Sometimes I wish I was a celebrity. Not for the fame. Not for the fans. Not even for the money. But rather, if I was a celebrity and wanted to help people in any country, all I'd have to do is pick-up a phone and a charity would be at my beck and call.
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="The Front Door for Many Charities"][/caption]
The sad reality is that, even when I'm on location, it can be an uphill battle to team up with large reputable charities. This is regardless of how many times I get my foot in the door, regardless ...
Within Reach of Davos
In January of 2007, I withdrew from grad school at the University of Notre Dame and began an unemployed, unplanned, and "uncultured" journey to help the poor.
Almost exactly three years later, that journey has brought me to within grasp of being able to talk to world leaders about global poverty at one of the planet's most important conferences. I can get there - but only with your help.
Out of 75 applications from around the world (and many more that didn't make the deadline), I was selected as one of five potential candidates to go to Davos. The winner, is determined ...
The Quest for Sustainability
[caption id="attachment_1801" align="aligncenter" width="481" caption="I Give a Talk to YouTube & Google Staff in San Bruno, California"][/caption]
"Years from now, I'm going to be looking back at this point in my life and laugh," I told my friend whom I'm staying with in San Francisco. "I'm doing something successful enough that people are inviting me to meet them and give talks... yet unsuccessful enough that I can't afford to buy myself some new clothes," I said with a wry laugh.
Right now I'm in San Francisco - home of Silicon Valley. It's home to where all this technology that has made this ...
The Final Week?
This is maybe my final week in Bangladesh.
Since I landed, I've been trying to complete projects related to Challenge Poverty. As you know, I've been working on building that Pond Sand Filter and repairing that school. It's been nearly 6 months and I want to wrap everything up in the next 72 hours. Yeah.... that maybe a bit ambitious. Fingers crossed.
The good news is that the water quality of that Pond Sand Filter is now clear, clean, and deemed safe to drink by official tests conducted by the Department of Public Health here in Bangladesh. Here's a photo. One is ...
Based upon popular request, here are the revised (and simpler) voting instructions on how to get me to Davos to talk to world leaders about global poverty:
Last year, I had expressed my disappointment with the Davos Debates. Not because I lost – but because of the manner in which the winner was selected. It seemed arbitrary, done behind closed doors, and completely undemocratic.
With this year’s winner being selected by popular vote, does this make this year’s Davos Debates nothing more than a mere popularity contest? Not at all – and I mean that even if I lose by a landslide.
The Davos Debates would have been a popularity contest if voting was the only method of selecting a candidate. In that case, it would make a lot of sense for any of those big YouTube mega-stars to submit a video (it could even be unrelated to Davos) and win by a landslide. Free trip to Davos!
But, what I like about this year is that it combines an evaluation of ideas and a way to prove a candidates campaign & rallying ability. The first round was all about ideas. The judges didn’t care if you have 1, 100, or 1 million YouTube subscribers.
Just to give you an idea of how impartial these panel of judges were: the head of a US-based charity that partners with the Professor Yunus’s Grameen Bank also submitted a video the Davos Debates. He was not selected as a finalist.
The second round, is all about a candidate’s ability to rally support for their cause. I like because it combines the best of last year’s contest (the search and selection of good ideas) with the idea of transparency and opening up the selection process to the people.
The way it is setup now, whoever gets to speak at Davos can say “I have an important message and I have a lot of people who want you to hear it”. It gives much needed weight that have been missing in previous iterations of the Davos Debates.
I was checking Dailybooth just now and found one of my friends Vondell had drawn this:
Shawn of the Uncultured Project is in the running for a slot at the 2010 World Economic Forum Meeting. If selected, he will have a chance speak to world leaders about the terrifically strong and largely untapped power the YouTube community has as a force of good.
Watch Shawn’s video and vote here: http://www.youtube.com/Davos
Votes can be submitted every day until the 15th of January.
Tonight it doesn’t matter if I never ever get to Davos because this drawing is awesome
In January of 2007, I withdrew from grad school at the University of Notre Dame and began an unemployed, unplanned, and “uncultured” journey to help the poor.
Almost exactly three years later, that journey has brought me to within grasp of being able to talk to world leaders about global poverty at one of the planet’s most important conferences. I can get there – but only with your help.
Out of 75 applications from around the world (and many more that didn’t make the deadline), I was selected as one of five potential candidates to go to Davos. The winner, is determined by you – because it’s your vote that determines the winner.
I won’t lie. I’m up against some brilliant people. I wish we could all go – because I’d love to meet them all and brainstorm. At the same time, I know that it’s not like global poverty can be solved with a one week trip to Switzerland.
But this could be big. It’s the biggest thing to ever happen in my life and it could be the biggest thing for the future of this project. So, if you’d like to help, here’s how you can do so:
Things you will need [REVISED as of Jan 11th, 2010]:
A YouTube or Google account. Signing up for either is free.UPDATE: You don’t need to signup for anything to vote.
An internet connection good enough to use YouTube.
The ability to get online every 24 hours until January 15th.
If Possible: Friends & family who might be interested in voting as well.
2. On the top half of the page, you will see something about the Davos Debates. It will have three tabs. Click on “vote”.
3. You will see five videos from the five candidates. Select my video called “A Message to Davos” – the thumbnail is my picture.
Videos Are Randomly Sorted and May Not Appeared In This Order
4. Once the video starts playing, click the green thumbs-up button. Wait a few seconds. Your vote has been placed.
When The Red Thumbs Down Turns Grey, Your Vote Has Been Cast.
5. You can vote again everyday.
It may seem that, with so many followers on Twitter and so many subscribers, this is all but guaranteed. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Without getting too academic, it boils down to public vs. private networks. My support network is very public. And, like every network, not everyone following me or subscribed will be reading my tweets, watching the videos, or reading this blog.
It’s very possible (and very likely) that many of these candidates have a group of friends, family, and colleagues who will be diligently voting. This could be close.
Hey Shawn, I saw your Davos video (of course) and the one blaring thing I noticed is that you did not mention what is UNIQUE about YOU. Lots of people work on ending poverty. You even listed websites who are doing it too.. but you didn’t say.. what is special about YOU.
You’ve gotta start using that as your leverage. Thats why I gave YOU money instead of them. That’s why we follow you. You’ve got a unique audience because of the unique way you work – which is also important.
Mention it in your next davos, and in any of the other videos you make that describe what you do. The thing about not using guilt, about showing your viewers where the money goes.. use that. use the unique viewers you have.. we are not middle aged charity people.
We’re nerdfighters and youtubers and we are powerful – use it!
The World Economic Forum wanted to tap into the power of YouTube in an attempt to become more transparent, more open, and more democratic. Unfortunately, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The World Economic Forum – a gathering of influential people and world leaders in Davos, Switzerland – has garnered the reputation of being a bit of a closed door venue. It’s an invitation only event and isn’t open to the public. That is, until the World Economic Forum turned to YouTube.
Starting last year, the World Economic Forum opened it’s (virtual) doors by allowing anyone to submit their thoughts to Davos. It was a good idea, but their first start had a lot to be improved upon. I had written about it on this blog when it happened – I was really excited at the idea, but was disappointed with the original execution.
This year, it seemed that the World Economic Forum had learned from its first run and was coming back stronger than ever. Instead of just submitting videos that were to be spliced into a clip show, one lucky person was to be flown to Davos to interact with those attending. And best of all? The YouTube community would help pick the winner.
Unfortunately, I was left with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu and disappointment. Click the jump to find out why.
I really thought I was going to be witnessing history with this YouTube/Davos partnership. What I feel we got instead was a missed opportunity.
I was kind expecting – or at least hoping – that when YouTube partnered with the World Economic Forum at Davos, they would be doing the same kind of thing that YouTube did with the Presidential debates. At the CNN YouTube Debates, the Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates were asked questions submitted by the YouTube community. The candidates would listen to the question and then respond. CNN even flew a few of those YouTubers down to the debates so that they would have an opportunity to make a follow-up question or comment. Even if the debate didn’t move beyond canned responses – at least there was citizen interaction.
That I believe was what was missing with YouTube and the Davos Question.
First, since those submitting videos were asked to keep their videos under 3 minutes, I kind of assumed that meant there would be a 10 to 30 minute screening of the best videos for world leaders to see. What happened instead, was that a handful of videos were cut into a two minute montage sequence. As you can see here, half of that montage sequence was devoted to restating the original Davos Question (“What can we do in 2008?”, “Hello Davos!”, “Wow, that’s a big question. Big big question”, etc.,.). The remaining minute was just a quick laundry list of requests and ideas (lower poverty! more renewable energy! invest in kids!). What could have been the opportunity for powerful ideas and discussions to emerge ended up looking more like a wish list to Santa Claus.
Second, just like regular YouTube users submitted their answer to the Davos Question, world leaders, celebrities, businessmen, and future youth leaders were able to record what they’re take was on the question. But, for the most part, this was nothing new. Bono, of course, asked us to support the Millennium Development Goals. The executive director for UNICEF made a similar plea. There were a few surprises of course. It was good to see youth leaders like Whitney and Juan there with some good ideas. I was a bit surprised that most important issue the Director of the American Center for Disease Control chose to raise was “Exercise!”. What was absent, however, was any evidence of interaction with the community.
I was really hoping that the world leaders at Davos would be watching some of the videos and then commenting and responding. Ideally, it would have been nice if these leaders would have gone back to YouTube later to check and see what the response to their videos were. They called this “The Davos Conversation” but it didn’t feel much different than watching an interview on TV. There were a few exceptions, the US Director of Education decided to voice her agreement to a video by a YouTuber pleading for greater investment in children. And Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, decided to respond to a question raised by a YouTuber about Google’s potential to help in electronic voting.
If The Uncultured Project has taught me anything it’s that, if you are not satisfied with the way things are being done – you have to offer your own solution instead of critiquing others. This is where the World Social Forum can come in….
Why can’t the World Social Forum take the same technology (YouTube) and use it to the full potential the the folks at Davos did not?
This is not a charity, organization, or anything formal. It’s my journey to try and make the world a better place - one meaningful difference at a time. It’s about inspiring others to believe that we can be the generation that ends extreme poverty. Hopefully, this project can also show the big multinational organizations that there is a better way to engage people on the issue of global poverty.
I'm Shawn - a 28 year old Canadian from Toronto. Before starting this project, I was a graduate student on scholarship at Notre Dame University. My life took a turn after I met Dr. Jeffrey Sachs (author of the book "The End of Poverty") when he came to give a speech at Notre Dame. That speech inspired me to withdraw from grad school, liquidate my savings, and begin this journey to try and make the world a better place - one meaningful difference at a time.
