The Balancing Act: just about right

This is my third Skoll Forum, and I definitely think that it was the best. And that's saying something, since I got my award last year and that was pretty exciting.  The challenge here has been the balancing act between the business school home of the Forum and the practitioner community.  A couple of years ago, the focus was too academic and much of the material was not interesting to the social entrepreneurs.  And, I know that academics need this kind of interaction: it's their career and passion.  This year I think they got it right.  Most of the plenaries were focused on inspiration and building the field as a whole.  As usual (based on last year), we got to see four Sundance-created short films on Skoll entrepreneurs.  The researchers got two days of focused seminars and content, while the practitioners and non-academic attendees were happily engaged in workshops and what I dubbed "master classes:" where Skoll Award winners would sit down and talk about their challenges.  Their real challenges, not the ones they talk about when they are selling their organization! 

Closing Plenary Speech by Larry Brilliant

Larry Brilliant did a great job inspiring us with a speech I've never heard him give before, because I've only heard him speak post-Google about Google.org.  And, it wasn't your typical inspirational speech: Larry went dark before he put forth the light.  He gave us all of the reasons to be pessimistic, before he started to open the door to the possibility we might solve the problems.  And then he went for the jugular in the core part of his talk: he talked about the appalling suffering  that smallpox inflicted, with graphic pictures of smallpox victims.  As someone who  helped lead the successful effort to eradicate smallpox, Larry talked about looking at hell on earth: the faces of people dying from smallpox.  It's easy now to forget how terrible a disease this was.  His core message: if we successfully got rid of this pestilence, human beings can be up to the challenges facing us today. 

Jeff Skoll

Jeff was quite accessible this week.  He spent over an hour giving a talk to the Skoll social entrepreneurs on Tuesday before the event.  He was very open to questions about his life and future directions.  As someone who has already done some incredible things (eBay and Participant Productions being the two most notable examples), we're all interested to see what's next as Jeff considers his next moves.  I felt Jeff did a great job speaking: he's really settling into this role as one of the tech/business communty's leading drivers of social progress.  He also hung out with the social entrepreneurs at least three of the nights this week.  And the best of those nights was the final party for the Skoll team and awardees.  See below for pix!

Sundance

After the conference concluded, the social entrepreneurs got together for two topics.  The first was to discuss some issues in small groups we had set the topics for (I was in the group talking about a bigger vision for the movement beyond our individual organizations). The second was all about story-telling.  Sundance had sent two senior executives and four director/producers to spend time with us.  We were in a story-telling workshop and each had to talk about what motivated us, what kept us up at night and what got us up in the morning.  That was the best part for me.  Nick Moon got quite a laugh when he said Martin Fisher kept him up at night.  He then went to point out that Martin is in San Francisco and he is in Nairobi, and the time difference made for late night calls talking about KickStart!

Party for the team

As happened last year, the Skoll staff had a party on the final night.  But last year, the conference ended at noon without afternoon sessions for the Skoll SEs.  So, we had a ton of people.  And, the Skoll team was bigger than just the staff.  There were three MBA student bloggers from Haas: Rob, Ellen and the redoubtable Edwin (former Benetecher).  The conference team attended.  Nina Smith brought her baby.  The Sundance team was there.  Spouses.  Daughters (grown-up daughters).  It was a tapas restaurant and the format encouraged people to circulate during dinner: a great format.  And, Jeff spent the evening talking to people in 1's, 2's and 3's.  I mean, he helped make Al Gore into an Oscar-Award winning actor: what might he be able to do with a social entrepreneur!  And someone was kind enough to grab my camera and take the picture below to prove I and Taddy were actually there!

Finale

The big messages of the Forum for me came from some of the big names: Muhammad Yunus, Jeff Skoll, Larry Brilliant and Fazel Abed.  They were pretty consistent:

• the world's problems need original solutions from dynamic risk-takers
• go forth and experiment
• expect to fail a few times, until you get your concept working
• When you've got it right, just do it over and over with more people (Yunus said get it right once, replicate 6 billion times)

The goal is to get more of the world's people behind making the change.  I like to think we pushed the cause forward a little faster this week!

 

 

 

 

 

The big celebration was also in the Sheldonian: the 2007 Awards for Social Entrepreneurship.  And it was exciting!
Below, I have picked a few select photos: the rest are on my Flickr page.




Salman Ahmed got the crowd pumping as before, and then we met our four rockstar presenters (well, at least one is literally a rock star, and the other three have a pretty good claim to the status): Jeff Skoll, Peter Gabriel, Sally Osberg and Muhammad Yunus.



The ten new Skoll award winners got their moment in the sun (well, the klieg lights).  For social entrepreneurs (except Jeff) this is the Academy Awards, and the smiles were beaming.  I picked Dan Viederman of Verite out as a good example.  Do you have any doubt we are looking at  a guy who has slogged through a lot of tough stuff and is celebrating the moment with  zeal?

 

This year is my year for moderation.  I speak a great deal, and have come to appreciate the role of a capable moderator.  Now it's my turn (am I a "gasp" senior stateman?  statesperson?).

I moderated two panels at the Forum. The first was Fazel Abed of BRAC and Susan Collin Marks of Search for Common Ground.  Our topic was growth: both of these organizations touch millions of people, but in very different ways.  BRAC is Bangladesh's largest NGO (maybe the world's largest).  They employ over 100,000 people.  Abed's approach is to systematically take on the "universal problems of the poor:" health, education and economic opportunity.  BRAC does an amazing number of things and seems to play a more important role in the lives of the poor than Bangladesh's government (but Abed would never say that). 

Search for Common Ground  delivers its messages in a variety of ways, but most typically media.  They produce radio soap operas and TV shows designed to illustrate key social issues: ethnic  co-existence, HIV/AIDS,  and so on.  The core  mission is to reduce conflict in society. 

Both groups have some common traits.  Constant experimentation, measurement and improvement were clearly part of the plan.  Training and knowledge improvement of staff. 

It was easy to moderate two top social entrepreneurs who effectively played off each other while delivering their distinct messages.  And, it helps to have great prep work done by Skoll staff (and Charlie Leadbeater). 

The opening plenary was enjoyable: best Skoll Forum opening that I've attended.  My fellow bloggers have captured many more of the details, so I'll focus on sharing my pictures and the mood.  The weather was spectacular!



The exciting musician Salman brought his dynamic style with the guitar and got the crowd really going. 



Pat Mitchell interviewed Muhammad Yunus, and he did what he does so well: make social action sounds completely obvious and straightforward.  You feel like marching out and making it all happen!



Queen Rania of Jordan is always an impressive speaker.  She manages to deliver her messages so effectively, while  phrasing her words in such a way that it's impossible to quote her out of context.  It's an impressive art and skill, given the incredibly difficult circumstances of Middle East politics. 

I confess, I have a new camera and I'm having fun taking lots of pictures: far more than I can blog.  So, I'm putting them up on my Flickr account. 

 

Isn't this cool?  Kevin Jones pointed me at this for tomorrow's session on human rights social entrepreneurs...

Just arrived in Oxford in time for the opening Monday night dinner of the Skoll Forum.  The Skoll social entrepreneurs get a day together before the big opening on Tuesday afternoon.   The location is Exeter College, whose dining hall was the prototype for Hogwarts in the Harry Potter film.




It  was a time to meet old friends and new social entrepreneurs.  There are a handful of new Skoll staffers so  this was a time to meet the team.  It was also a chance to meet Jeff Skoll in person. 






Each of the new social entrepreneurs spoke for several minutes about what drew them to do this work.  The funniest guy as usual was Joe Madiath.  Long-time Beneblog followers know Joe as the guy who didn't fully recognize Al Gore when he bumped into him at Davos.  Joe talked about organizing his father's workers while a teenagers and getting elected president of the union (he was quickly bundled off to boarding school!). 

I am rushing around getting ready to fly in a couple of hours to London en route to the Skoll Forum. Trying to squeeze in some meetings before and after the Forum, to take advantage of being in the UK. So, I have one meeting in London right after landing Monday morning, and have a couple lined up for Friday.

Just came home yesterday from the biggest disability technology show of the year, the CSUN conference. Adobe and we gave a well received presentation on our efforts to make a Save-As-Accessible-Book option directly out of Adobe Acrobat. We have it working in the lab reasonably well, and now need to complete testing and packaging it as a solution.

The biggest highlight of that conference was brainstorming with the best minds in the assistive tech field about the future. I spent several hours with Professor Gregg Vanderheiden of the University of Wisconsin TRACE Center, who is in my opinion the top U.S. academic leader in the field. Gregg has been pushing me with his "raising the floor" concept: that all people with disabilities in the world should have a basic level of access to information technology. It's a great concept, and Gregg is encouraging me to run with it in fields beyond disability (although that's where our initial focus will be).

And of course, that's one of the attractions of the Skoll Forum. I get to hang out with the best minds in the social entrepreneurship field: academics, practitioners, funders, communicators and so on. I get to try out my latest ideas on people and vice versa.

All I have to do to get ready is clear my email Inbox on the flight over!
Labels: Acrobat, Adobe, CSUN, raising the floor, Skoll

Amazing how fast we slide right back into "real life." Davos was only a couple of days ago and already I'm neck deep into my normal work.

It is worth taking a moment to reflect on the many faces of the Davos experience. Each person attending has many options to choose among, and you can't do it all. Here are just a few of the Davos' I saw in action last week.

Deal Davos (aka bilateral Davos)

You come to Davos to meet with a handful of specific people who are also there at the same time. Your time is dedicated to a moderate room in some Davos hotel, as your team runs a steady stream of key customers, suppliers and potential partners through. Davos as nexus for minimizing global travel.

Political Davos

You see Davos as a place to get exposed to leading politicians from around the world, where you can hear Tony Blair, Angela Merkel and King Abdallah of Jordan and a hot of others. A place where American politicians get exposed to world opinion and protest, not so much from the folks outside the gates of the WEF, but from leading businesspeople around the world.

Educational Davos

You get educated on the big issues facing your business and society (often the same issues). Top experts explain these issues with a depth and sophistication you rarely get elsewhere. You have interactive workshops and role playing with 40 other CEOs, digging into issues from completely different vantage points. I especially enjoyed the Digital Piracy workshop where a handful of us had to develop and present the "Commercial Pirate's Manifesto!"

Sporty Davos

You get to drive fast cars. Ecologically friendly fast cars. Skiing and sledding and snowboarding and cross country. Parties of every way shape and form, especially tuned for customers. Music and arts experiences.

(Global) Society Davos

You can spend all of your time on social issues, hanging with the heads of NGOs (the international name for nonprofits), major labor unions, religious leaders and of course the social entrepreneurs. You can learn more about the environment, about human rights, about development aid, about the digital divide, about microfinance, about healthy food and about disaster response. I was excited to be part of two sessions about improving disaster response through technology and corporate engagement with NGOs.

Ideas Davos

You get to see lots of inventions and new company ideas: a huge variety. I saw a 3 Watt LED light bulb as bright as a 60W bulb but cool enough to hold in your hand. I saw a pair of adjustable eyeglasses for kids in the developing world that cost less than $1 a pair to make. I heard about medical advances to combat strokes and diabetes. My favorite of these was an invention that you swallow and it takes pictures of your digestive tract, instead of needing the dreaded sigmoidoscopy. It was nicknamed "the light at the end of the tunnel!"

Young Davos

You get to meet up and coming business, media and political leaders: the people who will likely be at Davos in the future. I enjoyed seeing Mayor Gavin Newsome and his girlfriend, who I thought was just a gorgeous actress but also turned out to be a top Stanford Business School graduate. Plus, the WEF is staffed by an army of brilliant young people eager to change the world, people like Jesse Fahnestock who used to run Bookshare.org for us.

Friendly Davos

You get to spend lots of time with people you know through Davos over the years or other aspects of your life. The pressures of day-to-day work aren't there, and you can spend an hour impromptu with someone you had always wanted to meet. In a past year, I got to spend an hour chatting with David Baltimore, Nobel Laureate and then-president of Caltech, my alma mater. At an alumni event, I would get 60 seconds!

Conclusion

You can't do it all, as I said above. The hardest decisions to make are what to not do. What blend of the Davos cocktail will you have is a big challenge. For example, I decided this year to avoid political Davos because I thought other things were more important to my work. The richness of the experience lets you give up on some parts and still feel like you didn't shortchange yourself. But, it's very hard to get enough sleep!

I walked away with easily 60 business cards of people with whom I should be following up. Some of them will get involved with Benetech and that will be great. Some will send new people my way and vice versa. Some of them are on similar paths to mine and I know we'll be helping each other advance. Davos is just another branch of the great karma bank.

Hope I get to go back again!

Every year there's a big party at the WEF on the last night (Saturday). Countries vie to sponsor the main event, throwing a big show and serving up their best food. Of course, the reason is economic development. After the opening show, we were treated to a short video extolling the virtues of investing in Malaysia. Knowing their audience it prominently featured a beautiful golf course (and of course beautiful Malaysian women). I was surprised how attentive the audience was to this commercial. Willing participants in a transaction of an evening of entertainment for a four minute video.






















The Malaysians had brought a dance troupe, and it was fun. It had more of a feeling of a traditional cultural experience than last year's India party (which was Bollywood to the max). After singing some Malaysian songs, the four top singers switched to popular (American) music. Lots of Motown. And of course, we were dancing up a storm. There was also two other venues for music: one was sort of a jazz nightclub with jazz duos and the other had South African singers followed by recorded dancing music.

My challenge on these parties is that they go very late. Because I'm staying at the Schatzalp, the last train up the mountain leaves at 2 am. If you miss it, the next train is at 6 am! And, there were some people who ended up on the 6 am funicular. Of course, I caught the 2 am train and ended up in the lounge of the Schatzalp talking about the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) project and getting a CD of Amazonian music from my Brazilian buddies (the big column in Brazil's major Sao Paolo paper was entitled (Jungle Boys go to Davos!).

Over the five years I've attended the WEF, the level of protesting has gone way down. I like to think that inviting social entrepreneurs and other representatives of wider society has played a role in this. Of course, the issues are different and the U.S. presence seems lower.


I did run into a nice protester on the street. Uli was protesting against the Swiss banks taking five times more money in from the developing world than it puts back out. His direct concern was about corrupt elites that stash their ill-gotten gains in Switzerland. He was advocating for legal changes that would allow more transparency in such cases and permit countries to recover looted assets. We had quite a pleasant chat.

Of course, not all of the interactions were pleasant. One night after a party, one of my fellow social entrepreneurs got hit in the head by a snowball thrown by some punks shouting slogans. However, my buddy felt it was just drunk kids acting up rather than a political act!

People are often surprised when I tell them how social entrepreneurs are well received at Davos. We're full participants in panels, including being speakers. I think the reason for this integration is the strong support of the WEF's founder, Prof. Klaus Schwab, for the regard of social entrepreneurs.

One great example of this was a major reception held last night with the following hosts: Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce.com), Prof. & Mrs. Schwab, Michael Dell, Peter Gabriel (rockstar and founder of Witness), Alan Hassenfeld (Hasbro) and Marilyn Carlson Nelson (Carlson Travel). The reception was held in honor of social entrepreneurs and marking the release of a new book edited by Marc Benioff entitled The Business of Changing the World, which is a compendium of essays about business people and their engagement with the social sector. I had some great conversations with people explaining what Benetech does.

Talking to other Social Entrepreneurs

At least half of the highpoints of this week in Switzerland are the interactions I have with other social entrepreneurs. I feel very much at home with these folks, which are my peer community. Last night I was talking to John Wood about his book, Amazon.com: Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. He gave me the direct advice of a social entrepreneur in the middle of marketing his first book: immensely useful.

Moving on to dinner, I sat next to Garth Japhet of Soul City in South Africa, a doctor/social entrepreneur who leads an organization that uses media to influence behavior that affects HIV/AIDS. Garth was able to give me (in less than ten minutes) the reason why HIV spreads so much more quickly in southern Africa than in most other places in the world. He explained that immediately after infection, you are extremely infectious for around three weeks until your immune system beats HIV down to nearly indetectable levels. He noted that while southern Africans do not tend to have a larger lifetime number of sexual partners, they tend to have longer term relationships with multiple partners at the same time. Because a person might be with several long term partners in that several week initial peak infectivity, you will infect several people (and you are less likely to use a condom since it is a long term partner and not a one night stand). And if your partners are similarly oriented, they could infect several more people. Garth noted that a single infection leads to many more infections given this profile compared to societies where you might have as many sexual partners over your lifetime, but where the likelihood of having multiple partners during this three week period is much less.

Like many of my conversations with social entrepreneurs, I feel like I have a window into a crucial social issue from someone with an unparalleled vantage point. And, I get to have at least a dozen of these in-depth conversations every time I come to Davos!

Davos is more than eating, drinking, and paneling (speeches). Significant numbers of other activities are here, and they are often unusual.

I attended the Internet governance panel this morning (lest you think that Davos is all play and no work). Fascinating panel: Vint Cerf (Google), Michael Dell(), John Markoff (New York Times), Hamadoun Toure (ITU), Jonathan Zittrain (Oxford) and moderated by Paul Saffo (Institute for the Future). Just a few snapshots:

John Markoff did an effective job of telling us how bad things are. Botnets (infected PCs under the control of bad guys) represent over 10% of the PCs connected to the Internet. Microsoft Vista illegal copies are already for sale in China, in spite of Microsoft's efforts. According to Microsoft, over a third of illegal copies of their OSs come with trojan infections pre-installed. He noted that Microsoft has spent tremendous amounts of effort in Vista protecting premium content. By extension, wondered what things would be like if Microsoft had spent as much efforts on protecting your private information. His bottom line:

It's as bad as you could possibly imagine!

Jonathan Zittrain made a strong analogy that the Internet today is as structurally weak as AT&T's telephone network was back in the days when you could get free telephone calls using a Cap'n crunch toy whistle.

I can't quote Vint Cerf or the ITU guy (didn't ask permission), but they brought good perspectives to the panel. Michael Dell stayed on corporate message. Wasn't clear that we made much progress on the stated topic, but I did miss the first few minutes!

I hope to share a little of the flavor of Davos as we get into what's going on. Davos is a little mountain town in a valley with ski slopes on both sides. There are basically two main drags around the town, an upper one and a lower one, that meet at the two ends of town and make a long winding oval. City buses and shuttle minivans circle around the town, mainly running around the racetrack (which is one-way in several areas). The Congress Center is in the middle, and that's where the big events happen. But many other events are scattered around the hotels of Davos, and it can take 25 or 30 minutes to walk between the most far flung ones.

Last night I went to the Blogger's nightcap at a hotel at the eastern end of Davos. I came out after midnight and found that there were no buses or shuttles running anymore, so I just walked back to my hotel's funicular. That's not a term I use frequently! It's a train that takes you from town level up 1000 feet to the Schatzalp hotel, which sits well above the valley. Like several hotels in Davos, it's a former TB clinic, and was featured in Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain." I hadn't eaten dinner, and so ended up getting food at the one bar I found open while walking more than half the length of the main drag! I ran into some fun Brazilian social entrepreneurs I hadn't met before (based in the Amazon) and we ended up drinking beers and swapping stories well into the night.

And, that's a key part of the Davos flavor. Yes, you are meeting people you want to meet or people you already know. But, the magic comes when you let serendipity lead you forward. Almost everyone here does something interesting, and you are more likely than not find a common interest with someone you would never would have a priori guessed would be passionate about human rights, or technology, or the political situation in Bangladesh, or environmental change, or...

And of course, the best place to meet people are in the six person minivans. Last year I jumped into one and sat across from George Soros. People are accessible and interested in knowing more about everybody, and it creates a real opportunity to accelerate three month's of new meetings into three or four days.

We're wrapping up an intense couple of days here in Zurich, and I take the spectacular train to Davos this afternoon. The event here in Zurich is the Schwab Social Entrepreneur Summit, where roughly a hundred social entrepreneurs get together with global leaders to advance the movement.

Sunday was a day of content aimed just at the social entrepreneurs. We discussed leadership, recruiting and succession, among other topics. This content has been driven by requests from the SEs themselves, looking for help in developing their leadership style and their organizations. Many of the SEs are senior, having been leading their organizations for longer than a decade, and many longer than that. Succession issues: how do we build an organization that will outlive our involvement, and how to approach recruiting a successor to the founder, was a session that I moderated. My panelists were Jeroo Billimoria, a serial social entrepreneur from India who founded Child Helpline in India and took it global (as well as starting three other social enterprises); Tom Friel, the Chair of Heidrick & Struggles, the global recruiting firm; Bruce Pasternak, CEO of Special Olympics (and the first CEO not from the founding Shriver clan); and Jennifer Broggini, board member from TechnoServe (member of the search committee that found successors to her father, the founder of TechnoServe).

On Monday we were joined by a dazzling array of global leaders who are interested in social entrepreneurship. Schwab Foundation board members Paolo Coehlo (the noted Brazilian author), Zanelle Mbeki (first lady of South Africa) and Hilde Schwab, the co-founder of the Schwab Foundation. Notable attendees included Larry Brilliant, the head of Google.org, Jonathan Greenblatt, founder of Ethos Water, Ron Grzywinski, founder of ShoreBank, Tim Wirth, head of the UN Foundation, Matthew Bishop of the Economist, and scores of other similar luminaries. The foundation community was also well represented, especially the Skoll Foundation. Skoll and Schwab have the two leading social entrepreneurship networks for senior practitioners, and it's great to see them working together to advance the movement.

Tuesday was kicked off by Jacques Aigran, the President of Swiss Re, the insurance company that hosted the summit at their elegant facility in Ruschlikon, a suburb of Zurich.

Aigran noted that Swiss Re was interested in several aspects of the SE field, including bringing insurance to the developing world, as well as being involved in the global warming crisis (which he feels will disproportionately hurt the poor in the developing world). Hilde Schwab declared the Schwab commitment to making social entrepreneurs better known throughout the world. Her best example was Muhammed Yunus, who is also a board member of the Schwab Foundation, who of course won the Nobel Peace prize last year. She noted that Yunus worked for twenty years before anyone in the West noticed!

Out of all the panels I attended, I especially wanted to let you know about the kickoff panel on Monday. The panel was moderated by Greg Dees of Duke University, one of the leading business school professors tracking and analyzing the social entrepreneurship movement. He pointed out that SEs are all about breaking away from charity and alms giving and focusing on pragmatic problem solving. Mirai Chatterjee of the Self Employed Women's Association in India explains social entrepreneurs as private initiatives that used business models around financial sustainability, self-help and empowerment. Her inspiration for this work included Gandhi, who of course was all about self-reliance!

Matthew Bishop of the Economist Magazine made some interesting points. He continued the theme of claiming social entrepreneurial status (we had earlier heard that insurance was an SE as well as Gandhi), by explaining that the magazine had been started in 1843 to remove trade barriers in the UK, which were hurting the poor by driving up food prices. His analysis of global entrepreneurship is that it has gone through a revolution in the last thirty years, driven by transparency and innovation in capital markets. Breakthroughs by entrepreneurs are followed by productivity improvements embedded in more traditional organizations. He foresees a continued drive towards improving effectiveness as the relationships among states, corporations and private individuals evolve. We've come to recognize the limitations of the nation state, especially around innovation. He also forecast an evolution in capital markets and a rise of intermediaries in the SE field.

Roger Martin, dean of the U. Toronto business school, talked about the need to drive new skills into the business school community, especially improving the teaching of entrepreneurship and trying to teach empathy. Bill Drayton rounded out the panel. As the founder of Ashoka, the biggest and oldest global network of social entrepreneurs, he's known as the godfather of the movement.

The final quotes are from the man of the hour, Larry Brilliant, the new head of Google.org. Everyone in the SE movement is waiting to hear more about his vision for Google.org, since anything seems possible for Google. Larry described his ten months at Google as drinking from a firehose, and explained:

This is the morally most challenging moment in my life,
but I've never felt more alive!

He also announced that Microsoft (and I think Yahoo!) and Google are planning to work together in the area of disaster preparedness.

It was a gratifying couple of days, and I've only scratched the surface. But, tonight I'll be in Davos and getting ready for the next phase of this trip!

It's that time of year when social entrepreneurs get to hang out and carouse with the world's leaders. I'm en route to Switzerland for two conferences (or, a pre-conference and a conference).

This is where many of the key global players from the social entrepreneurship field get together, under the auspices of Klaus and Hilde Schwab. The first event is the Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur Summit. Klaus is the founder and head of the WEF. And, later in the week I move to Davos for the World Economic Forum - Annual Meeting 2007.

I very much enjoy blogging from Switzerland, and sharing my experiences. I feel it's a privilege to attend, and appreciate the enthusiastic engagement social entrepreneurs receive from the most senior corporate and government leaders. The leaders who take a week out to attend Davos are very interested in global issues, both as these issues impact their business but also their families and the world.

This will be my fifth Davos in a row, and I am definitely far more comfortable than I was the first time. The key epiphany I had was how human the Davos attendees are. This is a chance for them to interact directly with other people without the all-encompassing cocoon that normally surrounds them.

This is a place where their concerns for their children and grandchildren can be openly expressed rather than being deemed inappropriate for polite business conversation. These are real people who yearn to be part of the solution rather than the problem.

I look forward to sharing the (nonconfidential) parts of the conversations I have, and hope that at the end of this coming week you feel slightly heartened about the future!

I realized I didn't provide a link to more pictures, so here are 50 from the Skoll World Forum, Oxford 2006 - a photoset on Flickr.