What I picked up from "The folly of finding what works"

“The impact of information technology on the Global Economy” was the title of my research project last semester. 2 weeks into the project and I was still finding newer things to study. Around the same time, my professor in charge advised me that I better stop searching for more topics and better get to work.

I, on the other hand wanted to make this a comprehensive study on the impact of IT. So I wanted to include Overview of the situation today, the booms and busts, the venture capitalists, web1.0, web 2.0, the long tail, Outsourcing, trickle down effect, ICT for development, mobile communications. Phew. No wait, there's more, e-commerce, e-governance, case studies of famous companies, the semiconductor industry, exports, imports, recession. Relate that to GDP, employment, education, productivity, FDI...

Did I leave out anything?

Clearly, if I did manage to include it all, I'd have a PhD thesis, which I would have sold and made money from.

Just one problem.

This would never get finished. In fact, my project wouldn't even start. I'd be so busy finding newer things to study about that I'd hardly put pen to paper and actually document anything. Instead I would just be reading and researching on every single item that was remotely related to the IT industry.

Moving on,

This May, when I started my summer internship, I was fascinated by the health care industry. In particular, primary health care. The numbers were huge and I was overwhelmed by the scale of their operations. So when I had to pick my project, I didn’t want to leave out anything. I tried to include everything, using variety of economic formulas, different theories. My internship coordinator asked me why I don’t stay for a 6 month fellowship. As flattered as I was, I also got the underlying hint. I understood that given the time frame it was unfeasible to carry out the study with so many parameters. Heck, I wouldn’t be able to make sense of all that data. So I picked one or two core areas and focused on them.

As far as personal experiences go, these were the first two instances that came to my mind while I was reading Ken Banks' blog post titled The folly of "finding what works". He brings up a very valid point:

As with the confusion caused by multiple interpretations of “sustainable development“, the social mobile space is struggling with its own definitions of concepts such as collaboration, empowerment, scale, “enabling environment” and “finding what works”. We hear these terms on a daily basis, yet we never stop to ask what they really mean. What does an “enabling environment” really look like, and do we really need one like people say we do? Who decides what scale really means, and how important scaling really is? We all nod in agreement when people use these terms at conferences, but refrain from questioning them through fear of appearing ignorant.

The “folly of finding what works” strikes particular resonance. Although mobiles for development has only been around for a few short years, surely by now we’ve identified at least a few things that work? Isn’t that the purpose of all these reports, blog posts, tweets, projects, conferences, workshops, barcamps and academic studies?

After six years-or-so of social mobile, we’re surely at the point where we can throw some real resources around at least a few tools? Surely we can pool our collective skills, knowledge and resources into helping at least a few reach their full social change potential? Instead of sitting around talking about our commitment to social mobile, we need to show our true colours and act, regardless of who gets credit for those actions.

Reading this also started another chain of thought in my head, the credit for which has to be given to Stan Thakaekara. In the course of what would turn out to be a vociferous debate on issues relating to the environment, education, caste and equity amongst other things, Stan gave us some gyaan on how he feels that technology hasn't quite lived up to its promise. How technology hasn't quite created an equitable world. How the more answers we try to seek, the farther we seem to move from actually arriving at the truth. And instead we're just making the world worse off.

But then what is the truth anyway?

Coming back, Stan was of firm belief that the divide is getting larger and larger. Technology is giving only a few answers. It's a balloon effect, where squeezing one side of a balloon makes it expand in the other direction. You can't ignore the consequences and certainly can't escape them. So we have to now come up with clean technologies in order to clean up all the mess that we created over the years* **. Jeffrey Sachs also says that it's not that we don't have fossil fuels, we have plenty of it (maybe not oil, but coal surely), its about using it in an optimized manner.

Jeez, I digress again.

When Stan first told me all this, it did strike a chord somewhere but I was still too mesmerized by capitalism. I now realize, I didn't quite understand capitalism. Maybe I still haven't. But after having read works of Jeffrey Sachs, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Joseph Stiglitz, I have been exposed to a whole new way of thinking. These guys aren't dishing out dung. They all emphasize on the same thing, there's little time.

Bottom line being:
The reforms have to take place now, the access to credit/capital for the poor has to happen now and heck social media for development better deliver now. Because everyday, a kid is losing his life in Africa (and India and Latin America and Bangladesh and...). Like Ken said, we need to stop talking and start doing now.

*Of course there are numerous theories which say that we would have reached this stage anyway even had it not been for the pollution, but lets leave that for another day.

** And then there's yet another theory that says that no matter what you do, we're way past the threshold. So we have to release chemicals in the air such as sulphates to cool our system (remember the TED talk on climate change? No? Here)

ICARE this summer

So another year comes to a halt as the summer beckons.

After a rather uneventful last 2 summers(unless you count the trip to Egypt), I am hoping to become more productive this time around.

This summer I shall be working with a fantastic organization, The International Centre for Advancement of Rural Eye Care (ICARE). Responsible for trying to come up with ways to remove blindness from rural unreachable parts of India and the developing world, ICARE looks at long term solutions at a large scale. They also manage and plan the community health care initiatives of L V Prasad Eye Hospital, another giant in the health care industry.

So what is my work going to be? Broadly I shall be working with a lot of economics related aspects, such as cost-benefit analysis of their Vision Centers vs PHCs as well as bordering over to marketing where I try to analyze various community eye programs and newer & effective ways of spectacle delivery. Apart from this there might be other things in store that I am not yet aware of.

Why did I choose this?

Well mostly because over the past year I have been increasingly becoming attracted to the developmental sector. Its evident by the proportion of social entrepreneurship related items in my feeds.

Seriously speaking, I never thought this sector would excite and it'd be naive of me to think that this is my true calling, but for whatever reasons there might be, right now this is the place I want to be in. Lets see how the gig goes.

P.S: At the same time I have been working on a couple of other ideas in the field of community health and nutrition and am also most probably volunteering for Kiwanja, a champion organization trying to use ICT for development. Check out their product FrontlineSMS.

Creating more opportunity in the social sector amongst the youth

Nitin Rao, a NIT Surathkal alumnus started E4SI (while still in college!), a unique fellowship program that helps the engineers from top institutes to spend their summer interning in an organization that’s working for a social cause.

Now in its second year, the number of applications that the folks at E4SI received this year increased by a phenomenal amount. Most of the publicity was word of mouth. But the point I am trying to address is a different one.

Now that E4SI is expanding, it will start receiving even more number of entries. With 400-500 people fighting for the 24 coveted slots, many good (and deserving) candidates are bound to lose out. Clearly after a point of time even the judges can’t be objective.

At such a juncture it would be a great idea to create a group (say on Facebook) with the profiles of the candidates who just missed out. These are high potential candidates who would fit in other similar organizations as well. Social enterprises looking for high potential talent will find this resource highly beneficial. The students will also be grateful for its only the facilitation that is lacking in this space. The students are willing and the organizations I am sure are in need of brain power.

This is something world famous marketer and Acumen Fund supporter Seth Godin did when he announced his internship for college students. This helped spread goodwill as well as showed the candidates that Seth cared for the initiative they took to apply for his internship. Obviously the Seth Godin brand name helped the others find decent offers for their summer as well.

And that’s something Taya over at Next Billion has blogged about.

What strikes me most about the opportunities at these organizations is their exclusivity-in the sense that they cull the "best of the best" through limited edition fellowships. Just to be clear, I have no problem with the notion of wielding the power of the "best and brightest" to tackle the world's problems. In fact, it's a rather poignant reversal of fortune; usually the least powerful members of society are stuck with the worst resources. However, after the superstars are chosen, I wonder what happens to the "best of the rest" and the "rest of the rest." Presumably, the folks who apply to these programs are smart, ambitious, values-driven, change makers in the making. What I wonder is, "what happens to these people?" Is their energy and enthusiasm lost or is it simply redirected? How can we tell? Do we care?

While I have taken E4SI as an example, I would extend the suggestion to other similar initiatives as well such as Kiva, Acumen Fund etc. Using an already existing brand name to indirectly vouch for equally deserving candidates to enter into the developmental sector.

Cross posted on the Mutiny

Source Pilani: Empowering Rural India

Inside Goenka Public School, which is situated in the bustling center of Pilani village, is housed one of India’s fastest growing rural BPO’s.

Welcome to the world of Source Pilani who are redefining the concept of CSR in rural India with their socio-economic approach to BPO’s.

A brainchild of L K Maheswari (the current Vice Chancellor of BITS Pilani), who convinced the Goenka family to invest in such a venture; he’s played a crucial role in scaling Source Pilani to where it is today. Giving a shout out to the alumni and getting them on board to man the ship, today the gritty team of Manoj Vasudevan. Sandeep Thalluri, Ashish Khandelwal and Bharat Bongu are putting in tons of man hours in order to put Source Pilani on the map.

The establishment of a rural BPO was mainly to tackle and capitalize on the problems faced by the urban BPO’s such as high attrition rates, increasing salary costs and sky-rocketing real estate prices. This lead to the belief that such a move would provide a host to some of the biggest opportunities such as access to a large pool of talented work force in and around Pilani, world class infrastructure facilities. Apart from this it would also help in building a brand name of the Goenka’s in the social entrepreneurship sector.

Today Source Pilani has several clients including some international ones. One success story which the founders narrated to me was regarding their work in the medical transcription domain:

“We partnered with Truworth to deliver Medical Transcription services. We have been consistently achieving 98.9% quality. Trueworth started realizing cost benefits of around 30%”

Source Pilani has also been providing data entry and form processing services to JhunJhunu (district in which Pilani is located) collectorate for e-Gram and NREGS. They have been delivering exceptional service despite the complex work flow. They deal accurately with a large volume of data of 890 villages and were recognized and felicitated by the district collectorate for the outsourcing services they provided

With revenues already in lakhs, an ever increasing list of clients, a stable workforce of 60 skilled personnel who are regularly rewarded based on their performance and a board consisting of BITS Pilani faculty and Alumni, things look bright for Source Pilani.

They are currently also participating in Tata NEN’s hottest Startup award, you can vote for them here

Alternatively, you can also SMS HOT117 to 56767