First, there was the blog post. As you can see, the number of new views dropped very rapidly after a few days:

This is not the full story, because I also tweeted a direct link to the Pledgie campaign site. That’s been viewed 182 times, but I don’t know if those are all unique views.

Not quit viral so far, I’m looking for other ways to spread the word.

I’m worried that it will be hard to convince people who have never met me to invest the money. That may turn out to be the bottleneck, but that’s just a theory.  At the current level of exposure it’s too early to tell.

I need to define my target audience. So far donations have come from friends who know me and TED. Their interest in Life Hacking and the fact that they have jobs probably also helps.

I suspect my target audience is TED fans with above average income, into the Web 2.0 startup scene. Age group 23-35. How to reach that audience?

Last weekend I tried to create a StumbleUpon campaign as advised in this talk by Tim Ferriss. Unfortunately the campaign got rejected. They don’t allow fundaising in their paid ads. I understand their reasoning, although I do think StumbleUpon would be a great platform for fundraising.

I quickly looked at Google Ads, but I figured those only make sense if someone is already looking for what I’m doing, which I think is unlikely. Also, what keywords would I use? And would using TED as (part of) a keyword cause any trademark issues?

Of course, fundraising sites do get stumbled occasionally, just not through paid ads. So if you like my campaign, please do stumble it.

My attention was drawn to Just Giving. That site is not available to me as I’m not an official charity nor am I based in the UK. However, it triggered me to search for more generic fundraising platforms.

That search quickly took me to Social Actions, with which I was already familiar thanks to this Google Tech Talk. It lists approximately 50 platforms from which it aggregates data.

I went through a bunch of them, but found that many were not suitable for several reasons:

• one specific subject (e.g. climate change, politics, human rights). TED is a very broad conference.
• specific region (e.g. micro loans to China). I live in The Netherlands.
• focus on collaboration (about team building) : I do not need a team to go to TED, I only need money.
• focus on poor people : I am not poor, but TED is very expensive. It’s within reach for me, but the timing couldn’t be worse.
• focus on “official” charities or non-profits: I am not an official charity and I am not a non-profit.
• the platform itself is for-profit or has high transaction costs: not necessarily a show stopper

Despite that, I did find two suitable platforms:

1. You can add #takeaction to your tweet and Social Actions will pick it up. I did that and it actually got retweeted by @IndiaActions.
2. Change Agents. I’ve signed up for that.

Going through all 50+ platforms sounded like a lot of work, so I decided to combine this with another experiment: outsourcing. I sent a list of about 15 platforms to Ask Sunday, together with a short description and link to my campaign, the above list of criteria and my target audience.

They concluded that none of these platforms were suitable. I then asked them to repeat the analysis for the rest of the platforms and they concluded the same. I’m inclined to agree. Did they miss anything?

I thought about suggesting to TED that they make a platform themselves, where TEDsters with money surplus could “hire” TEDsters with time surplus to work towards TED goals. TED could act as a filter, because they screen participants. They could also process payments as ticket discounts, guaranteeing that the funds go towards attending the conference.

Then again, although it would have some benefits, this kind of collaboration can also take place on existing platforms. I need to think about this a bit more.

So what’s next?

Maybe I should build my own platform?

I’m contemplating sending proposals to certain organizations of prototypes I could build for them. But I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with such a direct approach.

91% to go, but you’ll agree with me that this has been a useful learning experience already.

I “should” be able to “afford” this conference, since I’m a software engineer in a fairly rich country. So it’s really a cash flow issue; if I could, I would have borrowed the money from my bank and worked for the ticket later.

This is where you come in…

Your donations** will help me go to TED India. In exchange, I offer one hour of my “brain power” to anyone donating $50*. Please send me an email if you wish to use that offer.

I can provide most value when you need new ideas; out of the box thinking (why do you think I wanted to go to TED in the first place?). It could be for your own project, or for a cause you care about.

I can also design and build you a prototype “web service”. I’ll use Ruby on Rails for that, which is awesome and allows really fast prototyping, but don’t expect miracles in one hour.

This took me about 1.5 day (although in all honesty I’m sure there’s people who could have done it even faster).

Or maybe you could use some creative travel advice?

I can even help you find flaws in other people’s reasoning.

You can read more about me on my blog, check out my resume, follow me on Twitter, leave a question in the comments or send me an email.

Thank you!

* = Multiple hours are possible too. I’m available until August 8th. I will refund new donations after the target amount has been reached. I also reserve the right to cancel my attendance to TED if the target amount has not been reached in time. In that case I will refund all donations. Finally, I reserve the right to refund your donation if we can not agree on the project. All amounts are in USD.

** = You can donate money through Paypal here by entering an amount at “Make A Pledge”. If you live in the Eurozone, it may be easier and cheaper to transfer money directly to my bank account. I can provide details on request.

Of course, I wanted to adopt the brightest star available, but this was difficult using the interface available at that time. So I decided to download the list of stars and build my own Ruby on Rails application around it to make this search easier.

It’s located at pale-blue-dot.sprovoost.nl and here’s a preview:

My adopted star

You can search for stars in order of increasing or decreasing brightness and you can choose not to list stars that are already adopted. Each of the stars can viewed in Google Sky Maps, so you can see if you like the looks. You can also search by adopter name.

I just realized that every star now has a URL. Not sure why that is significant, but it’s kind of cool.

One of the features that I’d like to build soon is the possibility of finding available stars near a particular star, so you can adopt a star close to your friends star. To make the sky even more social, I’d like to build a Facebook App around it.

Of course, I don’t have an infinite amount of time to work on this, so any help is greatly appreciated.

You can find the source code here and the issue tracker here.

Also, is there anyone with enough math and programming skills and patience to build a mobile app? Such an app would use the phone’s clock, GPS, accelometer and (optionally) compas to assist in locating the adopted star in the sky.

We all want to save the world, but we are remarkably ineffective at it. We leave the car at home once a week, replace a few light bulbs and complain to our friends that the government should do something about AIDS. Perhaps we even donate a bit to charities.

The problem is that it just doesn’t add up. It feels good, but it often turns out there are far more effective things you could do. But how do you decide what the best way is to spend your precious time and money?

And herein lies the answer: who says your time is precious and you have little money? Perhaps you are just wasting it? What if you had much more time and money?

If you really care about the world, why aren’t you reading books about it, talking to politicians and devoting most of your time to helping out an NGO? Why do you spend your time staring at 1000 unread emails in your inbox? Why do you waste your money by paying your bills too late? Why haven’t you started that big dream company yet?

The biggest problem on this planet is inefficiency. If only people could free up their wasted time to do the things they believe in, the worlds biggest problems will turn out to be a piece of cake to solve.

The good news is that this is one of the cheapest problems to solve: teaching people how to use their time more effectively pays itself back many times over!

My favorite book on the topic of productivity is Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. In it, David Allen confronts us with our own blatant inefficiencies and he does so with a great sense of humor. He shows some really simple ways to tackle them. His solutions are almost obvious, if it weren’t for the fact that almost nobody uses them.

He doesn’t ask you to use any high tech solutions except for pen and paper. He doesn’t send you on an expensive three day training course, nor does he trick you into buying a DVD. He just explains you how to use your common sense and how to use your human nature to your advantage in stead of your detriment.

Once you’ve made the transition, you’ll never want to go back. It’s good for you, good for your colleges, good for your family and friends and good for the world.

So my plan is simple: I will use your donations to distribute free copies of Getting Things Done in the Central Business District of Melbourne, Australia.

The only condition will be that people actually read it. For that purpose, I will ask them to leave their name and email address so I can regularly stalk them to see if they’ve read it.

Why Melbourne? First because I live there, and second because it is a rich city where people have quite a bit of free time and know how to enjoy it. That means they can make a significant positive impact on the world at a very low cost to themselves.

What’s in it for me? I don’t think this is going to be a lot of work for me, so most of my ‘income’ will be in the form of fame and glory and the benefits of living in a more productive city.

As an experiment, I am participating in the Amazon Associate program, which means I get a bit of money for every book that people buy through my link. I’m keeping that! Call me evil, but I believe in doing good while making profit; it is the only way to make a huge difference on a global scale.

I will find the best way to distribute as many books as possible with your donated money. I will keep a public record of exactly what happens to the money.

It is a great thing when the whole world joins together for one hour to think about something important. I love that about Earth Hour. But why just climate change? There are so many other problems in the world.

Imagine having the worlds attention for one hour – something nobody has ever achieved – what would you say? What would you want 6.7 billion people to think about?

So here is my challenge for anyone who cares about the world, has a camera and some free time:

Send me a one hour video with your top 10 best ways to help the world!

Rules

There are just a few simple rules:

1. A top 10 of of best ways to help the world
2. 60 minutes
3. Explain the problem
4. Explain how it can be solved on a global scale
5. Provide a simple first step for individuals to contribute or learn more
6. No lies: be prepared for some serious fact-checking by the community
7. No divine intervention: it’s just us this time

I will pick a personal favorite, but at the end of the day there will be more than one winner. On Saturday the 28th or March 2009, at 20:30, everyone will show their favorite video to their friends, family and community.

Prizes

At this point, I will buy the winner a drink, but I’m trying to obtain more interesting prizes.

A bit of background

About a year ago I watched a talk by Bjorn Lomborg about setting global priorities. The question he asked himself is how to save the world with 50 billion dollars. If you have been watching the news lately, you will be painfully aware of how little money that really is.

Most people, including me back then, would assume that fixing climate change should at least be somewhere on that list. The eye opener is this: it’s all the way down the bottom! It turns out that if you have a limited budget to do good in the world, climate change is the last thing you should worry about.

I didn’t really know what to do with that information, until recently when two things happened more or less at the same time: I heard about Earth Hour and I read Bjorn’s recent book on climate change: Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming

Now I’ve always been a bit skeptical about Kyoto and about symbolic actions from the green movement in general. As a physicist and environmental scientist I already knew that Kyoto is too small to make a difference. Read the book if you want to know why, but to put it very simply: it is like walking to the moon.

There is a very important difference between a first small step towards a bigger goal and a first small step to nowhere (same goes for bridges…). Kyoto will not stop what we have set in motion, it will barely even slow it down. With or without Kyoto, humanity will have to deal with the same effects of climate change.

But until I read the book, my attitude was that if people enjoy walking to the moon, I should let them. It’s probably a Dutch thing: live and let live… Not much harm in people saving the planet in vain, right? Turns out I was wrong.

Bjorn presents an eye opening analysis of climate change. During my time as a masters student in Sustainable Development, I always looked at climate change as an umbrella phenomenon with all sorts of effects in other areas. For example, it causes temperature and sea level rise, habitat change, hurricanes, tropical diseases, etc. But we only looked at these issues from the point of view of climate change.

The remarkable thing about Cool It, is that it looks at all these issues from the perspective of the issues themselves. So in stead of just asking “What is the effect of climate change on tropical diseases?”, he would ask “What factors influence tropical diseases, and what is the relative role of climate change?”.

This is a massive eye opener! In stead of looking at the big, unfamiliar and scary monster of climate change, you are all of sudden looking at a large group of smaller monsters, that we are familiar with. It turns out we know quite a bit about tropical diseases, river flooding, etc.  Even more, for each of these monsters, reducing CO2 is by far the least effective way of defeating them. Just to make the book more controversial, some monsters are even easier to defeat with more CO2!

So where does Earth Hour come in? Well, because it turns out we can’t defeat all the little monsters if we all focus on the wrong attack strategy. Bjorn makes an excellent case that our global obsession with climate change is distracting us from solving the real problems. In fact, the obsession is making us ignore or even aggravate these real problems.

Focusing all the worlds attention for one hour on just climate change is therefore not only unproductive, it is counter productive!

Now I’m not saying that Bjorns own list of priorities is the best solution (although it looks pretty good actually), but I would like to see more people think very critically about priorities. People need to ask themselves tough questions, like:

• Should we spend $180 billion per year to delay the inevitable climate change by a few years or $50 billion to save polar bears, dramatically reduce flooding and hurricane damage, malaria, HIV, poverty, starvation, malnourishment, etc, etc, etc, etc?
• Should I spend my money on buying green bags and carbon credits, or donate to an anti malaria charity that can save far more lives per dollar?

We are living in a unique moment in time. Never before could a message be passed to the majority of humans in the world, including the ones that don’t have any electric lights to turn off. A date and time has already been conveniently picked. People will be together in the living room with their lights off. They will be thinking “Now what?”. So let’s give them something to watch, something to think about.

Let’s give everyone something to match their own taste: some people like drama with nice special effects, others like boring economic stuff, still others like personal stories. Not to mention the fact that there are quite a few languages and cultures out there. That’s why we need more than one winning video.

About the rules

A top 10 of best ways to help the world

I want the videos to focus on solutions, because I want the videos to result in quick and decisive action. Think years, not centuries. Sure, there are many problems out there to which there is no known solution yet, but there are also plenty of problems to which there are good solutions that just need to be executed. Focus on those.

It really has to be a top 10, not just ten examples. You really have to be convinced that your number one is the best thing you can think of. Similarly you agree that the number two is really good, but a little less so.

Just imagine getting a phone call from Google offering you a billion dollars, but you have to chose only one, right now! You’d better have your answer ready!

60 minutes

Because there are 60 minutes in an hour. That means you have about 5 minutes per problem, which is plenty of time. Have a look at some TED talks to learn how to present an incredible amount of information in a very short time.

Explain the problem

Because the focus is on solutions, this part should be done quickly. For example: “Malaria is killing millions of people per year, which is bad.”.

Explain how it can be solved on a global scale

These are kind of things the big players can work on, like your government:

“50 oil tankers filled with DEET should do the trick for about X tax payer dollars.”

Remember: you can’t just create money out thin air (actually you can, but it’s not recommendable), so really think about where that money comes from. What would your country or big corporate be willing to sacrifice? Or even better: how is it going to make money out of it?

Provide a simple first step for individuals to contribute or learn more

Sometimes only the big players can make a difference and they just need a bit of convincing. In that case you could say something like:

“There will be a rally to demand that our goverment spends $100 million on fixing malaria. Join us on [date, location] or find out what’s happening in your town at [website] ”

Perhaps there is a fund that people can donate money too: mention it.

But remember to think about how these first small steps will lead to the bigger solution. Don’t just start a walk to the moon!
No lies: be prepared for some serious fact-checking by the community

Please accompany the video with some documentation with references to your sources. I encourage you to release a first version of your video early on. That way, people can fact-check and discuss the content, while you can still make changes.

I am personally not amused by documentaries that present blatant lies, very dubious “facts” or mislead the audience in some other way. For example, I get very upset when a narrator mentions a huge number without putting it into perspective (e.g. “How would you feel if a coal company put a ton of CO2 on your house?”). Or when an extremely unlikely event is presented as inevitable (like a 30 meter sea level rise).

I’ve seen a lot of documentaries do this, so don’t let examples from Michael Moore or Al Gore guide you too much. There should always be room for some artistic freedom, but please do not mislead people: the world is complicated enough already.

Helping the world is very serious buisness and justify very strong debate. It requires documentary makers to swallow strong criticism and to learn from it. It also requires critics not just to be very civilized, but to really contribute. A comment like “You are stupid, this won’t work because of gravity.”, should be replaced by something like “Unfortunately your solution won’t work due to gravity, because [physics for dummies]. Perhaps you could consider [way to deal with gravity]. Good luck.”
No divine intervention: it’s just us this time

Some people believe mankind is doomed and that some sort of higher being wants to punish us for our sins. Others think that prayers might help. Still others think the earth belongs to Mother Nature and is better off without humans anyway. I think that is all complete rubbish. Tell that to the next person you meet who is dying from HIV.

The world is complicated enough without accounting for divine plans. Taking them into account will distract us from finding real solutions and from making progress towards a better world.

How to help

I am very busy, so any help – including taking over the entire project – will be greatly appreciated!

Other things you could do:

Tell your friends about this project. Especially your video-savvy friends. Of course, you can make a documentary with your cell phone camera, but if you happen to have a friend with a better camera: why not?

Read about the worlds challenges and possible solutions. The Copenhagen Consensus Center could be a good place to start, since their goal is “to improve the prioritizing between various efforts to mitigate the consequences of the world’s biggest challenges”.

Invite all your friends – although it might a bit early – to your home to watch the best video on Saturday the 28th or March 2009, at 20:30.

I will work for OpenStreetMap which is an effort to create a detailed map of the world with no nasty copyright restrictions. Like Wikipedia, they allow everyone to contribute to this map. I for example added a few things in my neighbourhood.

Groups of volunteers all over the world are traveling around with their GPS devices to map the world and sometimes an organization like AND donates their maps.

The objective of my project is to create altitude profiles for (bike) routes. For this I will use a global elevation map created by the NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).

Since the world is pretty big I expect to learn a lot about scaling a database application. Perhaps, if time allows and if I get an invitation, I could even outsource the scaling work to the Google App Engine.

I will store the SRTM data in PostGIS (spatial database extension for PostgreSQL). That will be my first time away from MySQL.

Another new thing that I want to try is the Git version control system: you can watch Linus Torvalds talk about it:

Of course, in the end it is all about one thing: the free T-Shirt! I will write more about my project later.

Het doel is om meer inzicht te krijgen in deze plannen en waar nodig (opbouwende) kritiek te leveren. Hopelijk kunnen we daar zoveel mogelijk experts bij betrekken.

We gaan een weblog bijhouden met daarin onze nieuwste bevindingen, inzichten en verwijzingen naar relevant nieuws. Tevens willen we een vast informatief deel van de site bouwen. Te denken valt dan bijvoorbeeld aan een stemwijzer die aangeeft of iemand (voor het eigen belang) voor of tegen eventuele sloop of renovatie van hun complex zou moeten stemmen.