I spent much of September working with the iSpirt folks on our comments on India’s upcoming Data Protection and Privacy bill. The full comments are here: http://pn.ispirt.in/ispirt-final-comments-data-privacy-bill/

But the most interesting thing are the UX pictures, where I’ve tried to think through what informed consent might actually mean on a smartphone, when one is being asked to provide access rights to their bank account say for the next months.

At Jaaga.in, we’ll be working in the coming year on a set of usability studies to build a multi-lingual set of interfaces (smartphone, voice-only, etc) to get confidence in a UX design that works reasonably well for every Indian adult to provide informed consent. Stay tuned….

Given at the State Dept/Unreasonable Goals Summit in June 2017.

Summary

Scaling confidence and creating innovation ecosystems are key to fighting poverty and creating economic growth and yet many countries retard these goals through their education, telecommunication, import and immigration policies.

This paper thus advocates six paths to improve the bedrock of innovation…

1. Recognition that progress arises from building on top…

Abstract

Rather than building informal sector digital job exchanges themselves, governments should encourage an eco-system of exchanges by lowering costs and barriers of entry and encourage a sufficient market for competing exchanges to innovate against each other — even in smaller, poor countries.

In particular, governments should:

1. Encourage the use…

Woo hoo! We are coming out to the world at MozFest this weekend! We’re on the decentralization floor and would love to meet folks and give away grants. :-)

Sadly, I got dengue, Archana and I had to cancel our tickets but our co-Founder Tej and awesomely stepped in to…

Achilles: Hi Tortoise, I want to give you a chunk of something that I’ve been working on, The ADAO. Its currency — adacoins — are similar to a share of an art-collective but over time will hopefully develop incredible value.

The Tortoise: OK…. …

The ADAO is a cryptocurrency-based philanthropy fund that supports creatives who leverage technology to advance the SDGs. The ADAO is an acronym for The Altruistic Democratic Autonomous Organization. It will issue its own currency — adacoins — with social values built into it.

How does it work?

A significant share…

A Good Social Entrepreneur picks a problem she deeply believes in and is worth spending 5–10 years dedicating her life to solving. Bad Social Entrepreneurs cannot name the particular problem where they can demonstrably affect change or choose problems based on where donor or VC money is.

A Good Social…