Last month, Guri and I were invited to Alliance for New Humanity conference. In the company of all kinds of famous folks -- three Nobel Peace Laureates -- I felt honored to be on two "dialogos" with folks like Lynne Twist and Andrew Harvey and doubly honored to have a workshop slot.
My talk was titled "invisible revolution of the Inner-Net" and the first paragraph of the description read like this:
Wikipedia didn't write the world's ... largest encyclopedia; YouTube didn't create videos that get 100 million views a day; Flickr didn't take the photos that are posted every second; MySpace didn't create the content that attracts the masses. And just so, the Gandhis, Mother Teresas and Martin Luther Kings of the next generation will not simply publish a newspaper, write letters or give talks. Instead, the next revolution will be led by a distributed network of invisible heroes who create spaces for meaningful, many-to-many connections to manifest organically.
The presentation got a standing ovation and some people were so moved that they bullied the conference organizers (it was a funny sight!) to have me redo another one during one of the break hours! And then, all service madness broke loose. :)
The slides (which unfortunately, aren't too descriptive!) and reference articles are listed below:
Threadless Tees: hipster tee-shirts. Company aims to do $20MM in business this year.
49,00 Grandmas: a graduate student discovers a way to distribute 3.5MM vitamin A tablet to Nepali children.
Long Tail: book by Chris Andersen that describes the phenomena in detail. (Also see first article by Chris that coined the word and talked about the rise of 'Touching to Void' book.
Crowd Sourcing: Wired magazine article on crowd sourcing.
Power of Many: an outdated book on how many people loosely connected are postively changing our world.
Push Comes to Pull: an excellent 50-page paper on the new paradigm, from the Aspen Institute.
