world in two ways: through narrative and through analysis. Analysis uses critical reasoning and evidence and deliberation to teach us how to act. Narrative uses story and emotion to teach us how we feel about things, which in turn tells us why we act.

Unfortunately, in nearly all of our communications, we tend to use analysis to persuade others, despite all the evidence suggesting that people are more effectively moved by stories. When it comes to getting people to act, the most brilliant piece of big-picture analytical reasoning is simply no match for the well-told, detail-filled, specific story.

Take, for instance, Acumen Fund founder Jacqueline Novogratz.  In her effort to demonstrate the interconnectedness of humanity in today’s world, the Acumen Fund founder could present an economic analysis about international trade and flows of goods and services.

Nobody would remember a word of it.

Instead she tells the story of her blue sweater.  The sweater, which pictured zebras grazing in front of Mount Kilimanjaro, was Novogratz’ most beloved article of clothing throughout middle school.  After a ninth grade classmate made fun of Novogratz for wearing the now ill-fitting sweater, during her freshman year of high school, Novogratz’ donated it to GoodWill. Fast forward ten years: Novogratz is living and working in Rwanda when she sees a young boy wearing the exact same sweater.  She runs over to him, looks at the sweater’s tag.  Sure enough, her name is there, in faded black ink.  The story makes the same point about the interconnectedness of humanity in a modern economy as a presentation on trade flows would—but, it makes that point better. In a way we’d remember it.

Storytelling has always been close to Ashoka’s heart.  After all, Ashoka started with stories: the stories of changemakers and changemaking that Bill Drayton collected as he traveled through India looking for the world’s leading social entrepreneurs who would become the world’s first Ashoka fellows. So when I decided to put together a storytelling workshop this past fall, there couldn’t have been a better place to do it than right here at Ashoka’s Global Headquarters.

The workshop I led was based on Marshall Ganz’ Public Narrative technique, developed at Harvard and used to transformative effect in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Public Narrative is the art of translating values into action, through stories, and thus persuading people to help you make change. In this course, we explored storytelling as a leadership skill, breaking an effective story down into its three component parts and practicing each part before integrating back into the whole. We studied videos of masters of this: Barack Obama, Martin Luther King Jr., Bono, and J.K. Rowling among others. And then each participant developed their own story. And on the last day, when they delivered their own public stories, I was blown away. I had tears in my eyes for half the stories and was cracking up for the other half.

We’ve turned a handful of the stories from the workshop into an audio series. Here they are:

1. Claire Bangser: “Nurturing Creativity”

2. Michele Leaman: “A World We Share”

3. Caraleigh Holverson: “The Roadmap of our Lives”

4. Daniel Lau: “The Importance of Asking Questions”