Technovelopment Tools

So the US Consumer Electronics Association just released its annual Christmas season survey of American consumers to see what they wanted as a gift this holiday season.  Number one, it turns out, was a computer.  That's probably not too much of a surprise... But coming in at #2 was the notion that peace would be the best gift for this year.  That probably says something significant - and hopefully optimistic - about where America is headed.  Of course, #3 was a big screen television, so I could be wrong...

I found the survey interesting for a few reasons, not the least of which was the seemingly odd juxtaposition of computers and world peace.  It is, of course, the particular view of this blog that the two can and should go hand in hand...

I got into the international field back in the early 1990s, working for the United Nations on environmental projects... Those were the heady days just after  the creation of the concept of "sustainable development" and just before the crashing anticlimax of the Earth Summit in Brazil, and I was a quick convert to the ideas of Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland and the World Commission on Environment and Development.  In describing what sustainable development was, they had argued that new and emerging technologies were a central and necessary precursor to progress on global environment and development challenges (it's on p. 65 of Our Common Future of you want to check it out for yourself...)

Well that made sense to me.  In 1995, I was appointed Secretary-General of a UN conference on the environment, and I made technology a cornerstone of our program, launching a series of (pretty primitive) online tools that were among the first at the UN.  I started to get a sense of how technology could shape and mold our work in the development field in some very real and very tangible ways, a concept that soon became central to my career.

I left the UN to work in the field of local economic development - dirty, solid, hands-on work as an antidote to the byzantine debates of New York and Geneva - but kept my focus on technology-driven tools to aid development at the community-level.  A lot of my war stories will probably pop up in future blogs, but one of my main lessons was that technology can be a powerful driver of new economic and social opportunity for communities.  It can also be a disconcerting, alarming and bewildering morass of new ideas and new tools - and this often scares away the very people who could best make use of it.

I'm not a techie - never have been, never will be.  I'm useless on that front.  But I've been able to use technology for some pretty incredible purposes with some pretty incredible results, working across Canada and in more than 50 countries around the world.  Starting with the next entry in this blog, I'll begin to showcase and discuss some of the ideas and tools that I've discovered along the way - and I hope you'll take the time to share some of your insights (via comments) in the same way.

Next: NE Ware Communications and the WIPOT: Dumb Systems for an Intelligent Era