Jim Fruchterman at the Skoll World Forum

Heading to Oxford!

2007-03-25T15:21:00.000Z

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!

We have moved!

2007-02-06T21:59:00.000Z

Jim Fruchterman is now on Social Edge. Please update your browser and RSS feeds.

Skoll World Forum, Oxford 2006 - a photoset on Flickr

2006-03-31T08:46:00.000Z

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.

Story Telling, Sundance style

2006-03-31T07:04:00.000Z

One of the major themes of working with the Skoll Foundation is the focus on stories. That's what Jeff does with Participant Productions, and a big piece of the Foundation's efforts are around helping us tell stories. Many social entrepreneurs actively avoid telling stories about themselves: they tell stories about other people more easily.

At last night's awards ceremonies, the highlight was seeing four short films on four of the Skoll Social entrepreneurs. I learned that my buddy Martin Burt was on the front line of a revolution in Paraguay when mayor of the capital city, by calling in garbage trucks and bulldozers to surround the congress building while the army was busy shooting people. Only the tenacity of the filmmakers got this story out of Martin, who otherwise would be talking about his dream of helping turn poor farmers into rural entrepreneurs. Another film was a compelling version of the turning point for Victoria Hale when a taxidriver challenged her thinking about why the pharma industry can't make drugs that could save hundreds of thousands of lives (because the customers would only be poor people). Ann Cotton talked about why it is so crucial for girls to have access to education, and I learned even more about her drive for girls education in Africa. Finally, Amitabha Sadangi told in Hindi about his background as a very poor person who had the opportunity to get top academic degrees and then decided to help people like him rather than go for the bucks. His affordable drip irrigation systems make it possible for farmers to make more money and keep their kids in school rather than migrating during the year looking for work.

The films were an outcome of a Sundance story-telling workshop where filmmakers and social entrepreneurs got together to create better ways of telling their story.
Robert Redford is a huge fan of social entrepreneurship, and he really engaged in what we were doing. He tracked me down to explain what we were doing in our new environmental project!

Social Entrepreneurs Doing Deals

2006-03-30T14:50:00.000Z

I am having a blast at the Skoll Forum: spending tons of time talking to people about social change and technology. The best part has been talking to the other Skoll entrepreneurs. By putting us all in the same hotel, and giving us plenty of time to talk, we're coming up with tons of ways that we can work together to advance our common missions. Just some quick examples:

- Heidi Kuhn of Roots of Peace: Heidi has actually driven a great deal of real landmine removal, and she is very strong on the human and public side of the issue (somewhere where we are not strong). I know that as soon as we have a working prototype of our landmine detector (which is some time off in the future), we'll get help getting it tested in some of the most mine affected countries

- Bunker Roy of the Barefoot College: Bunker is pushing me to do something for blind people in India, and I am getting excited about the challenge

- talking to John Wood of Room to Read about his computer labs and their (successful) efforts to publish children's books in Nepali and Khmer. They are definitely tackling market failure in the publishing industry: in Nepal they are now the second largest publisher of children's books in Nepali.

- Rodrigo Baggio (of CDI in Brazil) and I are trying to find more time together since we're both in the IT space: we know there's a joint project here somewhere.

and more. There is such a natural desire to find ways to work together, and each of us has major strengths to bring to any such partnership. I don't expect each of these conversations to result in something in the coming year, but I'm sure we will find at least one "live one" in the next year, and more after that.

Practicing for the big event

2006-03-28T15:44:00.000Z

The different social entrepreneurs have started showing up: we have a day of meetings before the main Skoll Forum starts. There are sixteen social entrepreneur award winners this year: three are past Skoll grantees, but this is our first chance to be on stage for the big award ceremony. And six of the new SASEs are people I have never met before, and it's cool learning about what they do.

Sandy Herz got the new SASEs together this afternoon to do a practice run for the big event on Thursday night. I just found out it's going to be live on Social Edge. We had fun running through the rehearsal, with different Skoll staff standing in for Jeff Skoll, Robert Redford, Sir Ben Kingsley and Sally Osberg (CEO of the Skoll Foundation). We definitely camped it up: we'll probably be more serious on Thursday night.

In Oxford for the Skoll Forum!

2006-03-26T20:40:00.000Z

I'm already here in Oxford and getting ready for the Skoll World Forum. This week I'm hanging out with the Skoll crowd and they've picked out a really cool hotel that used to be the Oxford prison (the hotel's name is Malmaison, or "bad house"). My room is made from three former jailcells. The windows still have bars on them. Reminds me of my old office five years ago at Moffett Field (which used to be the drug dispensary and had bars to keep people out, not in!).
The door is still the same metal encased door with a porthole for grub (haven't figured out if room service has a key). However, the hotel added a standard door handle to make it into a hotel room.

When you go out the door, you're looking at a typical prison cell block with catwalks and all.

My excitement about being here is based on the people I'm going to get to meet. First, there's time with my peers, other social entrepreneurs. This was a big highlight last year, and one of the main reasons I come to events like this. Second, I get to spend time with the Skoll Foundation team. Although we're located a mile apart in California, I'll probably get more face-time here in Oxford because we're all sheltered from the pressures of normal office obligations. This includes hearing from Jeff Skoll. Last year, I heard about Participant Productions and got an idea of how big Jeff's plans were. Now, seeing how much success he's had with films like North Country, Syriana, Murderball, Gandhi (dubbed into Arabic) and the New Heroes series, I'm really looking forward to hearing more from Jeff. Third, there are all the cool people who are excited about social entrepreneurship and want to get involved (or are already involved). Last year, I was very impressed with the business school students and professors I met, especially those in the Skoll Program at Said (the Oxford business school).

Well, more as it unfolds!