WITNESS

Somehow things have shifted from a heady, analytical space to a place in the heart. We got into a conversation about empathy and Peter Gabriel talked about the time he spent playing music with Bonopo Apes (in fact, he had a dream to start 'ApeNet' which would be a site where they could communicate with eachother). Anyway, Cocoa who was capable of a kind of sign language communication was very upset after Sept 11th because everyone around her was so upset, and she asked why. They replayed the footage of the airplanes crashing into the Twin Towers and she signed 'Planes crashed into buildings. People died. I am sorry.'
I find that heart wrenchingly touching.

And it's related to this notion floating around here that maybe and hopefully we are on the cusp of a transformation of human consciousness. We need nothing less if we are to survive the next century.

Related quotes:

All communication is intention.

All storytelling is motivated towards action.

The best regime in the world is nothing other than the least bad, and everything still remains to be done.


PS Sorry I don't have attribution for the quotes....my heart is taking over and I cant keep track of these things in the midst of it.

Sorry folks - as you know if you are here - all the interaction comes at you fast and furious and I need to be coherent early tomorrow AM for a presentation with our founder Peter Gabriel on our forthcoming HUB - a 'YouTube For Human Rights' (or as I prefer to say, I 'YouMyWikiTube + Advocacy for Human Rights) and a subsequent interview with the Financial Times that is doing a profile on Peter and his social enterprise (aka WITNESS).

Favorite quotes for today (not attributed) 'no change without individuals, nothing sustained without institutions' and Ghandi.... 'Live like you will die tomorrow, but learn like you expect to live forever.'

 

Goodnight.

I dont know what happened to last night's late night post - it seems to have been lost in cyberspace or perhaps not posted yet?

In any case, I reiterated some favorite quotes from the day....one unattributed was

'Nothing changes without individuals...nothing lasts without institutions.'

And from Gandhi: 'Live like you will die tomorrow. But learn like you will live forever.'

 

And today, from Peter Gabriel in response to a reporter who asked 'what 5 pieces of advice can you give social entrepreneurs?' and he said:

1. Dream in color.

2-5. Never give up on your dream.

 

When the journalist asked me the same question, I said

1. Listen

2. Learn

3. Evolve

4. Don't be afraid to make mistakes

5. Build lasting collaborations and teams

PS Every day I challenge myself to follow my own advice!

I joined Peter Gabriel last night at a private Media Governors meeting which was off the record so I cant attribute remarks....But it was interesting to see the newly established upstart Chris DeWolfe of MySpace, recently acquired by the media giant Newscorp, in conversation with mega-mogul Rupert Murdoch about the future of media. 

Legacy media (ie newspapers, television, radio etc) is in the midst of a revolution (of sorts), racing to adapt to the new media Web 2.0 landscape characterized by citizen journalism, the blogosphere, and the likes of MySpace, Face Book, YouTube, etc. The challenge from the legacy media perspective is how to "monetize" online content while sustaining the traditional cost-heavy infrastructure, ie if you are in the business of delivering and distributing newsprint.  In the US, media giant and newspaper chain Knight Ridder was recently acquired by the highest bidder....a smaller chain.

While legacy media troubles over the challenge, we see the opportunity for a more democratizing, bottom-up influence in how issues are framed and responded to -- hence, the forthcoming Hub!

There are media swarming this place and fortunately for WITNESS we have Peter Gabriel as an ally. Today, we did substantive interviews about our work and a range of human rights issues including our campaign with our partners CPT and CEJIL in Brazil to end the cycle of slavery into which 25,000 Brazilians fall each year. I hope to get a short film we produced with our partners featuring interviews from many people enslaved inside Brazil to President Lula who is here this week. We talked to Retuers, TV8 (Switzerland's prime time news channel), Globo (Brazil), BBC Channel 4 radio (prime time news program), another radio program syndicated throughout the Americas, and the One documentary which is still in production and will include interviews with the Dalai Lama and scores of other leading voices for peace.

Here's a shot of Peter doing an interview with Reuters in Second Life.

You can see his avatar on the computer in the background. When he saw it he quipped: "OH, I've lost weight!"

And then I can't resist....

Peter with a Swiss doctor inspecting his nostrils. I took him to the infirmary for some cough medicine and he got a full review! He says he owes me one for this...

HIV is the cure to all diseases. I'm not sure that I can tell you why, but David S. Wetherell, the Chairman of the Lentigen Corporation in the USA, certainly can. My dear friend (and WITNESS Board member) Van Jones and I were leaving the Belvedere Hotel and a conversation with Gavin Newsome (the Mayor of San Francisco), when we bumped into David (who we didn't know from a whole in the wall) at the coat check. In typical Davos fashion, a random conversation began and we wound up having dinner together. The conversation took a turn for the better when David, who was apparently a former internet mogul and TIME magazine cover story, started explaining that the HIV virus can in fact be the cure for all disease. If I got it right, the good thing about the HIV virus is that it can get to a cell's nucleus -- and Lentigen is supporting biotechnology which uses that so-called "vector", without any of the very ugly other activity of the HIV virus, to transport therapies directly where they need to go.

He says Lentigen is also developing a "vaccine" for 198 out of the 200 known cancers. This preventative was developed by a Nobel Prize winning scientist who studied why people with Downs Syndrome only get 2 of all 200 known cancers - prostate cancer and leukemia. It has to do with the way their cells are constructed and Lentigen have figured a way to replicate this component of the Downs' syndrome cell which eliminates your risk to almost all cancers without causing you any of the symptoms associated with Downs. Am I crazy for blogging this, or is he? I suspect not. In fact, he is has been named one of the top 25 investors in Money Magazine. So let's wait and see. It sounds like these biopharmaceuticals are around the corner...along with something which will double our life span. We begged him to keep the lid on that till we figure out how to manage all our current problems of overpopulation, poverty, etc....

In the Summer of 2007, WITNESS will be premiering the HUB (see www.witness.org/technology) for details.

It's basically a website where anyone anywhere can upload media of human rights abuses and create or connect to communities who can use the media to make a difference. Peter Gabriel and I were talking about the project last year at Davos and have spent the last year planning and analyzing the complex questions that surround it.

This morning, I got a chance to quiz Niklas Zennstrom, the CEO of Skype and Co-founder of a new web broadcasting system called Joost on a range of questions - how can we best preserve the safety of people who upload? should we go for a modification of a commercial platform like YouTube or build something in an open source framework as a mash up of existing technologies? what are the best ways to approach the review process, given the challenges surrounding context, reliability and authenticity. It was encouraging to hear that we seem to be on the right track!

Peter Gabriel arrives late tonight and we are doing press tomorrow including an interview in Second Life with Reuters and Huffington Post. I hope my avatar is under construction! If you dont know what avatars or Second Life is, see www.wikipedia.com. Pretty crazy.

Day three of the Schwab summit and the pace is quickening as we try to juggle lots of sessions, conversations in the hall with Google, Reuters, and fellow entrepreneurs, and preparation for Davos.

With Peter Gabriel as our co-founder and no WITNESS staff assistance at the Forum, I generally assume the role of press contact for media interviews and we have requests pending for a joint interview live with Al Jazeera English and a Huffington Post interview in Second Life, amongst others. Should be interesting. The challenge is how to take advantage of the opportunity for visibility and exposure of our issues without getting sucked into a media vortex and missing the richness of some of the Forum discussions and seminars.

This year at Davos, there is a much-needed focus on climate collapse (branded more euphemistically) and I want to be sure to get better equipped to understand what is going on and how we can make a difference personally and institutionally. There is I think an increasingly dangerous and arbitrary divide between the environmental and the human rights sectors, especially when you consider how many fundamental human rights and needs are predicated on a healthy environment - whether the right to water, or to means of subsistence, etc. I also always like to pick a couple of sessions on off-beat topics I know nothing about - last year's session on the science behind Out of Body Experiences was a highlight!

Finally, the Skoll Foundation which has supported WITNESS' work financed a Predictive Index survey assessment of my leadership style and personality (they actually did this for all the Skoll award winners here at the Summit). After taking a short web-based test, I was given a remarkably accurate asssesment of my leadership style and treated to a lengthy conversation with someone who has been consulting for 25 years in the field. It basically assesses the significance of 4 key characteristics in your personality, namely dominance, patience, formality and extroversion. While I predicted with absolute accuracy how I would rank, the more detailed narrative analysis I was given was very helpful in understanding the types of people I work well with, the kind of institutional climate I have a tendency to create, etc. I look forward to sharing the results with my staff and possibly adding it to the http://www.strengthsfinder.com/ analysis all staff do when they arrive. I also think it can be very useful in recruiting candidates for positions because while intuition is a very instructive guide this gives lots of added information. It deepend my belief in the importance of self-knowledge in management....

More later.

I am in day 2 of the Schwab Forum in Zurich before heading to Davos. They have brought together their network of social entrepreneurs worldwide with academics, business people, and funders or investors in a fairly standard conference format. The social entrepreneurs keep agitating for a less structured environment since I think most of us feel that we learn most from peer dialogue and engagement and as in most conference contexts find that the most meaningful conversations are happening during breaks. As a new Schwab Advisory Council member, I will bring this up in our forthcoming meeting.

That being said, there was a presentation I found interesting yesterday given by Axialent which focuses primarily on the for-profit sector. They talked about cultural archetypes within organizations that they have worked with and categorized them in 5 different ways:
1. Achievement
2. Customer-centric (and in a non-profit context the customer can too often become the foundation rather than the client or intended beneficiary)
3. Innovative
4. One-Team (ie work is done by the group, on behalf of the whole etc)
5. People First (ie a focus on supporting and caring for the people within the organization)
They said from their experience that an organization generally only has one or two dominant characteristics at a time, and the break out discussion revealed that different stages of organizational development may demand different models at different times. I would guess my staff would describe our dominant culture as achievement oriented although I hope and feel they would recognize elements of all the other archetypes as well. I am curious to have the conversation.

Looking forward to Davos, I've emailed the team at WITNESS to let them know I have been invited to a high level but informal breakfast meeting on "Natural Resources, Investment and Development" in Africa with Irene Kahn (Secretary General of Amnesty International), several other leading NGOs and some major multi-nationals involved in the extractive industries including DeBeers, Anglo American and Unilever. As most people are probably aware, natural resource exploitation such as diamond mining in Africa has been the catalyst for many human rights abuses and environmental devastation. I'm looking forward to a frank dialogue about a more productive way forward!

Insights welcome.