So it goes

Social Innovation Camp is even nearer now and I’m still thinking about ideas.

One of the themes this year is “distance”. I spend 90 percent of the year communicating with my family via email, Skype and phone, so I can relate to distance as a social problem. On the family level, distance is a tangible barrier to overcome. Some technologies help shrink this distance, but there is a lot of room for development.

I have already mentioned one distance-shrinking technology: Skype. The service is a revolution. Previously, the main alternative was expensive long distance calls. Skype cuts the cost of communicating with my family to almost nothing (I still occasionally have to make calls on my cell phone). It is much easier to stay in touch. continue reading »

Social Innovation Camp is nigh, and I have yet to come up with a single suitable idea to submit. The trouble with most of my ideas is that they don’t require the internet. In fact, I’m having trouble thinking of anything that would benefit from a virtual implementation.

That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of socially innovative things to be done.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is a “Clean-Up Day.” It’s something I used to do in Anchorage. When the snow melts each spring, heaps of litter suddenly surfaces and the city looks like a dump. So every spring, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of volunteers scour the streets and parks, packing bright orange garbage bags full of rogue cigarette butts, plastic bottles and occasionally other, more novel rubbish (I once found a 2L bottle of K-Y Jelly in a marsh). continue reading »