A few months ago I wrote about my friend Nick's company and project called GiftTRAP. It is a board game with many twists. It contains over 600 photos collected from around the world, many of them from Flickr photographers. It is being used to raise money for charity for a non-profit entity called Right to Play. And it is being launched globally on something called Massive Play Weekend where they will attempt to garner a world's record for largest number of locations playing a board game in the history of the world. Nick embodies Goethe's quote: "Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men."

If you are interested in hosting a game and being a volunteer:

• sign up to be a Massive Play weekend volunteer on the site
• order a MPW free game board (they ask you to pay the $12 to cover S&H though)
• Pick a venue (home, coffee shop, bar, office your call)
• Invite some friends to play anytime on 6th-8th October 2006
• Play at least once with friends over the Massive Play Weekend
• Send us an email to confirm your event and include a photo of your event
• MPW is a fundraiser. So were asking you to use your imagination. Charge people to play, pay for the postage or auction your copy amongst friends

If you donate you will get entered into a draw. The winner will get 5 nights here; www.bigwhiteselect.com including ski passes. Pretty cool!

I highly recommend that people take a look at Nick's site and consider helping him raise the charity funds and maybe even be part of setting a world record.

Good luck Nick!

(If you are looking for the 2007 event information, please click HERE.)

I am very excited about our launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability. For the month of March, Vancouver will host a cornucopia of events and activities, all focused around bringing sustainability to our lives and our city.

Special features of the website include: 

This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.   more »

Fast Company has a brief article on the rise of social entrepreneurship and how that is being reflected in the courses that are being designed at the various MBA programs.

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It might be the bias inherent in my own network of friends, particularly because of the fact that many of us went through the Leadership Vancouver program here, which is focused very heavily on community development, but it certainly feels to me like many of the entrepreneurs I know are also more interested in building companies while having a positive impact on the community around them. Some of the examples of this are particularly obvious in the bioproducts arena where many of the technologies are truly green.

Another great example is the work being done by the people over at BC Technology Social Venture Partners in association with many of the local social entrepreneurs.

Here is yet another example of the nano-bio convergence that is happening, although this time it is the disciplines themselves physically converging in a new research facility. This can only help accelerate the interesting developments between the two sciences.

Here is a wonderful article on Laurance Rockefeller, philanthropist, philosopher, mediator, venture capitalist, conservationist. It is inspiring to say the least.

This is a wonderful article from the SF Gate website about a man named Dick Grace. From football captain to  Marine Captain, to VP of Smith Barney Investments, and now a reformed alcoholic and Buddhist who owns a niche Cabernet Sauvignon winery and spends his time, money, and effort raising money for kids around the world.

This is a picture of he and his wife Ann with "John Karma" a Nepalese boy they found as a two year old laying in a basket abandoned on a trail in Nepal. They cleaned him, de-liced him, and found him a home. And they hope to bring John to college in the USA eventually.



Here is a picture of how they found John at two years old in 1997:

This is a great article from May 2001 BC Business Magazine that set off a discussion in Vancouver's high-tech community about giving back and developing a long-term philanthopic view. BC Technology Social Venture Partners was one of several groups that were formed out of that discussion. I am an aspiring-future-member of the BCTSVP which is a fantastic example of the social venture philanthropy model as designed by Paul Brainerd, formerly of Aldus Corporation fame and now director of the Brainerd Foundation.

The Universe is 14 billion years old and will either either re-collapse into itself, expand into a completely diluted state, or rip apart in its 36th billion year in a runaway expansion so violent that galaxies and planets will be torn asunder in a fraction of a second. How do we manage the polarity inherent in knowing that our influence on the universe at that scale is essentially zero balanced against the fact that here in our own very small sphere of influence, we can have an effect on things around us that only exist in this little slice of time?

The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. 2 billion years ago, our first ancestors were microbes. It took 1.5 billion years before those microbes turned into something resembing fish, another 400m years for those fish to turn into mice-like creatures, another 90m years for those mice to evolve to apes, 9 m years for the apes to turn into proto humans and then we evolved from there. No matter what religion you are, you have to look at that in awe and wonder.

Now for the bad news. The sun in our solar system is expanding and it is expected that it will eventually absorb Mercury, Venus, and Earth, causing life here to only last for another half billion years. I am pretty sure that the last life forms left will be single-celled bacterium, cockroaches, and spammers. So the window of opportunity for life to develop here and then migrate throughout the rest of the solar system and Universe is about a billion years. Given that we didn't invent space travel until the first half billion were over, that window is now a half billion to get off the planet and out into the Universe. Given that we only have another half a billion years, shouldn't we all just get along, enjoy the sunset while it's that far away, and figure out how to get the hell off this planet? Of course, while we're here, we should do as much mountain biking, trail-running, paddling, travelling and exploring as we can.

By the time the Earth has hit 8 billion years, long after we are gone, the oceans will have vaporised and at the 12 billion year mark, Earth will have folded entirely into the sun. If the planet is going to be gone, does that mean I think that we should use up the precious natural resources pollute our biosphere while we are here? Of course not, that would be asinine and short-sighted. But then again, humans are not the best at extending their time-scales, nor at empathizing enough with future generations. Although that does seem to be changing in some small but important ways with the spread of the sustainable development movement. I may be a bit of an odd realist/pragmatist in the sustainability movement in that I'm not sure I believe in the implicit value of resources, plants, and animals on earth for their own sake. If they're all going to be gone anyway, that seems moot. But since these things took tens and hundreds of millions of years to develop, I do believe that we should learn from them (biology), design things based on them (biomimicry and nanotechnology), be efficient in our use of them so that we do not mortgage our children's future (sustainability), and learn how to build efficient systems so that we can spread out into the universe and live in harsher, resource constrained regions as we do so.

Of course, we're not good at passing along our knowledge on long time lines, and we're quite adaptable in the moment so maybe it is just the way of our species that we will consume all available resources where ever we go but that we will conserve it when we are pressed to do so. Sort of future-blind, but highly adaptable, with very little long-term memory. Which leads me to think that maybe Mr. Kurzweil's great leap forward really will be the best way for our species to spread itself.

Ray Kurzweil has calculated that by 2040, we will hit the inflection point of the technology development curve of mankind, known as the Singularity , an event horizon beyond which we can not possibly see with our tiny little massively parallel chemical-processing brains. By around 2040, $1000USD of computing power will be the equivalent of all human brain processing capacity on the earth combined (about 12 billion brains worth). He posits that in order for the technology development curve to be maintained, our inefficient genetic mutations will not be able to keep up, meaning that humans will essentially pass the "smart creature" torch to the robots and computers which will have the same brain processing capacity as us, but with MUCH faster substrate (silicon or otherwise, raher than our slow massively parallel chemical brains). 

What is really great about this is that in a few more decades we may get to really explore questions around whether consciousness is something spiritual/other-worldly, or simply an emergent property of going beyond a particular threshold of neuronal capacity or simply a self-referential program that is convincing enough to appear conscious. I can't wait. Really.

Given Kurzweil's supposition about the double exponential rate of expansion of technology, that means there is a heck of a lot of stuff that will need to be brought to market in the next 35 years. Hence my interest in venture capital, angel investing, technology cycles and trends, and the tricky process of nurturing technology from idea to plan to funding to company to production, and eventually to some sort of exit. Hence I will be writing a lot on business and technology development.

Some of the most fascinating events are transpiring in the border wars between business, technology, society, and our natural environment. Bio-ethics - how will we use cloning? Nanotechnology - will it create autonomous gray-goo that will devour us and the earth? Bio-IT convergence - will we really build the Ceylons? What about the ability to project power and wage war - on a budget? According to Lord William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson in "The Sovereign Individual", that is one of the key factors that contributes to massive historical inflection points. As technology changes the power equation, power-structures and economies follow suit. Consider: Osama Bin Laden, a multi-millionaire (who was supported by the U.S.), is now the enemy of the American goverment. They have for the first time in history chosen to target an individual rather than a nation-state. Primarily because of the alleged threat of relatively massive power (bio-weaponry) for minimal cost. I will rant, question, and point to interesting discussions in this area as they develop.

Finally, I have some more mundane, smaller-view areas that I am very interested in as well. They include but are not limited to: Complex Systems, Emergence theory, Health & Wellness, Environmental issues, Renewable Energy, Ethics, Fitness and sport, Humour, Interesting People, Nanotechnology, Philanthropy,  Privacy/Security, Sustainable Development, and World Affairs.

I wish I could remember the author who said, "I do not write what I know, I write so that I may know myself." That was very wise. That is also a goal of this blog. Thanks for reading.