My friend Alex just spent 2 months in India and Nepal, where he hiked the 300km Annapurna Circuit. During a fifteen-hour layover in Munich yesterday, we had some beers and schnitzel together at a Biergarten, and Alex asked me, “Nat, you and I and all our friends are pretty smart, capable people. Why aren’t we working on something great that could save the world or be worthy of a Nobel prize?”
I love my work in the Linux world, and hope it has had some positive impact on the world. But what Alex said hit home. Right now, could I be doing something bigger? Something better? Could you? Even if you are passionate about your work, it’s a good call-out and an important thing to reflect about. If you’re not trying to do your very best, why not? Do you have a good reason?
Alex is pounding this drum on twitter.
This theme of Alex’s reminded me of Tim O’Reilly’s “work on stuff that matters” post from January. Tim had some nice guidelines for “stuff that matters,” but I liked the gut-instinct feeling of Alex’s question. What’s your Nobel-prize project?
Posted on 21 April 2009
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Nat – I am not sure that the Nobel-prize is my objective – I want to be more simple. However, my goal is to take collaborative tools and techniques from the world of linux, et al, and apply them to other areas. Currently the area of my focus is health-care in developing countries. The Open Initiative [http://www.intrahealth.org/open] is the start of that idea… I hope. [And much thanks to you for lending your name to the effort!]
What I would love to see is health care workers collaborating and sharing in the same manner that open source geeks do on a daily basis. If these collaborative networks can be created, the *collective intelligence* of providing the most fundamental of human needs is more easily achieved. I’m not doing so in some attempt to have the idea be ground-breaking or original but simply because I think there is merit to it.
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I actually do believe that the work I do with Mozilla matters. The Web is a huge, huge part of the future of all media, and ensuring it remains open and accessible is incredibly important.
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@dria – One interesting question to ask is, what software has had the biggest positive impact on the world? I think my best answer right now would be “the web.” That encompasses a lot of stuff – apache, Linux, TCP/IP, Mozilla. You’re lucky to be working somewhere that you can feel that way about!
@Dave – Applying open source methodologies to health care is a great idea. Are you guys thinking about creating things like knowledge bases and expert systems to help 3rd world nurses and doctors practice medicine, doing diagnoses, etc?
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Changing the world, or more pertinantly to me – the futility of what we do has been on my mind for a while.
I was sitting there, working for a corporate, enjoying what I did and taking the money. But I realised – what do I do that will actually be there in 3 years, 5 years or even less likely 10 years?
It made me go off an strike out on my own. Consulting on my own – working on the smaller projects with more control over the whole thing. It’s not the answer – but for me at least what I do now actually makes a difference to a small company, to their entire direction and those who are employed by them.
Of course, I’m still not satisfied with it all – but I guess I’m edging closer to something worthwhile whilst still being very hungry for something important, something world changing.
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@nat – absolutely. Further, and very important to the countries we work in in Africa, is the involvement in those types of system of Community Health Workers who tend to be the only option in the villages of health-worker-starved countries.
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Nat,
What a great question and I’ve asked myself the same thing over and over. It would seem that many have the capability and passion to do something great at the level you describe, but lack insight into where to begin.
I mean, how does one even start to explore this? It’s a question of how/when/where to jump in. It would seem that it almost takes an entrepreneur mindset to kick something like this off. Or perhaps just dumb luck… or fate I suppose.
Thoughts?
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I am from Nepal studying in US. My parents live in Nepal (under 12-18 hrs of electricity load shedding every day). I also did part of Annapurna circuit about two years ago (I reached the Muktinath temple).
I have been thinking why Nepal is so poor and what can be done to remedy that for a long time. I’ve concluded that there is no easy fix and nothing that a bunch of smart people can do. After all, the recipe for a modestly affluent country is pretty obvious–good infrastructure, educated people and conducive environment for business. Nepal, and most poor countries, lack all three and there is nothing a bunch of clever people can do to change this.
Nepalis have to change themselves if they want to change Nepal. That means voting according to ability rather than identity during elections and courage to stand up against strikes that rob people of their basic economic rights.
However, there are small things that westerners could do that would help few people. Some of them are: support free trade, buy products from poor countries even if the products are made by exploited people or child labour and establish schools in remote places (this is cheaper than you imagine). Transferring technology is always good but unless you have manpower to harness it, it is mostly useless. Although one piece of technology that Nepal could really do with is development of cheap micro-hydropower stations. Most of Nepal is without electricity, but fortunately there are few thousand streams and rivers which could be cheaply harnessed to provide power to majority of people.
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Actually one of the worst things one can do is visit Nepal, then come back to US, and ask the Americans what can be done to save the poor world! Sort of things Bono is good at. And I’m sure there is not a society of Africans that respects/reveres Bono. In contrast, there is actually a foreigner that Nepalis revere: Edmund Hillary. He asked people of Namche what they wanted. They replied schools, so he built schools for them. He also built hospitals and an airport. Now Namche area probably has the best living standards in whole of Nepal and the Sherpas are one of the most well off and educated group of people in Nepal.
So if you really care and put a lot of effort, resourceful people can make a difference in the poor world. However, you don’t need to be smart/genious to make a difference.
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Apart from promoting my favorite project (Sugar), I would recommend to work on anything that makes easier for people to work together and share knowledge. That means pretty much any FOSS project, but some will make you feel like you are having a bigger impact than others.
I love when I read news from kids in Uruguay, Peru, Nepal or some OLPC pilot in Africa and know they are using the software I wrote some months ago.
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@bafj – Congratulations on striking out on your own! You are master of your own destiny. That’s definitely worth something. An inspiring story.
@ansoo – I can’t speak for him, but I don’t think Alex was coming back from Nepal and saying, “We should help those poor people I just saw in Nepal.”
I think it was more of a general question about how we spend our time — are we writing software just for ourselves, or our friends, or some corporate app that no one cares about, or are we doing stuff that could have a real positive impact on a lot of people? Because the same amount of work could have a very different impact depending on how it’s applied.
I appreciate your perspective on this whole question, and your idea that maybe “being smart” isn’t all that helpful. What do you think about room to read building schools in Nepal, for example?
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Nat,
I have only read about Room to Read (some in Nepalese media), and from what I’ve read they are doing a good job. Although I think working for NGOs is not very good use of one’s life (we could instead work on something that can make people’s life better), we need more people like John Wood and organisations like Room to Read. From what I’ve read Room to Read is one of few NGOs that spends more money on their projects than on operating expenses and Land Cruisers.
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The Annapurna Circuit is hard work! I only did the Base Camp trek
I have always assumed that giving away my labour in the form of open source is a very good way of donating to the entire world. that’s one of the reasons I work on SpamAssassin… if only it wasn’t necessary in the first place!
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“If you’re not trying to do your very best, why not? Do you have a good reason?”
Yes. Because you inevitably just end up getting crapped on from a great height, at which point you realise it really wasn’t worth the effort.
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Well, I don’t have a nobel prize project in the works just yet, but if people are looking for immediate ways in which they can start changing the world, take a look at my blog post called…
“Want to Change the World? Here’s How to Get Started”
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what you can do is invent new technology that solves otherwise unsolvable problems.
this is full of microsoft types, but I likes it. was kind of surprised it wasn’t run by you, when I read about it a few weeks ago.
http://www.intellectualventures.com/
word up,
Anna -
Here is a video titled “I Want To Live In A World Where…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjJKiCgFlGU
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