Erik Sundelof's blog

Around the world. Constantly. Something is happening. The snap of the moment. A flash. A picture. A video. A short text message. A reflection.

It cannot have passed anyone that the Grameen Bank got awarded the Nobel Peace Prize some time ago, and the scientific community thinks about the social entrepreneurship more seriously than ever before. Yet many both inside the social entrepreneur community as well as outside tend not to see what social entrepreneurship is and more importantly why we so desperately need it.

I attended the Where 2.0 conference earlier this week. The topic as to address the new GeoWeb, which in short is simply mashup of content based on location. The conference highlighted strategies and different applications in this very interesting field. My thoughts and reflections on the conference are:

I read The death of Wikipedia by Nicholas Carr telling the story of the death of Wikipedia. I have as many know been critical about the Wikipedia, which is a great construct, yet surprisingly very few realise that any review systems will need hierachies within the community.

Cellphone applications today are often focused on, in some sense simplified, displaying the web page on the cellphone. The web pages are more or less exclusively designed only considering the restrains of a regular work station. This is perhaps one most important challenge in future cellphone solutions and in many ways this is a philosophical challenge rather than a technological challenge. Nevertheless, I will not try to fully address the challenge in this blog post, but indicate what I believe are the key elements of it and sketch the solution.

I am collaborating with the Graduate School of Business here at Stanford, and usual working with students is always an intriguing and fruitful experience, which I usually cherish a lot. We did touch a quite interesting matter of what a social venture really is during a discussion on the project. Do all social ventures include a non-profit approach or can you have social ventures based on a ‘purely’ for-profit model? Can a commercialised approach ever do any good?

Blogging is changing the way we look on the content on the web and the media. It is more and more becoming a way to easy-publish to the web. Yet many blogs are lacking the fundamental design and architecture of a more conventional website. Where will this saga end?

Information is power.

Thus less surprising are the buzz of information and the communication of it. My project here at Stanford is about information and how we can transfer that information from in-the-field to an information database. Initially the project is focused on an open-source news application to be used in emerging democracies. Very few people are reflecting on what this information is and for what purpose it exists? The question “Do we really need all this information?” emerges…

I have looked at the report from WSIS-meeting in Tunisia and to be honest it is rather disappointing. A lot of talk ending up in a report that really says very little on anything, especially how to really change the problem of digital divide. I will let a friend of mine explain why (at least to some extent).

Atif and I went to the November event with ESW Bay Area and listen to two speeches - Biomimicry For Designers, Jeremy Faludi, and ESW Stanford Response to Tsunami, Molly Morse. Both were very interesting, and especially the second one had importance for both Atif's and Samuel Perry's projects.

We also had the oppurtunity to present the program with some posters to show the diversity of projects, and handouts with presentations of all the fellows. The response from the audience was good and everyone seemed interested in the program. The Chapter President Felipe Albertao invited us to participate in any upcoming events.