Sky’s Blog @ The Dalai Lama Foundation — Spreading the word in a networked world

I’m listening to Neil Goldberg talk about “The future of work” while I’m writing this. Neil created and operated the Gate 3 Workclub, which lasted until early 2005 in Emeryville, CA. Gate 3 was a place where people could “hotel” and drop by and work (for a monthly fee). (You know, kinda like Starbucks without the hassle factor as they try to chase you out because you’re taking up space.)
Neil is a designer, and (wow) Gate 3 looked very designed! He worked thru many issues about what made a great workspace, including not only the physical layout, but the social aspects - which are SO important! “Water-cooler conversations,” anyone?

So why is this post called “I’m a Turtle”? - read on. (more…)

The buzz is growing on Project Happiness. And I think it’s a reflection of how attractive it is to all of us to be able to see video rather than just read words on a page. We get so much more out of even a short video snippet of our friends than we do from a written email (which is so easy to misunderstand!).

Jeff Buderer of OneVillage Foundation has summed up some of what we’re doing, plus provided valuable links to others who are using video in their work across Africa. So take a look at what he has to say.

At the AirJaldi summit, one of my “most memorable moments” was when Sheel Mohnot BOUNDED onto the stage to give the most energetic five-minute introduction to a social enterprise that I have ever heard! [Find his presentation on the AirJaldi "resources" site.]

Sheel Mohnot

This guy Sheel is the South-Asia (to me this means mostly India, but maybe it’s broader) team member for KIVA.ORG - his role is Manager of South Asian Microfinance Partnerships.

KIVA dot ORG is a totally-cool way you can loan money using a microfinance model, to entrepreneurs all over the world to help build their small enterprises. The Kiva team, with coordinators around the globe, and their “field partners,” seek out small businesses that need just an incremental boost (on the order of several hundred dollars US) and they put them into the KIVA database, where people like you and I can then look at them as individuals and make decisions about how we’d like to invest. We pick specific entrepreneurs, and make specific dollar-amount loans to them, and then we track the performance of those loans over time.

KIVA’s explosion occurred on Hallowe’en this year… (more…)

I learned something about Flickr last night. Grrrrrr … it took a lot of debugging, but I did finally figure it out in spite of their documentation.

For those who do not know, Flickr is a web site where you can upload your photos and they’ll be available for other folks to view. Visitors to the AirJaldi Summit in Dharamsala, India, have been posting their photos to Flickr, and I needed a way to show those photos on the AirJaldi Resources site… (more…)