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 of the best ideas of others, wherever they may be.
2. Cheap Mobile Internet and Phones — so everyone can watch and contribute to the best ideas in the world.
3. Low Import Duties for Tinkerers and Startups — so they can quickly build new products leveraging the world’s best hardware (as…

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 of standard digital formats for job seekers and jobs, enabling friction-less and free digital interoperability among employers, job seekers, government ministries, schools and digital exchanges.

2. Expose job seeker registration data collected by government agencies to job exchanges, freely and transparently in order to lower the costs of job seeker…

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 be the BANK.

Here’s our program write-up

The ADAO Bank — A philanthropic cryptocurrency

Presented at Mozfest 2017 at Ravensbourne College, Oct 28–29

Archana Prasad, is an artist from Bangalore, India. Her work is a particular conjunction of visual art, technology and urban community art, ste​wed​ in design and research methodologies. As Founder of Jaaga.in, …

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…. What am I supposed to do with it?

Achilles: Four things actually. First, find a few people you completely admire who are doing work to save the planet and give them a few adacoins. Second, hold onto the rest, because the whole point of this is that the artists and social do-gooders finally get some upside in…

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 of the currency will form an endowment to support SDG focused artists and social organizations worldwide, with governance and decisions over who gets funded controlled by the community of adacoin holders via Ethereum smart contracts.

To raise funds, we will accept donations in other crypto-currencies directly such as ETH and…

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 Entrepreneur retains board members they respect, who care about their organization’s mission and generously and expertly give at least one of 3 things: connections, actionable guidance and/or money. They use board meetings as deadlines to think deeply and rigorously about the company’s most important problems and motivate their teams. …