Another great find from the Doors of Perception conference in Delhi: the Honey Bee Network, here in India. It is a network of people designed to find hackers and inventors from the countryside, the sort of people who don’t have two pennies to rub together but invent a coconut-tree-climbing machine so they can work better, or a man who had never been to formal school but heard on the news that government researchers were spending millions to built a mobile robot, and built his own to (supposedly) perform the same tasks. Another memorable example was a shock absorbing bicycle which has a gear which translates the impact of hitting a bump into turning the wheels, speeding you up instead of just inconveniencing you. (And with the roads around here, that could be quite an advantage--or send you headlong into disaster, I’m not sure which...)

The network works to connect these innovators to other people in other villages who can use their ideas, as well as companies that might license their inventions to provide them an income from their creativity.

The network includes or is affiliated with several groups: www.nifindia.org, sristi.org, gian.org, scai.org.in, and indiainnovates.com.