(really) entrepreneureal

Yesterday was the first time I voted in an election (ever).  Upon leaving the polling station I felt an overwhelming sense of pride, belonging and engagement that was entirely new to me.  Sure, I’ve felt pride before (watching my sister graduate highschool), belonging (every family reunion) and engagement (volunteering at the YMCA), but never on this scale.  I had a strange urge to run down the street shouting “Hooray for democracy!” (”and don’t forget to vote Obama..”).  Why, then, am I left feeling like elections in America are done all wrong?  That they are divisive, prolonged, and unecessarily difficult?

What would the perfectly designed election look like?

This is obviously a huge question – with an equally sprawling answer.  Where to start? In the run up to E-day we have to contend with a crazy campaign trail that seems to last years (which it does) and sucks millions our of our pockets.  Hell, it even takes up precious TV and Radio airtime, which you know probably pisses off a whole legion of couch surfers.  Then there’s the legislative system (not exactly an easy fix) and the electoral college; the media storm both prior and during the election, which can significantly affect electoral results…the list goes on and on and on.

Where to start, indeed.  Stay tuned for more as I gather my thoughts.

I just read this great post from my friend Ben in D.C. about international development.

It’s interesting that people’s reaction to “development” hasn’t changed much since I left university (which is, admittedly, only a short while), or, for that matter, over the last 60 years, which is more or less when it became an organized activity set.  This is certainly ironic given that development has, for better or worse, shaped the economic, social and environmental fortune of much of the world – you’d think that people would at least know what it is.

Here’s my favorite part from Ben’s post:

” Here’s what international development is to me:  billions of people around the world still aren’t healthy, educated, and online.  They have no voice.  They have few rights.

Meanwhile, technologies in health, science, telecommunications and economics fields that study behavior, developing markets, microfinance, etc. are all converging.

Lift people out of poverty and you connect more people together. “

Sounds a little utopian, but it basically gets at the core of why many of us in development get out of bed every day – or at least it should.

Development is changing every day, though, and the scary part is that most “development practitioners” don’t even know it (also, I hate the term “development practitioner”, it conjures up imagery of dentists).  The theories taught in the undergraduate and graduate programs, the acronym-heavy jargon that development agency drones live and breathe – this is old development.  The new wave of development, something I’m hesitatingly calling “Development 2.0″ (but need a new name for it), is built more on the cultural foundation of Silicon Valley than Geneva, or D.C. (U.N. and USAID headquarters, respectively).  This means user-focused, agile, flexible and iterative design – basically everything that traditional development is not.

There are frontrunners, of course, and I don’t want to dismiss everyone with a wide brush.  Kickstart, TechnoServe, Acumen Fund, Inveneo, TechSoup, RootSpace – these are all the future of development, even if they’re not household names like the U.N. or USAID (though I’m not sure which household would know the latter, to be honest). While they might not have millions of dollars at their disposal, the impact they effectuate, and the ways in which they do so, this is what the future of development will look like.

Buzz words like “scale” and “leverage”, usually used to describe the Big Dogs (USAID, DFID, U.N., etc.) will be replaced with “local”, “targeted”, “cross-functional” and “worldchanging”.

Watch this space, the underdogs are on the up-and-up.