Over time, human traffickers have evolved their network technology from bronze coins to online classified ads.  What do these changes mean for us?  I think we can go a long ways towards building and internet that is both safe and open if we learn from criminals and apply their means toward building the types of communities we want.  I just received a rough cut of my TEDx talk on this topic and wanted to share it here.   This week I will have a chance to spend a few days learning from people at the INFO summit hosted by Google Ideas, to explore these opportunities more.  I am excited to see what we can build in terms of using technology to support of communities who are negatively affected by illicit networks.  Follow the thoughts on twitter at #infosummit2012

Back in October, I met the man who I think is quite like the person I would like to be when I am old.  He is a poet, and a famous one, but to tell the truth, I had never read a word of his work before I shook his hand.

It wasn’t so much his words that struck me, but his hair.  It was a perfect mix of Einstein and The Beatles: a disheveled white crown that transitioned into side burns to frame his face.  His voice was also striking: difficult to describe, but the words “weathered” and “wise” come to mind.  He gave a reading at Magdalen, and if you haven’t heard his work before, check it out here: http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/heaney/personal_helicon.php Be sure to click on the ‘Listen’ button and hear him read.

Reflecting on this year of meeting people in the start-up and design world, I think we have something to learn from great poets.  Mr. Heaney spent his entire life engaged in intense observation of his world, and has built his career around artfully describing the tacit insights found in these observations.  While many of us pride ourselves in being in touch with customers needs, we are often are more focused on ourselves than on the object of our observation.  For us, user observation becomes a means to an end, and I believe our insights are weakened as a result.  We fail to make observation and documentation a way of life, as it seems to be for great poets.   If we stop looking in the mirror, and instead immerse our selves in the task watching the world around us, we might find insights we are not even looking for–and grow some pretty cool hair to boot.

When I first heard someone talk about “iterative design” and adopting an “iterative process” to software development 10 years ago, I had no clue what they were talking about.  As I later learned, the term refers to the process of adding new information into what you design by building a prototype of a product, testing it, and then rebuilding it better and better in an ongoing cycle until it is awesome.

After attending a lecture given by Reid Hoffman recently, I left the room with pages of notes on the lessons he shared from his experience scaling several successful consumer internet businesses (LinkedIn, PayPal, and others).  When a friend who missed the lecture pressed me to summarize Reid’s advice in a few sentences in the hallway, my answer was something along the lines of: “Pay attention.  Launch early.  Fail often.”

This idea is at the heart of what my friends Gill and Ruiyuan and I were looking to do when we started the Oxford Design Thinking group.  We saw a need for create a space for ourselves and our fellow students to practice each part of the process of creating grounded value for customers: products and services that are defined, created and tested through direct interaction with the end-user.  Particularly in context of ambiguous and complex environments, where accurate data is less reliable or available, this type of iteration and user involvement is particularly valuable.

While I usually think of iterative design in terms new web services or nerdy electronics projects that I like to work on, a recent stroll through the Oxford science museum was an incredible window into a cross-section of iterative processes of old.  The messy design questions of the time where things like: How can we track time?  How can we see things closer than they are? How can we safely removing a leg?

While I am sure we are all glad we are not subject to the iterative design of an amputation device, I thought that posting some of the photos from the stroll might be of interest to folks.

For the last few weeks, thanks to the Story Museum and a intel kindly provided by Gill and Tim, I have been spending my Fridays learning typesetting and letterpress printing.  So far I have only made a few runs of items, but there is something powerful about the physicality of thoughts in the process which I am still trying to wrap my brain around.  Until I can speak more thoughtfully on the ontological ramifications of holding ones own ideas, I thought I would share a few neat finds around the shop:

1. The presses themselves.  These are big beautiful  heavy machines which, in their hey day, were the go to tool for rapid information transfer.  Unlike email though, where the medium and the substance are equally intangible, these big guys literally transferring ideas from one object to another. So cool!
2. Cases:  Ever wonder where the word UPPER CASE and lower case came from?  Well it is from cases of type which are placed on two shelves in front of the typesetter.  All of the capital letters are located on the “Upper” case and all the lower case letter are in the “Lower” case.  Awesome right!
3. Chinese Typewriter:  How do you design a type writer with 5000+ characters?  Like this.  Paul, the incredibly kind and skilled tutor at the sessions, showed me this in a back closet of the shop.  Basically, you hover over the characters until you find the one you want, and then by pressing down on the button, it plucks the character out of the tray, pushes it against the ribbon and the page, and them sets it down again.  They keep the most common characters on top, and then you can add more in as you want.
4. Mistakes: If I were in charge of printing books, I would have made a mess of the next generations thoughts.  The first Christmas cards I tried to make with my friend Mark, had the words “Merry Chistmas” emblazoned across the front.  As my new friend Ben at the shop explained to me, mistakes used to play a much more important role in information transfer than they do today.  Apparently there are people who devote their entire academic careers to tracing the impact of typesetting mistakes on the interpretations of great works.  There an awesome illustration of the example is this photo of a first edition King James bible that my college owns, which was originally published with a typo where the Ruth is called a “he” instead of a “she”.  Apparently, there is also a 1611 copy in the Bodleian where the phrase “thou shalt commit adultery” appears.

During our first formal hall for graduate students at Magdalen, the President of the college stood up and praised the role of tradition and structure in college life.  Without citing specific reasons, he spoke of why students must wear gowns to dinner, why only certain people walk on the grass, and why each fellow has a certain seat in the senior common room after formal hall.  ”We have carried these traditions for hundreds of years and we will continue to do so.  We embrace them because they are good.”

I was struck by the contrast between that statement, and his next, where he went on to praise one of Magdalen’s more famous alumni, Oscar Wilde–hardly a lover of tradition himself.  Wilde was a force of free thinking, and was certainly not afraid to challenge the norms of his time.  Our chaplain once told me that there are college records citing a time when Wilde was reprimanded for reading a sensual passage from Song of Solomon with a rather “inappropriate enthusiasm” during a college chapel service.

It made me wonder.  Did Wilde find value of rigid walls and structure of Oxford?  Are there valid reasons to accept them as “good” in and of themselves?  As I walked around campus, a frumpy lumberjack-american in a fancy-pants castle, I kept coming back to this Wilde vs Tradition conundrum.  Was he a product of its success or proof of its folly?

Several years ago I had a conversation with my brother on the value of religious tradition and its impact on faith.  This is an excerpt from that a letter I wrote to him, answering his question: “Is there value in institutional religion?”  Re-reading our conversation seemed to reinforce the similarities between the structures of academic walls and religious walls and the freedoms and dangers afforded to the individuals who live inside.

 ’There are 15 bars near my house.  Each of which is in some ways as much an institution as is church. By eliciting our common subscription to the mostly meaningless institution of the local bar and the traditions that go with it (i.e. a dark room, alcohol, sitting across a table from each other, paying a 400% mark-up for a beer, etc.), none of which are not intrinsically valuable, I am creating an environment for something that does have inherent value. These bars are mostly awful places if you look at them objectively (with the lights on and no one inside), but their presence carves out a space and provides a tradition which becomes the soil for fantastic conversations.

Church structured events are about as interesting to me as an empty bar with the lights on. They seem sort of lame and pointless. But they creates a space for something beautiful–a meaningless space in our lives where incredibly important connections (spiritual and interpersonal) can grow.

While the substance of tradition seem to be rather light on content, it can withstand a good bit of ongoing change–therein giving important activities the elbow room they need regardless of how well these activities might fit into the ever-changing cultural norms of the day. As culture flips back and forth on itself, with one generation rebelling against the next and then back again, these structures can give each new group the chance to experience something that their culture may have not allowed them to see. So a church group, while it may feel like am inorganic or forced community of people, can give people the space they need to ask questions that their culture would never allow them to ask.

In fact, the meaninglessness of tradition is important to this function. Traditions and structure are inherently hollow, which is why they are so good at being our placeholders for truth.

And in both cases (the bar and the Church), the truth that one finds ought to exit the structure as soon as it can (returning regularly, but not remaining). A life that never leaves a church group is about as noble as a friendship that never leaves the bar.’

So perhaps, is was the very confines of Oxford’s tradition’s which allowed Wilde to flourish, creating walls within which his creativity and like-minded friendships were free to grow without interruption.  After leaving Magdalen, Wilde went on to create incredible works which have been read and loved by millions.  He also got into some trouble by suing the father of his lover for libel–the facts that emerged in the lawsuit process ended up backfiring and landing Wilde in prison instead.  During his two-year imprisonment–once again returning to an institutional set of barriers (albeit a much more gloomy set)–he wrote his famous work De Profundis.  In that work he makes a passing comment, which might be well taken as a support of the merits of the confines to be found in the structures around us: ”The two great turning points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.”

Here is an essay I wrote recently response to the prompt:
What book has changed your view of the world?

Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and Social Hope, an interpretation of pragmatist philosophy, has had a profound influence on my understanding of the world. More specifically, it offered the initial outline for deep logical roots that now firmly ground my sense of personal and social responsibility. This foundation is something I have searched for throughout my life and Rorty’s collection of essays and lectures has become something of a personal cornerstone in its ability to unite my professional interest in social justice and my academic interest in philosophy.

Since my undergraduate studies, I have been taken by the history and power of ideas. Thoughts are incredible, like invisible tools that carve shape and purpose into the events of our lives. In my early college years, Plato attracted my interest most. The landscape he offers is one of absolute truths, which exist independent of our awareness or experience. In this world, virtues–such as social justice–simply exist in and of themselves. Since virtues are inherently good and absolute, we all have the moral imperative of pursuing virtuous action. To decipher the good from the bad, we simply need to pursue the clearest understanding of reality. If person A believes that X is moral and person B believes that X is immoral, Plato would say that one of these men must be experiencing some distorted perception of X, as only one belief can be categorically correct.

I found this to be a satisfying framework–and then I read Sartre. Within the span of a single university semester, his brand of existentialist philosophy deeply challenged my familiar concept of realism. Sartre argues that these familiar and “absolute” values are actually just comfortable illusions: arbitrary constructs that serve as grounding points for self-created conceptions of the word. If posed with determining the morality of X, Sartre would argue that there is in fact no inherent morality of X: person A and person B are just equally good at fooling themselves into believing otherwise. Sartre does not argue that ethics should not be used, but rather that we should understand that it is impossible for one set of ethics to be more “true” than another–just as it is impossible for Mickey Mouse to be somehow more real than Donald Duck. Determining morality then is more a matter of interpreting fiction than discovering truth.

As a student, neither of these philosophies was entirely helpful in understanding my growing passion for human rights. With a mounting pile of educational debt, I wanted a rational understanding as to why I was about to take a low paying job to help others; and why this was a reasonable thing to do. In Plato’s structure, my belief in social causes was allowable, but it was still only about as logically defensible as someone arguing in favor of the existence of God. I could believe in the “absolute” moral imperative for social responsibility all I wanted, but if someone argued the exact opposite our conversation would be as productive as pitting one God against the next. In Sartre’s world, I faced a different problem: here, moral truths were mere fictions, and as such there was no basis for one fiction being more valid than the next.
In my senior year, William James helped me close this gap. His works, including Varieties of Religious Experience and the essay “Will to Believe,” paved the way for a fresh conception of epistemology and meta-ethics. James spoke with a new vocabulary when determining the value of actions: instead of focusing on the intrinsic value or moral statements, James would discuss their “usefulness” or “cash-value” by exploring their practical outcomes in a given situation. James argued that moral truth is not a static object to be studied, but rather a red herring that distracts from the more important study of actions and their useful or un-useful outcomes. Usefulness, James argues, is defined by how the action impacts the lives of others. Thus, an action that is right for one person may be wrong for another, depending on the outcomes. While James’ contemporaries accused him of heresy, blasphemy and relativism, I found myself drawn to his ideas. In James’ framework, person A and person B might still disagree about the morality of X, but at least they would have something substantive to talk about in the course of this disagreement, namely the real world consequences of their respective beliefs.

Equipped with this pragmatic understanding of ethics, I stretched out the repayment term of my student loans and launched a career in human rights. This philosophy even helped narrow my job search, limiting myself to only those non-profit organizations that were poised to make a substantial, measurable, “real-world” impact on a social issue. When Polaris offered me a position three years ago, I jumped at the opportunity. This was the right thing to do, I told my debt-worried parents, because there was an incredibly high practical value in the work of freeing people from modern day slavery.

As I continued to read more pragmatist’s works in the context of my new career, one question continued to bother me: While I might find it “most useful” to help people out of modern day slavery, the criminals I am opposing surely disagree. They might argue that it is “most useful” to sell individuals through exploitation and abuse and that this action has the very practical value of producing an incredible amount of material gain. In pragmatic thought, I wondered, what leg could I stand on to prove that my conception of “useful” is better than theirs?

Enter Richard Rorty. One Sunday afternoon, in an attempt to rejuvenate after a particularly long workweek, I picked up Philosophy of Social Hope and headed to a cafe. Inside, I found a very compelling argument that resolved this question, effectively removing the “relativism flaw” from the pragmatist position.

Rorty studied James a great deal, but his main philosophical hero is Dewey, a philosopher who helped define pragmatism by building on James’ foundation. Dewey convincingly demonstrated how Democracy can be defended as the “ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity,” not because it is any more true than another belief system (say Buddhism, or Libertarianism for example), but rather because its practical usefulness can be undeniably proved for any society.

Rorty takes this notion and runs with it. Instead of stopping with democracy, Rorty points out how pragmatist thought has the incredible potential to unite conflicting minds around many of the world’s social problems. In his essay, “Ethics Without Principles” he writes the following about the pragmatist model of determining morality:

“…you cannot aim at ‘doing what is right’, because you will never know whether you have hit the mark.….But you can aim at ever more sensitivity to pain, and ever greater satisfaction of ever more various needs. Pragmatists think that the idea of something nonhuman luring us human beings on should be replaced with the idea of getting more and more human beings into our community–of taking the needs and interests and views of more and more diverse human beings into account. Justificatory ability is its own reward. There is no need to worry about whether we will also be rewarded with a sort of immaterial medal labeled ‘Truth’ or ‘Moral Goodness.’”

By firmly tying the notion of “good” to the act of helping the human community, Rorty transforms the notion of a “moral imperative” into something tangible. Anyone interested in pursuing “good” actions, must commit themselves to understanding and healing the pains that are felt in this world. This imperative, can be applied to most all social issues, and has been a very helpful guide as I try to understand my career’s work.

In addition to casting the familiar complaints against pragmatism in general, Rorty’s critics have also attacked him on the grounds of his quick dismissal of long standing religious traditions. They argue that these belief structures, grounded by a divine moral authority, have productively united the moral conscience of societies for centuries and are pivotal belief systems for societal order. What value is there in tearing the rug out from a moral man by telling him there isn’t a God?

This criticism, in my opinion, sorely misses Rorty’s point. Rorty does not work to dismantle the notion of God or Truth all together, he simply points out that since we can never firmly grasp these notions, perhaps we should plan out our actions based on something we can grasp: in this case, the outcomes of our actions and the effects that our actions have on our peers. In many ways this is precisely what religions have been calling on followers to do for years: Christians are commanded to treat one’s neighbors (and even one’s enemies) as they would treat themselves; Buddhists are instructed to ground themselves in the present and to recognize the “oneness” of all people and actions; and Muslims are instructed to focus on the enactment of good deeds, which are naturally rewarded with good outcomes. Rorty is not actually casting off these traditions at all. Rather, his philosophy stands in firm support of religion’s call for compassion and service. All that he has done is offer a common language where by all men can discuss the virtues of these actions without invoking the authority of one God over another. Ultimately, finding a way to engage in a global conversation about helping one’s society without discussing God is hardly the same as claiming that God does not exist.

Rather, Philosophy and Social Hope it is a profound expansion of pragmatist thought that offers an incredibly exciting platform for ethical discourse and exploration. Rorty has delivered a useful tool whereby we can delve deeply into the work of solving society’s needs without having to ask ourselves the paralyzing question: why? When meeting basic humanitarian needs, this question often distracts from the pure effort of helping others and contributing to our larger environment. For Rorty, the usefulness of service is enough of a justification in itself-no strings attached. By finding a way to avoid absolute truths and yet preserve a prescriptive call to action, the author’s work is an impressive accomplishment. Rorty starts with philosophy and ends with hope.

Criminals are innovators. They are inherently entrepreneurial and willing to break the rules. As a result, they quickly adopt new technologies to improve profitability and expand illicit activities, thereby increasing the harm to the individuals they are exploiting.

At Polaris, we regularly saw human traffickers efficiently use online social networks, text messaging, and remote cameras to keep tabs on their victims, while their families and Police were driving around in cars looking for them on the street. In some cities, Pimps use disposable credit cards to instantaneously collect money from exploiting young women forced into prostitution, and yet it takes days for these same young women to receive a wire from their families once they are safe and in Polaris’ aftercare program.

New technologies empower individuals and networks with information and connectivity. In working to disrupt criminal economies and other illicit networks, I have found that the bad guys are often better at adopting new powerful technological tools than the good guys.

Particularly as the interent quickly spreads to billions of new users in vulnerable socio-economic positions, leveling this balance will be vital task of those of us who develop new technologies. When the US got the internet for the first time, we went from already having a wealth of knowledge to having even more. This information helped us be a little more savvy to the internet frauds and scams when came across our screen in our early online days. Even still, many of us had our credit card stolen or ended up chatting with someone who wasn’t who they said they were–it is hard not to get excited the first time you are told that you are visitor number 1,000,000,000 and you have won a prize. It is easy to dupe new online users, and easy to use new technology for crimes that exploit them. The less information and education the individual has before they become connected, the more this is the case. Many of the next billion internet users will be going from having no information to having the worlds information, which I could see as being a ripe opportunity for criminals to exploit.

One of the great challenges of our time will be to empower communities in order tip the balance of technological power in their direction. In the Arab Spring, we saw engaged, connected communities outpace oppressive governments who were unable keep up with their innovation. When people are empowered by technology over their oppressors (as the protesters were over their governments), new technology leads to communities by and for the people who are in them. In the realm of criminal economies, however, it is presently the criminals–not the communities–who have the upper hand in technology use.

As a result, communities have less ability to organize against the harms of criminal activities which impact their communities––be it the violence of drug cartels, the exploitation of human traffickers, or the health hazards of fake pharmaceutical drugs. Connective technologies are powerful tools, equally adept at being used for good or evil.

One of the great challenges of our time will be to design new products so that this power is equally accessible to all members of newly connected communities, democratizing the power and added influence that connectivity will bring.

I have taken a couple of small steps towards this goal in the context of empowering communities impacted by human trafficking networks, described in the video below.

If criminals are early adopters, how would you design technology so that communities can organize against them?

After seeing the movie Sneakers as a kid, I remember thinking that the coolest job in the world would be to test the security of banks for a living. Here is a great story about someone who had that job and found their calling in the process. It looks like the story teller, Moran Cerf, is also doing some really cool research in computational neuroscience and nuero-economics too more on his website here.

SafeAlert is a mobile app that I developed with a team of friends in a weekend as part of the Oxford Appathon (shout out to team mates Adam, Nithum, Jed and Ling!). The idea behind the app is to augment traditional crisis responses with social support networks.

Portfolio Question: What did I do?
Product strategy
User Interface design
Server-Side Salesforce.com development (this sounds more impressive than it is: Salesforce makes it really easy to build web apps and currently not all the functionality described in video is currently in place)
Pitch video explaining product (audio is just a rough cut with errors in it at the moment)

Here is my first luggage piece made completely from scratch. I wanted a bag that fit between my carryon size and my briefcase, and was classy enough to take on a long distance relationship between Oxford and Paris.

Classy aims notwithstanding, I was also on a budget, so I got the leather from the dump bin of a saddle shop and sewed and riveted everything together myself. The final sections came together just in time for my recent move to Oxford, Uk and it is working really well so far.

It can hold over 100lbs without a problem (structurally that is–my back didn’t appreciate the extreme weight tests), and can be worn over the shoulder or across the back like a fancy messenger bag. I sized it so the height can fit either under the seat or in a overhead bin of an airplane too.