The Reuters Digital Vision Program is a one-year fellowship at Stanford University for mid-career tech professionals. I'm blogging my experiences there: the amazing guest speakers, the interesting classes and discussion groups with other fellows, and thoughts on how technology can help reduce the gulf between the global rich and poor.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Mifos Bay Area Launch Reception (3/22/2007)

The Grameen Foundation had a reception celebrating the launch of Mifos, hosted at VISA, just down the street from me in Foster City. It was well attended, with 60 or so people. Mifos is the MIcroFinance Open Source project that I worked on during my RDVP fellowship. Two and a half years later, there are 4 MFI's working on implementing Mifos at their institutions, in India, Tunisia, Kenya, and the Philippines. The other exciting aspect is the development of the open source community to support Mifos. While I tend to think about the volunteers that are involved, George Conard (of the Grameen Foundation) and Brian Behlendorf (of CollabNet) both pointed out that it's important to recognize that there are developers that can make their living from working on it as well.

Alex Counts, President of the Grameen Foundation, gave a brief introduction. George Conard, the Director of the Mifos Initiative, spoke next. He gave a really good talk, with a few powerpoint slides, emphasizing the need for microcredit (using examples of both recovering from emergencies and funding purchase of raw materials), the importance of IT systems in microcredit (ability to scale to 1 billion prospective customers), the sorry state of the current systems (90% using a homegrown system, Excel, or none at all), the challenges (each homegrown system re-creating the wheel to accommodate the slight twist that they need to support their local methodology; or small vendors trying to support a system in a different language and timezone). Open source provides a solution: the ability to re-use code and for an ecology of support vendors to spring up around it.

Brian Behlendorf of CollabNet (who brought you SVN) and a key contributor to the Apache project, was the keynote speaker. I was impressed that he spoke about microcredit; I assumed that we'd get a standard (if privileged, insider's) view of the benefits of open source. But Brian went the extra mile, and put it in the context of microcredit. He mentioned that he'd been at Davos recently, and that had driven home to him the fact that microcredit worked (ie, that borrowers could put small loan amounts to work generating greater economic benefit) and that lenders were interested in making the loans, but they couldn't connect, and that, according to Brian, sounded like a software problem! He did a good job of describing the open source benefits of transparency, and also acknowledged the Grameen Foundation for the the critical role they had in funding the development. (He compared it to the role that IBM had played in bringing Eclipse to market or CollabNet's development of SVN.)

All in all, a fun event. Great to see the Mifos progress (can't wait until it actually goes live at Grameen Koota!) and thanks to a Grameen Foundation board meeting, plus the gathering for this event, a lot of people that I'd met over the years were there (Alex Counts, Peter Bladin, Emily Tucker, Susan Davis) from Grameen, another early Mifos volunteer Charlie Tomberg, plus people that I'd met through the RDVP fellowship from Cisco (Peter Tavernise) and Google.org (Rachel Payne). It was also great to meet Elizabeth Clarkson of Omidyar.net which made a sizable investment in Mifos.

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posted by Steve Ketchpel at 8:24 PM

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Tech Policy Summit Conference

On February 26 & 27, I attended the Tech Policy Summit in San Jose. It was a really well run conference (props to organizer Natalie Fonseca of SageScape). The general intention was to bring together people from the tech sector, especially from Silicon Valley, with policy makers, primarily from DC. In spite of the cross-country flight, and horrendous weather in Washington on the 25th, causing many cancellations, it still seemed like the DC contingent was larger than the local one. I guess I'd chalk that up to mostly a questionable complacency from the techies that things political can be ignored as long as you stay focused on the customer/business/technology.


So I'll try to share my takeaways, from a largely "techie" point of view, hoping that others may be encouraged to learn more (podcasts are available) and participate in the future.

The Big Issues


Thinking back over the repeated themes that came up, I'd say the main topics were:

  • Patent Reform
  • H1-B visas and immigration
  • Privacy and data security
  • Net neutrality
  • Broadband access
  • Math & Science education
  • Tax policy (esp. R&D tax credit)
  • Trade policy (esp. monopoly /duopoly, anti-trust issues, in Europe)
  • Energy

I'll put together another blog post or two with the "content" highlights for these topics.

Overall, the tone was slightly alarmist. America has fallen or is about to fall out of the lead in critical areas of global competitiveness, and we need to take action.


The People


It was an interesting mix of different groups, with some impressive names from each.

Media



Government



Tech Executives


It was a good turnout of CEO's with a handful of others mixed in. As I was looking up bios, I was surprised that the most represented shade of red was not Crimson, Cardinal, or even Blood on Concrete (MIT), but Big Red. I've noted the Cornell affiliations below.

and representatives from "trade associations" (aka lobbyists).

posted by Steve Ketchpel at 9:58 PM