End of Orientation grab-bag

This single posting captures several different short topics which didn't merit entire entries of their own:

1. Reception with past fellows (Wednesday evening)
   
2. Intro to ESW conference
   
3. Intro to LinkedIn
   
4. Intro to Social eChallenge (part 2)
   
5. Office Conversations (Helen and Jose)
   
6. Dinner Reception at Stu Gannes' house
   
7. Poster Construction
   

1. Reception with past fellows (Wednesday evening)

We had another nice reception. What made this one different was that alums of the program were invited, too. A handful made it, and I enjoyed meeting and speaking with Ken Novak, Ed Yoon, Melanie Edwards and Segeni Ng'ethe. It's encouraging to see that the past fellows have gone on to do interesting things.

2. Intro to ESW conference

Ashwin is a PhD student in Civil Engineering, and a student member of the Engineers for a Sustainable World group. He talked a bit about the upcoming Solutions for a Shrinking Planet conference at Stanford, as well as courses, seminars, and mailing lists. (It does seem that there's a rather poorly integrated patchwork of these at Stanford under different departments, leadership, etc.) The RDVP fellows will have the opportunity to present posters at the conference.

3. Intro to LinkedIn

Patrick Ewers, Director of Groups for LinkedIn, gave us an overview of this business networking service. Nearly all of us were already familiar, with a couple of us being fairly heavy users. Patrick introduced "groups" which were new to me (labels that you could self-identify with, then your network search shares anyone that also self-identified with that label, even if they are more than 4 degrees away).

The most helpful part of the discussion was advice from Margarita regarding profile construction: Get over your aversion to self-promotion. People will be more likely to find and respond to a well-crafted, interesting profile.

4. Intro to Social eChallenge (part 2)

Tracy Ho gave a slightly more formal presentation about the BASES Social eChallenge than Brij's earlier presentation. Talked a bit more about the in-kind prizes (legal service from Cooley Godward and Wilson Sonsini) and the judging philosophy that judges made decisions based on ability to meet stated project goals (so a project with a narrower scope wasn't inherently at a disadvantage against a bigger project.)

5. Office Conversations (Helen and Jose)

Friday afternoon offered a bit of a breather, with no scheduled activities. It turned out to be a good time to relax in the lobby downstairs (where brownies and cookies had mysteriously materialized) and talk more with colleagues.

Helen expressed an interest in seeing if we could work more closely together to see whether expanding access to microcredit might be one aspect of her goal of increasing the opportunities of small and medium entreprise owners in China. She was also interested in the BitPass system, a payment scheme with low overhead to get started as a merchant.

Jose and I talked about the "plan behind the plan" for Volunteer Bank. While he is excited about the idea of Volunteer Bank, feels that it will have a beneficial impact, and is interested in the technical aspects of making it happen, he is less captivated by the day-to-day operations. He would rather, he said, be working on the next idea or ideas, pipelining them for others to carry out. His real passion, then, was to create a Social Venture Incubator, rather than a single social venture. We talked a bit about the incubator model including the more successful instantiations of it in the dot-com world, places like Reactivity and Idealab. We also talked about how either Volunteer Bank or the incubator could be the focus for his project (with a related concern about the aptness for entries into the eChallenge), or the most demanding dual combination: focus on the incubator, but use Volunteer Bank as a full-length example of a project being incubated.

6. Dinner at Stu Gannes' house

Stuart graciously opened his lovely Palo Alto home for a catered Chinese food dinner with the fellows and their families. A couple other "friends of the program" attended, and it was a great opportunity for relaxed conversations (not counting the boundless enthusiasm of the 3 approx. 4 year-olds).

7. Poster Construction

In preparation for the ESW conference, we spent some time on Thursday afternoon starting to make a poster (30" by 40" board with eye-catching, informative material to use as a visual aid while talking with conference attendees about the project). By the end of the afternoon, I'd roughed out most of the content (repurposed PowerPoint slides from my initial presentation and tweaked them a bit). But having done a poster before (in my AI conference days...) I knew that the layout and paste up work takes longer than generating the content. So I came back on Sunday, and plowed through (modulo a nice break for dinner with Renee). Total time investment: 8-9 hours. I'm pleased with the result, and will post a photo soon.