Theresa Bradley 2014-12-27T18:59:36-05:00 Theresa Bradley Copyright 2008,, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Theresa Bradley Good old fashioned elbow grease. El Hacker Cívico: Civic-Minded Techies Gain Sway with Government in Mexico and Beyond,2013:/theblog//3.4334088 2013-11-25T17:13:03-05:00 2014-01-25T05:59:02-05:00 Theresa Bradley
To many in Mexico, what became known as the "millionaire's app" was just the latest in an old story of bloated state spending; but Soto and his colleagues saw a chance to push a new approach instead. In two days, they'd covered their white office walls with ideas for a cheaper alternative and launched an online contest that drew input from more than 150 software developers and designers, producing five open-source options in two weeks.

Lawmakers soon insisted they'd never known about the original app, which had been quietly approved by a legislative administrative board; and a congressional spokesman rushed to clarify that the project had been suspended. Invited to pitch their alternatives to Congress, a half-dozen young coders took the podium in a sloping auditorium at the legislature. The only cost for their work: a 11,500-peso (then US $930) prize for the winner.

"We didn't just 'angry tweet,' we actually did something," Soto, a 28-year-old IT engineer and social entrepreneur, said at the time. "Citizens need to understand democracy beyond voting every few years, and government needs to understand that we're willing to participate."

Seven months later, Mexico's president appears to have heard them, hiring Soto and nine others to launch one of the world's first federal civic innovation offices, part of a broader national digital agenda to be formally unveiled today. Building on a model pioneered in a handful of U.S. cities since 2010, Mexico's civic innovation team aims to integrate so-called "civic hackers" with policy experts already inside government -- to not only build better technology, but to seed a more tech-minded approach to problem-solving across federal processes and policy. What began as outside activism is slowly starting to creep into government.

Long considered a dry topic by many citizens, government IT has popped to life in recent headlines, with news of the NSA's vast surveillance machine on one hand highlighting the United States' imposing tech prowess, even as its botched launch of exposes severe problems in the way that government buys and builds software. That paradox echoes around the globe: While governments may spend heavily on high-tech intelligence and security programs, most are still struggling to update the unwieldy IT systems that run almost everything else.

Mexico's app incident reflects a common problem in that process: wasteful spending by non-techie bureaucrats who don't seem to know what they're buying -- at best, out-of-touch; at worst, party to crony contracting; and overseen, if at all, by officials even less tech-savvy than themselves. Citizens, in contrast, are adopting new technologies faster than much of the public sector, growing the gap between the efficiency and accountability that they expect as private consumers, and the bureaucratic, buggy experience that government still provides.

To break that cycle, a movement of community-minded "civic hackers" like Soto has stepped into the void, offering their own low-cost tools to make government more efficient, collaborative and transparent. In recent years, thousands of developers and designers have met to build civic-aimed software at weekend hackathons or casual coding nights across the U.S. and Europe; and similar networks are now cropping up across Latin America, Africa and Asia - part of a twin push for more democratic and more digital societies. Latin America's increasingly stable, middle-class democracies, including Mexico, Chile and Brazil, have seen a particular surge in events like Desarrollando America Latina, Campus Party and ABRE LATAM, which convene coders to address issues including crime, education, pollution and public health. For-profit brands sponsor contests like Brazilian mobile-phone provider Vivo's Smart City challenge, and philanthropies including the Avina Foundation have called for tech projects that boost civic participation. The resulting apps have done things like map crime to spot trends, let parents rate and compare schools, and help citizens recycle, report pollution or avoid traffic.

Their efforts illustrate an alternate definition of the term "hacker" that's common in tech circles: not a sinister saboteur, but a problem-solving programmer who finds creative ways around obstacles. Skipping slow social-science research and long product cycles, civic hackers favor an action-oriented, agile approach to software development that allows them to build, release and continuously refine their work. And because they believe in using open-source code -- free, public and infinitely alterable -- their output isn't meant to be final, but perfected over time by the community; not to mention retooled for use by other public offices, potentially saving millions now spent on redundant projects across jurisdictions.

Civic Hacktivism

Most civic hacking still takes form as outside activism, using the power of example to show officials and citizens how government might change its approach to technology. Around the world, some agencies are starting to pay attention -- not only accepting civic hacking as a new avenue of citizen engagement, but as a potential source of new tools. Many public offices now hold their own hackathons, including the White House, which in June hosted one of nearly 100 events marking the first "National Day of Civic Hacking" in the U.S. Since Washington D.C. launched its initial Apps for Democracy contest in 2008, similar events have mushroomed in big and small cities across the U.S.; federally, they've spread from NASA and the Department of Health and Human Services to the Environmental Protection Agency, Labor Department, and Veterans' Affairs - in part through, a platform designed to help government agencies host innovation contests to tap the public for new ideas. The State Department, well-known for its paradigm-shifting approach to "21st century statecraft," including digital training camps for global NGOs and public diplomacy through social media, is also reaching out to civic hackers through coding contests, for example with USAID's 2012 "Hack for Hunger" and a joint U.S./Russia codeathon that saw programmers in D.C. and Moscow build tools to track crime, legislation, and public contracts in 2011.

Globally, the World Bank has played a catalyzing role, not only hosting worldwide water- and sanitation-themed contests, but seeding the model in Latin America specifically, for example coordinating infrastructure and health-themed hackathons in Colombia, a challenge to fight domestic violence in Central America, and key events around disaster relief -- even using winning apps to locate missing people after 2010 earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Government agencies in Brazil and Chile have held their own national app contests, including a hackathon launched by Brazil's congress last month to source legislative transparency tools in the wake of anti-government protests earlier this year. In Mexico, the national tax agency this summer asked Soto and his colleagues to run an open call for an app to improve tax collection and service; while cities from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro to Mexico City have convened coders at a host of more general local contests, too.

Still, hackathons have limitations: Given their experimental, brainstorm-and-build-it nature, they produce more focused prototypes than systemic proposals -- drawing fire for spreading the "solutionist" illusion that cool apps can cure complex governance problems. In the rush to build something, coders can often fail to understand or address the context and roots of problems at hand; and without input from policy experts who've spent years studying complex issues like poverty, education or crime, they can end up producing simplistic or flashy tools that are divorced from real needs. That gap can be especially acute in emerging economies: an app to report potholes, for example, may be of little value in a place where roads aren't paved or few people own smartphones or cars.

Yet the speed, small scale, and low cost with which hackers build things can also slash the stakes for failure, freeing government to try new ways of delivering services and engaging citizens, reshaping its attitude toward risk and innovation. "An iPhone app isn't going to change structural problems in democracy," so civic hackers often focus on improving basic public services instead, said David Sasaki, an expert in open government and technology for the Omidyar Network in Latin America. It's not always about the actual apps built as much as it's about showing what's possible: "It's highly symbolic," Sasaki said. "It's about changing the mentality within government."

Civic hackathons can change the mentality outside government, too, creating new communities of techies who may've never thought about public service, but now find it full of interesting challenges. In that, civic hacking is part of a broader, emerging "civic tech" movement, which draws on crowdsourcing principles of community-based problem-solving. It can be seen as the latest incarnation of digital democracy: If "e-government" started to push public services online in the late 1990s, and "e-participation" engaged voters and officials in a more direct dialogue in the 2000s, civic tech is now moving from communication to collaboration, recruiting citizens not only to advocate but to build alternative solutions. While David Cameron's "Big Society" program in part sought such collaboration as way to cut public spending in the U.K., U.S. and Latin American officials seem intent on using it to source new ideas.

Innovation Infrastructure

To institutionalize that input, cities from Boston and Philadelphia to Buenos Aires and Mexico City are building an innovation infrastructure, opening civic tech offices that often partner with the community to identify, build and test new approaches -- not only working with civic hackers, but sometimes hiring them into permanent roles. Fellowship programs can seem a safe way to start: Nonprofit Code for America has joined with dozens of U.S. cities since 2011, sending tech teams into town on one-year fellowships to devise and disseminate easy-to-use tools, in the process training a new crop of civic hackers who could make careers in the public sector. Code for America founder Jen Pahlka, now a deputy U.S. CTO, coordinates a Presidential Innovation Fellowship, which draws developers and entrepreneurs to tackle specific projects across the federal government. Her organization has meanwhile helped to spread the model internationally, working with Mexico City's new Laboratorio para la Ciudad to launch a local fellowship last May. A division of Jamaica's Agriculture Ministry did the same, partnering with the regional program Code for the Caribbean; and Buenos Aires consulted with Code for America when staffing up its own civic innovation lab to incubate projects hatched at local hackathons.

In contrast to the broader innovation offices that some governments are opening to promote economic growth through traditional tech entrepreneurship, these specifically "civic" innovation offices are the first to focus explicitly on the relationship between technology, citizen engagement, and public services. Soto's team, for example, is part of a larger presidential office on national digital strategy, Mexico's first, which also includes groups dedicated to e-government and digital communication. Founder and coordinator Alejandra Lagunes, a former Google Mexico director who ran President Enrique Peña Nieto's digital campaign in 2012, brought the idea into the administration, which promised in a key inaugural agreement to implement the country's first open-data and e-government strategy, betting that a more transparent and efficient government would boost economic growth and investment, too.

Yet some experts warn that having separate innovation offices can risk siloing change, when what really spreads new ideas throughout government are direct personal relationships across agencies, an April study by the New America Foundation's California Civic Innovation Project found. Many civic innovation teams also focus on finding new forms of public engagement, when a more lasting transformation may require rebuilding internal tools and processes instead. But that's a tall order: Software built by small experimental offices or volunteer techies will never be as complex or secure as would be needed for a massive government project like And even if civic hackers had access to resources for such complicated work, they'd face an uphill battle navigating the arcane procurement systems that can prevent governments from using small vendors or volunteer labor.

That's why for Soto, it's about striking a balance: bringing civic hackers onto teams with issue experts across government to address specific needs, demonstrating a new approach as well as its impact, which may in time be more likely to change process and policy. "We could never build a with a hackathon. But with the office we're building, that's exactly the point: to create high-impact projects that lead to something more," he said this month from his new desk in Mexico City's leafy Condesa neighborhood. "Success isn't launching 120 apps. Success is actually changing a process inside government forever," so that the next debacle never happens.

Open Data

That shift will require sharing not just best practices, but data, across government. For that reason, Mexico's civic innovation team is drafting a national open data policy and building an open data portal, pushing federal and state offices to share information across jurisdictions, as well as with citizens. Though a founding member of the global Open Government Partnership, Mexico has been slow to issue open data regulations; even now, Soto's team is taking a gradual approach, polling members of the public to see what kind of information they want to see made available first, rather than releasing thousands of datasets unprompted.

Open data, and the belief that troves of government information should be accessible to citizens, is in fact key to the civic tech movement. From budget and fundraising figures, to the census, transit, or public safety stats that coders use to build apps mapping traffic and crime, public data are the building blocks of civic tech: More than transparency for transparency's sake, they allow citizens to build tools that can not only hold government accountable, but make it more efficient. Since the U.S. enacted its milestone Freedom of Information Act in 1966, watchdog groups like the D.C.-based Sunlight Foundation have modernized the push for open government, crafting new roles for the public in mining information once it's released. A key argument is economic: give citizens access to data, and they can build businesses around it, just as weather and GPS industries blossomed after federal satellite data were released. A 2013 White House Executive Order promotes that kind of collaboration, making federal data open by default specifically so entrepreneurs can build businesses around it. To an extent, that link between open data and economic growth can give advocates and officials a common cause.

Yet transparency groups and governments have had a different and arguably more antagonistic relationship in Latin America than in the U.S. Born amid the wave of democratizations that swept the region in the 1980s and 1990s, local transparency efforts at first focused on exposing human rights abuses by recent military governments -- a tough task that often left each side slower to trust the other, complicating efforts to work together on new issues. Some transparency groups have embraced a broader purpose, though, with organizations like Mexico's Fundar and Chile's Cuidadano Inteligente not only pressing for a wider range of data to be released, but recruiting techies to make sense of that data and put it to wider use. In that, civic hackers may help to further align interests: on one hand, they transform jumbled information into new tools for activists to hold governments accountable; on the other, they translate it into usable data sets for citizens, businesses, and even governments --essentially recognizing that transparency is not just about truth, but performance.

"Open data combats what are probably our two biggest problems: corruption and inefficiency," said Rodrigo Gallegos, director of sustainability and technology at the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, a Mexico City think tank. "Governments learn a lot when they open data and society is able to manipulate it in a creative way to find solutions or patterns. There's a huge opportunity."

Digital Divide

To realize that potential, though, Latin America's civic tech infrastructure needs to grow -- a question of resources as much as of interest. A gaping digital divide still limits the degree to which technology can be an avenue of civic participation, just as it limits the degree to which tech can drive economic growth. Mexico, for example, is home to one of the region's biggest tech sectors, but just 38 percent of people have Internet access, according to the U.N; and though mobile penetration neared 87 percent last year, high service costs have at times made civil society reluctant to use text messaging to engage citizens, a 2011 report for the D.C.-based New Policy Institute found.

Still, infrastructure investments are narrowing the gap; and telecom reforms are expected to boost competition and slash prices, increasing digital participation. The Mexican president's new digital agenda broadly aims to close the divide and put technology to new use in public safety, education and healthcare, investing in growing a digital economy. Latin America in general is already home to some of the world's most avid social media users, with Brazil and Mexico respectively boasting the world's fourth- and fifth-biggest groups of active Twitter users last year, and third- and fifth-biggest groups of Facebook users - many of whom put those platforms to civic use. In one early example, Mexicans tweeting around the 2009 #InternetNecesario campaign drew enough attention to kill a proposed 3 percent luxury tax on internet fees; today, many don't just use Twitter to lobby government, but to fill in where it has failed them, for example creating city-specific hashtags to warn one another of shootings and drug violence in places where cartel threats can deter police and journalists -- a trend explored by Microsoft Research.

Long before they were invited into government, Mexican civic techies built specific mobile tools to transmit everything from top-down hurricane alerts; to two-way crime reports based on citizen tips; to bottom-up election-monitoring tips, with voters submitting cases of suspected fraud. One key platform, Cuidemos el Voto ("Protect the Vote"), drew so many tips during Mexico's 2009 congressional race that the federal electoral crime office asked to use it, said co-founder Oscar Salazar, a startup veteran who worked with Soto in 2011 to launch Citivox, a dashboard that aggregates citizens' digital complaints. In the beginning, "it's about creating apps where citizens can engage as a community, improve their lives and gather a critical mass, so that government starts realizing something is happening. Then government engages," Salazar said.

As those efforts start to fuel demand for civic tech, governments can help to fuel supply by growing the pool of qualified coders. Though its public IT investments sharply lag stated goals, Mexico has still sent billions of pesos (hundreds of millions of dollars) to foster local software and ICT clusters and counts some 600,000 IT employees, with more than that number of students enrolled in engineering and technology programs. The question remains, though, how many among this new generation of techies will trade time at an IT giant or in the region's budding startup scene to work on civic projects. "We don't have a lack of talent; it's just focused on a different set of problems - they're trying to build for the consumer web, to build the next Twitter or Facebook, instead of looking out the window and seeing the real problems we have," said Rodolfo Wilhelmy, one of the hackers behind Mexico's "millionaire's app" contest, who now works with Soto as director of open data for the president's civic innovation team.

Codeando Mexico

Wilhelmy should know: Three years ago, he'd never heard of civic tech. Then a 25-year-old IT grad from the prestigious Tecnologico de Monterrey, he'd been building iPhone and Blackberry apps for his own startup and another local venture, cranking out everything from newsreader and e-commerce software to a Foursquare/Facebook mashup that helped people find the nearest taco stand. "After a while, I just said to myself, 'What am I doing - writing software for a brand, or should I work on something of real impact?'" he recalled. When friends asked him to join Mexico's first civic hackathon in 2011, their team won with a tool that shared public data on crime and schools. He recalls meeting U.N. officials and U.S. civic startup stars at that event; soon after, he started doing work for co-hosts Soto and Salazar at Citivox, and attending every civic hackathon he could.

It wasn't long before Wilhelmy spotted that key flaw of civic-tech solutionism in action: coders at those events often built novelty apps that failed to address real needs. Late last year, he and a few other Mexican startup vets sought a fix, creating an online platform where NGOs or government agencies can describe specific problems for hackers to browse and then team up to solve - framing relevant issues from the start. The platform, named Codeando Mexico, has since hosted more than 30 civic-themed challenges.

With Soto as an advisor, the team seized on the scandal surrounding the "millionare's app" to formally launch in March, calling for help "taking down the Mexican tech mafia" - a play on the big, slow software makers that dominate public contracting around the world. In that, Codeando Mexico tackled a central civic-tech target: procurement, widely considered one of the public spheres ripest for reform. Its goal, according to Wilhelmy, was to replace clueless or "compadrismo" crony contracting with micro-procurement, swapping traditional suppliers for leaner teams of open-source coders who can release and revise what they build in near real-time. "It's like the Robin Hood of procurement: You take money that's being spent on big projects and bring it to the developer community, giving them an opportunity to work on stuff that matters," he said. "There's a whole taboo around software: government thinks it has to be expensive. We're sending a message that there are different ways to do this; it shouldn't cost so much."

The maker of the costly congressional app in question, Mexico City consultancy Pulso Legislativo, insisted last spring that its hefty price tag didn't reflect its software as much as the aggregated data and analysis behind it. But critics were quick to note that Mexican lawmakers already had access to similar data compiled by at least five publicly-funded research centers - not to mention from INFOPAL, a congressional stats system with its own mobile application. With Mexico then in the midst of a contentious telecom reform, the public may've been especially primed to pounce on any hint of corruption or wasteful IT spending. Codeando Mexico saw an opening.

So it was that a crew of young coders, almost all under 23-years-old, traipsed into the legislature, a motley mix of suits and skinny jeans, one-by-one pitching a panel of judges that included the head of the congressional Science and Technology Committee. Drawing on public data culled by local transparency groups, their Android and iOS apps - including the winner, "Diputados" -- allowed citizens to track and opine on pending bills and to map and contact their representatives -- still a relatively new concept in Mexico's young democracy.

"People often think we're lazy, because we haven't had the capacity to be transparent, to reply in real time or according to other characteristics of the apps we saw today; we haven't had the capacity to respond to the citizen," committee chair and congressman Ruben Felix Hays said in remarks reflecting on the event. "It's clear we have to change the paradigm we've been working with in congress."

Maybe with a push from a small new civic innovation team inside the president's office, they will.]]>
Peter Thiel's Millennial Fellows Are Going to Be Just Fine,2012:/theblog//3.1776496 2012-08-15T14:37:14-04:00 2012-08-15T14:37:55-04:00 Theresa Bradley
Just 20-years-old and four-foot-eleven, Full stands out among startup CEOs. She began working with photovoltaics at age 10, soon directing her artist father to help weld early versions of her "SunSaluter" -- a $20 device that makes solar panels up to 40 percent more efficient, potentially revolutionizing electricity generation across the developing world. At 18, she piloted her product in Kenya; and last year, she left Princeton after winning a controversial grant from libertarian internet entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, who is catching flak for using part of his enormous fortune to entice bright kids to skip college and launch companies. At first, visitors to one of Full's new offices looked past her, asking in confusion where her parents were. A year later, she'd won $300,000 more from other organizations and hired a former Boeing engineer as her intern.

"People say because we're young, we're not ready for the real world. Well, of course we're not ready - that's why we have to just do stuff," Full said in an interview, reflecting on the last year. "If I don't know something, I do it, so next time I do it better. Just studying it isn't going to help me execute."

Critics have slammed the Thiel Fellowship as an anti-establishment indulgence - a delusional and destructive plot to lure kids from the certain, if conservative, return of a traditional education. But fellows like Full don't seem phased by the hype. Lost in the uproar over their eccentric benefactor and prodigy reputations, most of them just want to build things, and are pragmatically glad for support. In this, they're typical of their generation: a networked mass of some 85 million so-called Millennials, whom studies suggest are less ideological and more entrepreneurial than their predecessors, more driven to chart their own course. Thiel could not have scripted a group better suited to his Twainish "never-let-schooling-interfere-with-your-education" philosophy.

Thiel's inaugural batch of 24 fellows is now halfway through the two-year experience. More than 10 have registered companies; at least one closed an investment round; and another sold his venture, live music platform GigLocator, for a reported six figures. As a new class now begins the program -- its four-month application process documented by CNBC in a two-part series that airs this week -- Full's colleagues have compiled a simple Google doc of advice that reflects their odd blend of Silicon Valley celebrity and college kid innocence. "Understand the uniqueness of the opportunity... Ask and usually you shall receive.... Don't blow it when meeting important people... Order coffee instead of lattes because it's cheaper," the document advises, according to fellowship director Danielle Strachman, who shared excerpts aloud in an interview.

"This is not a race; it's not about that at the end of two years, you have a company started and you've raised all this money," Strachman said. "The grand experiment is if in 10 years these people look back and say, 'That fellowship really helped me launch into an untracked place.'"

To critics, though, the program appears more threatening. Its most generous opponents compare it to the NFL drafting college athletes who quit school for the pros: few make it big, and the rest are left with no degree and slimmer prospects. Others are harsher, with Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg trashing it as part of a larger, tech-savvy libertarianism, a narcissistic effort to replicate Thiel's "narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible." Forbes called it one of Thiel's "most provocative acts."

But for Thiel, "provocative" may just be a compliment. His writings, on everything from political correctness to the probability of apocalypse, have raised eyebrows since college -- yes, he has a bachelor's and JD from Stanford, where he even teaches on occasion. Now 44, the PayPal cofounder and early Facebook investor has made a career as a contrarian, famously foreseeing the dotcom and housing bubbles. He invests in futurist industries including genomics and private space travel; and his philanthropy funds endeavors in artificial intelligence, "curing" aging, and a movement to build independent, floating communities in the sea. Incenting budding tech entrepreneurs to leave school to build things hardly seems provocative by comparison.

Thiel's case for the fellowship is two-fold. First, the world needs more bright minds working on transformational technologies in energy, biotech and advanced software, and fewer designing mobile apps. As the motto for his VC firm, Founders Fund, protests: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." Second, he says, the U.S. university system is broken, part of an "education bubble" and "college conspiracy" that saddles students with irrelevant information and crippling debt. Instead of studying, Thiel says, young people should "do," using his "no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 to skip college and focus on their work, their research, and their self-education," according to the fellowship website. Quitting school is cast as the quickest means to needed innovation.

"We have a society where successful people are encouraged to go to college, but it's a mistake to think that's what makes people successful," Thiel told 60 Minutes last year. "It's not causal. Harvard does a great job at picking the winners, and therefore it should get very little credit for turning people into winners."

Thiel is not exaggerating the student debt crisis. Real college costs have tripled since 1981, according to the College Board; student loans now top $1 trillion, making them the #1 source of debt in the country, at least 15 percent bigger than revolving consumer credit including credit cards, with higher delinquency rates than mortgages or car loans, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Reserve data show. Unemployment -- highest among 20-24 and 25-34 year-olds, at 13.5 and 8.2 percent in July -- makes it tougher for graduates to repay those loans, even as a 2005 act limits their ability to discharge them through bankruptcy.

Yet as technology changes the economy's structure, employers are looking for innovative self-starters who can keep their firms competitive -- that is, they're looking for extra skills not always learned in school. Some 29 percent of employers called entrepreneurial experience an important factor in hiring, according to a May study by the Boston-based Millennial Branding consulting firm, although less than 7 percent of the adult U.S. population own their own businesses.

That appetite for initiative resonates with Millennials who, born roughly between 1980 and 2000, are more entrepreneurial by both nature and necessity. Famously self-entitled, they're often comfortable taking risks; digitally native, they've seen an avalanche of online options slash startup costs; and, in the wake of the financial crisis, they trust themselves more than big business or government. They want to have a concrete impact and control over their lives, and see their own ventures as an avenue.


A beige plush armchair sits forgotten in the fenced front yard of a corner bungalow in Palo Alto, where a group of fellows dragged it on a whim to pick a loquat tree weeks before. As at many student houses, there's a barbeque out back and skateboards in the living room, a pull-up bar in the hall doorframe and overflowing trash bags in the kitchen. But when Darren Zhu comes home, he changes into flip-flops to keep the dark hardwood floors clean. Zhu, a 20-year-old synthetic biologist, lives here with four other Thiel fellows: a statistician, a web designer, a robotics researcher and a biogerontologist (who, at 18, has been working to slow aging). A few other fellows stopped by the night before, talking politics -- Zhu says they're still exploring as many political systems as possible -- and singing Billy Joel and R. Kelly songs as he played the piano.

A high-school tennis player and conservatory pianist, Zhu fell into science early with kindergarten visits to the medical-imaging lab where his father worked for a future Nobel laureate. He chose Yale for college specifically because it suited his wide-ranging interests, and soon found himself traveling Europe with the school carillonneurs, a selective team trained to regularly ring the university's centuries-old bells. So it was that he stood overlooking campus from a 200-foot tower when he got the call offering him a Thiel fellowship. Now, he plays the bells and pickup basketball at Stanford, buying used research equipment for his own lab in a step toward the biotech startup he has thought about since high school. The Gates Foundation just gave him another $100,000.

"It always appealed to me to have something that I built myself, that I'm in charge of and dictate the progress of -- this idea of both empowerment, but also eventually impact," Zhu said in an interview. "We have a platter of things that we pick and choose from today, and we don't really care too much for the system to choose what we're defined by."

That sentiment echoes across Zhu's Millennial generation. Forty-six percent of 18-25 year-olds say they hope to start their own business in the next five years, more than double the rate for Baby Boomers, according to a 2011 poll for small-business insurer Employers. A 2010 survey for the Kauffman Foundation had similar results, noting the three top reasons 18-24 year-olds want to launch their own ventures: "to use my skills," "to build something for my future," and "to be my own boss."

Part of the pull is of course the Zuckerberg effect: the startup cool factor and promise of hitting it big. But, having watched their Gen X/Boomer parents punch the clock for decades, many Millennials also want something more meaningful: More than money, they want to be recognized for building things that are creative, Michelle Dagnino, a consultant and speaker on generational change, said in an interview. Even within a large company, Millennial employees say that "innovation" and "societal development" should be business's two top priorities, while their older counterparts still list "profit" and "value," Deloitte's 2011 Millennial Survey found.

Although their instant-gratification, networked natures can breed frivolity and groupthink, those same traits can also make Millennials more independent. Web culture has taught them to find anything anywhere at anytime -- sampling individually as it suits them and teaching each other online, bypassing rather than overthrowing old centers of authority. Thiel's fellows have been to magnet schools, private schools, home schools and graduate schools; summer camps, science fairs, laboratories and libraries -- to say nothing of the online worlds they're constantly rebuilding. In that sense, the fellowship is just the latest stop on a kind of intellectual shopping spree that's increasingly characteristic of their age group. "Millennials have the ability to self-learn," relying on their own networks to identify and reinforce new ideas and goals, said Scott Beale, author of Millennial Manifesto, a 2003 book on the generation's politics. "They're surrounding themselves with other people who say to them, 'Yeah, you can do that,' as opposed to being dominated by an older generation that tells them that they can't do things."

Forced to adapt to those interests, colleges are experimenting with open online courses and now offer more than 5,000 entrepreneurship classes for enrolled students, up from 250 in 1985, according to the Kauffman Foundation. Independent programs like Boston Startup School and Bold Academy provide crash courses in business or leadership; while hundreds of traditional accelerators and incubators drill those with more investor-ready business plans. Schools from Stanford to the University of Pennsylvania grant students leave to work on new ventures; and at the Thiel Foundation, Strachman runs a monthly call for entrepreneurial education programs that would become college alternatives. One of them, New York-based e[nstitute], pairs 18-24 year-olds with entrepreneurs for two-year apprenticeships that are intended to replace school as well as traditional corporate internships.

"Big companies just aren't as appealing or interesting or even credible as they once were," pushing more young people to look to startups as training grounds, e[nstitute] cofounder Shaila Ittycheria said in an interview. "People are trying to associate themselves with where they think that credibility, that success and value, lies."

Clearly, value still lies in a college degree, too. While there's debate over just how much more a graduate earns in a lifetime, estimates range from $280,000 to nearly $1 million. And for the majority of kids who don't know what they want at 18, school can still expose them to a wide world that shapes their lives. "I actually don't think college is bad," Ittycheria added, herself a Harvard Business School graduate. "It's just that one solution should never be forced down everyone's throat. If anything, why not give people a chance to figure out what they actually want to learn first?"

For those few kids who are clear enough to have companies they can't wait to launch, the people who hold the keys to their futures -- venture capitalists -- openly say they don't care about school. VCs invest in people who've dropped out of college all the time; what matters is an entrepreneur's ability to execute and stay committed to the venture. Thiel fellows, in contrast, are free to abandon projects or shift course at anytime; and even if they do launch a business, Thiel gets none of the first-dibs equity that most accelerators and VCs require. And when their two-year program is over, nothing prevents fellows from going back to school. Full already plans on returning to her scholarship; meanwhile, she has found a way to keep her favorite part of college alive, by joining an ex-Olympian on Canada's national development rowing team.

"One day when I'm 30 and I'm doing all this, no one will care that I was the one doing it; they'll care what the technology was. The only reason people are so interested now is because I'm so young," Full said of her solar venture last year. "I'd like to be taken seriously as an adult, and if I want that to happen, I should start acting like one. So. No more pretending to be a kid. Although it is helpful at times."]]>
Greek Respite Leaves Euro Problems Unchanged,2012:/theblog//3.1606345 2012-06-19T12:16:36-04:00 2012-06-19T12:15:34-04:00 Theresa Bradley
Greece is no longer on the cusp of default, but will still seek to renegotiate parts of its March bailout in coming weeks, looking to spread the same required budget cuts over a longer time period and to couple them with pro-growth measures like infrastructure spending, said Blanka Kolenikova, a country analyst at the Eurasia Group in London, in a telephone interview with me. The E.U., for its part, has sent mixed signals, with Germany insisting it won't bend terms of the current Greek deal even as France advocates more pro-growth policies.

In Greece, the winning New Democracy and third-place socialist PASOK parties have dominated politics since the country returned to democracy in 1974, jointly governing since late last year. But the odd union of these one-time arch-rivals is sure to strain, likely prompting a new round of elections before the government's term ends in 2016 and narrowing the window for action, Kolenikova said.

For European leaders, the central challenge is bigger, and has been mounting for years: How to stabilize a single monetary union that allows for 17 different fiscal policies? Independent countries could use interest rate policy to devalue their currencies, boosting exports, growth and state coffers; while a more complete union could control budgetary and even labor policy across members, limiting deficits and steadying debt markets and worker flow. Europe, stuck in partial-integration limbo, can do neither.

A European Fiscal Compact signed earlier this year takes a key step towards resolving that, slashing member states' allowable yearly deficits to 0.5 percent of GDP. But it requires at least 12 eurozone governments to ratify it, and so far only those that might be most likely to need the rescue funding to which it would entitle them -- Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Slovenia -- have signed on. The Greek vote leaves that situation unchanged.

"Our worst fears didn't materialize in Greece today, but the problem is still there," Mauro Guillen, director of The Lauder Institute of International Studies at The Wharton School of Business, said on Sunday. "Today's results allow Europe to kick the can further down the road."

Foreign investors have fled Greek, Spanish and Italian debt markets in recent months, skeptical of those governments' abilities to service their loans. Instead, domestic banks are buying up those bonds, boosting local exposure and the potential need for an ECB bailout -- an increasingly common pattern that strains European institutions while leaving untouched the core problem of uneven competitiveness and growth.

Policymakers in Brussels and Berlin have hinted at plans to more fiercely pursue a fiscal and political union, but it could take years for Europe's 17 member states to accept such constraints on sovereignty. Strong economies like Germany's could meanwhile give problem countries a boost with tax breaks or domestic wage hikes that would favor imports from places like Greece, helping to jumpstart growth in the periphery, Guillen said. Or, instead of austerity measures, European leaders could condition future loans on programs that boost productivity in such countries.

"Without some kind of external lifeline, capital injection, bailout of banks, or demand for goods and services, none of these countries can cope," he added. "The straightjacket of the currency union prevents them from adjusting in the usual way, so the rollercoaster ride continues."]]>
Fashion Brands Bet Shoppers Want To Partner For A Cause,2012:/theblog//3.1414706 2012-04-17T14:08:08-04:00 2012-06-17T05:12:01-04:00 Theresa Bradley
Customers and employees have donated more than 50,000 used Eileen Fisher garments for resale since 2009, raising more than $600,000 for nonprofits that support women and girls. Now Green Eileen, as the program is known, has opened its own recycled-item only store outside New York, giving old and new shoppers a way to do good -- and to feel good about her brand.

More than just selling used clothes for charity, programs like Fisher's are transforming traditional eco-friendly efforts into two-way projects that build community around a cause. Shoppers at a growing group of clothing companies can now not only buy recycled items or see a portion of sales go to nonprofits, but partner with brands that give them a more active role in giving back.

"You need to be responsible for the product from start to finish, but you also need to create community and connection," Fisher said at her airy corporate headquarters in Irvington, N.Y. "It makes the business much deeper than just selling stuff."

Polls show consumers prefer brands that pursue green and social goals, with 72 percent saying they expect companies to protect the environment and 62 percent saying they'd switch brands to support a cause, according to a 2010 study by global public relations firm Edelman.

But with two-thirds of companies now doing some sort of social responsibility campaign, according to a 2010 PRWeek/Barkley PR survey, shoppers are looking for more than fuzzy-feel-good initiatives. They want the emotional satisfaction that comes from observing their impact up-close, says Edelman managing director Carol Cone.

Some 63 percent say they "want brands to make it easier for them to make positive difference," and nearly three-fourths say companies should work with them for a greater goal, Edelman's survey found after polling 7,000 adults in 13 countries, including 1,000 Americans. They want a kind of consumer community service, and look to brands as conduits to connect them to a cause.

In the fashion industry, that realization is sparking a shift in focus from greening the way that clothes are made to greening the way that we consume them.

Manufacturing often accounts for just 20 to 30 percent of a garment's environmental impact, studies show, while shipping, shopping and washing contribute far more. Long driven by a marketing strategy called "planned obsolescence," fashion often pushes us to replace outdated items each season, while advances in manufacturing and trade slash prices and further speed sales. The average U.S. household now generates 228 pounds of textile waste a year, according to Census and Environmental Protection Agency figures -- the rough equivalent of trashing a sweater a day.

In that context, marketing experts say, companies can stand out by looking beyond traditional eco-initiatives that promote nontoxic dyes or organic cotton, to focus on consumption and disposal -- for example, by making clothes that don't need to be dry-cleaned, or that last long enough to be resold as vintage threads. A key step is making consumers aware of their own role in the process.

In addition to funding nonprofits, sportswear companies Nike and Patagonia have, for example, collected more than 25 million used sneakers and 45 tons of gear in "partnership" with customers; and Patagonia last year took the unorthodox step of asking shoppers not to buy anything new they don't absolutely need, building an online community around that commitment.

Top fashion schools are dedicating courses to sustainable merchandising, not just manufacturing; with students at Parsons The New School for Design in New York signing a sustainability manifesto that not only commits them to reducing waste, but to encouraging "responsible purchasing" by customers.

Internet companies including Rent the Runway, eBay and Etsy are meanwhile revolutionizing the consignment store model, helping millions to instantly borrow or buy used garments online, or to use them to make their own clothes instead.

Select retailers add to the second-hand market, too, recruiting recyclers with coupons. British department store Marks & Spencer gives £5 in store credit for every load of clothing donated to Oxfam; Eileen Fisher doles out a $5 gift card per donated item -- giving garments new life even while enticing shoppers to celebrate their clean closets with new sales.

"They're empowering consumers to be engaged with doing good, but also rewarding them," said Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst at The NPD Group market research firm, who predicts these programs will bring a long-term boost to their brands.

At Eileen Fisher, a cut of profits had for years gone to charity, but when the financial crisis slashed sales in 2008, the team decided it needed a more business-minded way to protect giving. Green Eileen was launched as an experiment, collecting and reselling used clothes to fund Fisher's foundation.

Thousands of nearly-new jackets, linen skirts and cashmere cardigans soon flooded drop-off points at certain stores and corporate headquarters, where they were sorted, dry-cleaned and stashed under boxes, along hallways and in any free corner by Janet Goyzueta, who started as Fisher's personal housekeeper and now helps to run Green Eileen.

The items are resold at a rough two-thirds discount off their original price at two company stores near Manhattan and, since November, at a Green Eileen storefront in Yonkers -- netting more per garment for charity than many thrift shops.

Fisher imagines the model expanding, starting with existing stores in Chicago, San Francisco and Boston. Customers say it is already making them more loyal to her line.

Since losing 60 pounds in 2010, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, a Pennsylvania-based health care consultant, has donated more than 240 Eileen Fisher pieces to the program, stuffing big brown bags with everything from silk scoop necks to cropped crepe pants to send in.

"It's the companies that sustain the message of giving back to the community that create the greatest trust," said Sarasohn-Kahn, who now spends so much time at her local Eileen Fisher store that she considers the saleswomen her friends. "It's a win-win-win." ]]>