After the conference ended on Saturday, I wandered around Harvard Square for a while and then made my way up to the Hong Kong, where I gathered with a few other folks. In addition to catching up with Dave, I met a few interesting people, including a guy who is working on his first podcasts; some of the software developers from DownhillBattle who are working on BlogTorrent, which aims to simplify posting BitTorrents; and Betsy Campbell of MIT’s Community Innovation Lab.
An aside about Betsy: she made what I felt was the most cogent point in a long afternoon of spiraling abstractions when she pointed out that the motivating force that gets most people involved in issues outside their family or community is shame. Her thesis (approximately, since I don’t see a good transcript of it in the conference sources) is that something has to make you feel that you won’t live up to your own image of yourself as a good person for you to do something about it. Which is, I think, spot on.
Incidentally, the work that Betsy is doing in making cross-boundary connections between non-profit community activist groups and people that could help them is enormously worthwhile. If anyone from Sloan is reading this, working with this lab could be a good Socially Responsible Business project…