Our very first post was written on October 31, 2006. WorldChanging Canada writer Rod Edwards provided a distinctly Canadian perspective on the prairies. His post was a tribute to the land, its vastness, its fragility, and its opportunity:

... I've never lost my appreciation for the "scale" that the prairies proudly flaunt .... Those scales hit you at a primitive level—standing in the prairie, lost in near infinite plains below, and endless sky above, you can feel, viscerally, the raw size of the planet. The Earth curves beneath your feet, and you know that the wind buffeting you has traveled lifetimes to get there.

Perspective is fickle, however. A car passing on a nearby highway will quickly invert the sensation of infinity. The size here speaks to vulnerability, too—as huge as this land is, it’s been settled, sown, ploughed, and harvested for generations. This land is fragile and damaged, and facing challenges commensurate with its scale.

Fortunately, the potential is proportionate too: those infinite fields are ripe for transformation into sustainable, organic engines of economic growth. There's a billion acres of functioning carbon sink out here too. And that endless sky, and its howling winds, are already spinning turbines in megawatt wind projects.

Read more of The Prairie Perspective: An Introduction to Green Manitoba by Rod Edwards (October 31st, 2006)

It was a lyrical and fitting beginning.

Fast forward to Summer 2008. Two years later, Edwards, along with a steadily growing team of contributors, is still very much engaged in chronicling that potential. Rod's most recent piece examined a striking prairie innovation:

There's an interesting development lurking in your magazine rack (provided you subscribe to Canadian Geographic): paper made from wheat straw—the stem & stalk waste product of grain farming. Indistinguishable from regular wood-pulp paper, printed products made of a percentage of wheat straw are notable not for their tactile qualities, but for their sustainability implications. As agricultural waste, wheat straw is perennially renewable so long as people farm. As a product, monetizeable wheat straw provides a diversified income stream for farmers. As a source of paper fibre, it takes pressure off the forests that traditionally supply pulp, and the species that inhabit them.

Read more of Paper from Wheat, Not Wood by Rod Edwards (August 29th, 2008)

Rod's piece is an exemplary WorldChanging story. It chronicles a bright green solution which is already changing the world. It looks not just at a game-changing idea, but a successful implementation. It brings attention to an innovation that ought to be better known, but which is under-appreciated. It provides context which helps us understand why an innovation is important. It allows the reader an opportunity to drill down to the details if they so choose.

It is also a terrific WorldChanging Canada story. It not only has all the features mentioned above, it also provides Canadian context. Canadian context is harder to define than Canadian innovation, but it's every bit as important.

Canadians are the highest per capita users of energy in the world. We have some of the greatest challenges, and the greatest opportunities, in conservation and energy efficiency. We have regional economic disparities. Our cities are livable but unsustainable. Our arctic ice is melting. We have both abundant natural resources and significant energy security issues. Our opportunities in the renewables sector are underexploited. Heating for most of us is not a luxury, but an matter of survival. We have huge distances to traverse in building faster telecommunications, more efficient transport, and smarter electrical grids. We have a history of welcoming newcomers and developing enduring social institutions. We have a unique social fabric.

A Canadian context can mean many things, but it certainly includes:

• an awareness of new models and technology as they affect Canada's unique biodiversity, consumption patterns, urban/rural split, or democratic institutions.
  
• the particular challenges of a northern nation addressing climate change and energy security.
  
• voices or publications that further articulate Canadian challenges with, or contributions to, a more sustainable society
  
• new uses for renewable resources that we have in abundance (wheat, wind, waves).
  
• replacements for non-renewable resources where our continued use or extraction is polluting or problematic (oil, water, old-growth forest).
  

This is our beat: bright green solutions through a Canadian lens. Over the course of November we've been celebrating by re-publishing some of our very best.


For an overview of some of the great WorldChanging Canada stories we've brought you over the last four years, we invite you to read some of our previous retrospectives:

• Worldchanging Canada: 2007
  
• CanadaChanging
  
• The Best of Worldchanging Canada: An Anniversary Retrospective

Salman Khan is the man behind Khan Academy, a 2009 Tech Award winning site with 12+ million views and 1200+ 10-minute "videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance". We talked with him about building "the world's free virtual school", the potential of open-access learning, using the format for sustainability debates, and challenges in growing a non-profit from zero to global impact.

Salman Khan: Well, its current incarnation is twelve hundred videos on YouTube - and other places, but YouTube is its main source of people connecting with it and finding out about it.

And there is a whole software piece that generates problems for people, and starts them off with one plus one equals two. The software piece will take them up to about Algebra II, but the video piece will start them at the most basic one plus one equals two level and take them well into college level calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, physics, chemistry, and biology.

The goal is to create the world’s free virtual school. Right now it's more content, but there is a kind of community forming around it. And between the community that is forming around it, the video content, and the software, we can do data manipulation and understand how we can keep tweaking it and making it a better platform for people to learn on. I envision it as the world’s free virtual school.

HM: Interesting. Do you have any metrics for its success so far?

SK: In terms of raw numbers...if you go to any YouTube channel you can see total video downloads. Some of the university open courseware efforts are older than the Khan Academy...if you just look at the raw numbers, only one of them is a little bit higher: MIT had 12 point something million cumulative views as of today, while Khan Academy had just over 12 million. All the other university open course efforts, whether it's Stanford or Berkeley or Yale, they're all a good bit lower than that.

What I have started to do is keep track of the daily change, and on the daily change Khan Academy is getting about 50% more views per day than even MIT which is considered the standard-bearer for open courseware. So the first metric is that I think I can legitimately now say that it is the most widely used open course video content, despite being one person's effort as opposed to a major research institution's.

I think what these universities are doing is tremendous, but Khan Academy has got a lot of traction that way. It has as I mentioned reached 12 million video views, it has about 80 or 90 thousand unique students a month using the site, and that's growing by 15 to 20% per month.

So that's just in terms of the raw numbers. For me personally, I think the bigger impact is the testimonials that I get, and if you go to the site you will see a lot of them.

HM: It is rather amazing that this site which has been around for not too long, and is more or less the effort of one person so far, has achieved this success. One really wonders what the "secret sauce" is. In other words, why is the site so successful, and what do you personally think makes your videos so enticing to watch?

SK: I am always trying to answer that question for myself, because I don't ever want to lose the secret sauce! (laughter) I think it’s a combination. First, it's the length of the videos: the fact that they're ten minutes makes them very digestible. They are almost like the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code type novels, where you feel like you can almost read another chapter and then go to bed.

And I think it’s this notion that you don’t have to sit through a 90 minute lecture to get to exactly what your weak point is. You don't have to sit through a 90 minute lecture on calculus if you just don’t understand implicit differentiation. The way a lot of the other content is categorized, you don't even know which lecture to watch to really hone in on your weak point.

The format, even more than the time limit, is probably what people find engaging. It’s very informal - they can tell it’s just me, probably at my house, doing these. They started off for my cousins...it feels like someone's older brother or family friend who is with them tutoring.

I started off with no fancy equipment. You don’t see my face - you just hear my voice. You have a black background, and I use bright colors to get some nice contrast to make it visually interesting. I've had a lot of feedback from users that hearing the voice with the black background kind of feels like it’s happening in your head. It feels like the voice in your head. And it’s very conversational - it’s not your traditional slightly cold or stilted lecture that you might normally get.

I got one note a couple of days ago saying that “you teach like a friend, not like a teacher". I think that lowers the stress level when you learn mathematics. You can compare it to the offline medium - the notion of being able to pause and repeat, and watch whatever you want.

I think that the other element is its breadth. For a lot of older learners that are going back to school, their main intimidation is jumping into a class and being completely lost. But when you go to a site and see "okay, there are some videos on calculus and whatnot, but the videos go all the way back to one plus one equals two" - you know that there is a point you can jump in. Or even if you jump in at a higher point, and get a little bit confused with exponents, there is a video that can help fill in the gap.

So I think it's also the breadth of the content. People feel very good about going there, and knowing that there will be something that they can connect with.

HM: So granularity, format, and breadth. It seems like those three elements have the common feature that they all make the energy barrier to getting involved lower.

SK: Yes, absolutely! I think the format, the tone...if I had to guess one, it would be the tone of the lectures.

Actually, I’ll add one more, not to throw too many out there: the focus on intuition and retention and connections, as opposed to the mechanical memorization side that many students often find themselves doing. I get letters time and time again where they're almost angry - they say "our teachers think that they need to teach us this at a superficial level so it will be easier, but it actually becomes a lot easier when you learn why you are doing it, or why this formula actually makes sense intuitively".

And so I think people appreciate the idea that they are getting the real deal. They are getting a deep understanding, as opposed to something superficial.

HM: Absolutely! So, not to get you into trouble, but I wonder if you could speculate on why it is that those elements are in relatively short supply in formal education.

In other words, if you think about Khan Academy, it's one person - and you were actually doing this part time for quite a while, though now you're full time. And you've created this resource which, as you said, is now getting the same number of hits as some of the world's best-known institutions.

On the other hand, you have this huge formal apparatus with many dedicated people in it - probably tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of dollars per year of investment, and there hasn't really been this kind of resource created. What if any lesson does that hold for future educational efforts?

SK: The simple answer is to put stuff out there and iterate, and not have a bureaucratic team that are better at shooting down each other's ideas and constraining teachers. I understand the need to constrain teachers, because you want to have quality control and make sure everyone is being reached. But the negative side is that you're also constraining very good teachers, and you're taking a lot of the humanity out of the lesson.

This happens at the textbook level as well, and the state standards. I think to some degree there are so many cooks in the kitchen that the final product that the student gets is extremely diluted. There's something to be said for fewer cooks in the kitchen - and if they're good cooks, the food will be a lot more fun to eat. (laughter)

That's my best answer. Several states apparently have had efforts along the same lines. The idea isn't mind-blowing: get your best teachers in the state, or in the country, and put a camera in the room - I don't use a camera, but you could put a camera in the room, or use a format like me - and have them teach. And put those videos online, and make them free for the world.

The expense is almost ridiculously low to do something like that. But time and time again, some of these states have contacted me and said "well, you know, it's getting stuck in meetings..." - and they really haven't produced any videos.

The best way to think about it is that it becomes very corporate. There is this view that it has to be very polished, and have computer graphics, and that the teacher has to have a script so that they don't say "um" or make any mistakes. And I think what that does is it takes all of the humanity out of it, and the humanity is what people connect with.

HM: Hmmm, yes. Let's talk about your motivation for a second. You quit a career in finance to do this. Tell us what your motivation was - both looking backward, and also how you think you'll stay the course looking forward.

SK: When I started, the only thing I had to give up was a little bit of my time after work. As you mentioned, I didn't start doing this full time until about four months ago, so I was doing this essentially as a significant part-time activity for about 4 years before that.

My initial motivation was this notion - if you read the website, I started with my cousins and all of that. And that's just tremendously satisfying. When you work at a hedge fund, it's a fun and intellectually stimulating job on a lot of levels, but it's tough to answer that question of "what did you do for the world today?" or "what value did you create for the world, other than for your investors?"

Just in a small way, it made me feel good to start with my cousins. Eventually, when I realized that I could "scale myself up" through YouTube and the software, I'd get notes from random strangers saying how their lives had changed, and how they're going to become an engineer now, and how they loved math for the first time in their lives. When you get those things from people all over the world, I don't think you have to be a Mother Teresa to feel pretty good about it.

When I first started, I thought it was a nice thing to have out there - something that my or your great grandkids could learn from, and it's fun. But over the last 6 months to a year, it started to be pretty obvious that not only is it a nice thing, but it's transformational for a lot of people out there. It's already reaching hundreds of thousands of people, and it could be reaching hundreds of millions.

And it was getting traction. As we discussed earlier in the conversation, it's getting traction above and beyond what major research institutions are being able to accomplish. Even though there is no obvious way in the short term to necessarily give me the type of standard of living that I might have been getting in my career - especially because I was at the point in my career where, if I would have stayed in it, I was at a kind of inflection point there too - it will never provide that type of livelihood. But it's been pretty clear to me that the value is definitely being created. And I just have to figure out some way for society to recognize some small fraction of that value, and at least be able to pay my rent and put food on the table.

I have YouTube ads on, which do revenue sharing at about $2000 a month right now. I'm pretty convinced in the worst case that just that, at the rate the site is growing, would be enough in about a year for me not to have to dip into my savings or my checking account to fund my family and this effort. But I don't want people to have ads for non-educational things while they're trying to learn algebra, or calculus or chemistry or whatever. So I am talking to some foundations, and I'm always open to sources of foundational support. Donations are coming in - I'm actually getting about $1000 a month in donations, and that's growing with the viewership.

So Plan B is donations and advertising - if I were to be really obnoxious about advertising, I could probably be there today, but I just don't want to do that. But if I got foundational support, then I could hire a team of five or ten people, and could really fulfil that idea of a full-service virtual school.

HM: Sounds very promising! Tell us a bit about how, at the personal level, Khan Academy has been perceived. Where I'm coming from is that, often when people go from a relatively, let's say, high-status job as perceived by society at large - doctor, lawyer, engineer, and so forth - to one of these more entrepreneurial efforts...we've heard over and over again how there can be a barrier in getting the message across as to why the effort is important.

And so I'm just imagining "Salman Khan, Hedge Fund Manager", versus "Salman Khan, guy who sits in his basement making YouTube videos..." (laughter) I'm just curious, have you had any challenges at a personal level - or with colleagues, with friends and so forth - in terms of getting the message across as to why this is important?

SK: I think if I had quit three years ago - some of my friends thought I was crazy even when I hadn't quit and I was not showing up at social events to work on YouTube videos instead. But I think by the time that I did quit, especially within close friends and family - a lot of them started using it, or at least they had family friends who started using it and would tell them "hey, do you know this guy? My son is addicted to his videos - could you get his autograph?" (laughter)

So amongst close friends and family, I think they understood it. When I meet new people...my wife is a fellow in rheumatology at Stanford, and when they meet me and say "what do you do?", and I say "well, you know, I teach on YouTube". Then they're like "oh, this guy is freeloading off his wife." (laughter) I never got that when I was working at a hedge fund. Then they were like, "good thing she married him!" (laughter)

I had to get over that, but I'm pretty much over it. And I think the letters I get from students, and getting notoriety in the mainstream press now - that obviously helps with my more superficial friends and family who will only realize the value of things once someone else confirms it.

HM: Fantastic. So in terms of the videos themselves, let's dig in a bit to the topics you've chosen. You were a math / CS major in school, and of course a lot of the videos are on mathematics, physics, biology, and so forth. The thing that those have in common is that they're relatively objective topics, in the sense that there's not a lot of room for different schools of thought on them.

So one question I have for you is, how well do you see this same format working for topics in the social sciences, or possibly topics which are a little more politicized? Do you think the same format will work? If so, why, and if not, what would need to change?

SK: I've hinted that I do plan on doing it, and I think it will work on one level - but I think there's an element where it won't work.

The level where it will work is to give people the baseline. I was talking to someone yesterday about how I would go about giving lectures on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That's something where if you just stress one word a little positive or a little negative, you're probably going to anger a lot of people. And I think nothing could be more debatable than an issue like that, or the India Kashmir issue - we could keep listing issues like that.

My take on it is that there is a reality that everyone agrees to. And I can convey that reality, and I can map it out, and I can draw out issues. My job is to be as good as possible at articulating both sides of the story, or three or four sides of the story if they exist. And that's what I think I can do on YouTube in the same format.

I have made a couple of videos like this. One would think that natural selection in evolution is a fairly objective topic, but as you know it's not - it's a highly politicized topic, probably more politicized than some of these conflict regions that we just talked about. I have made videos on that, and I actually made a few videos on intelligent design.

I think one of the problems is that people who believe in intelligent design are just outright dismissed by people in the scientific community, and what I wanted to do was sort of reconcile intelligent design - not in any way to justify it, but to show people who see beauty in things, to say "hey look - I'm not advocating whether I believe in a Creator or not, but if you believe in a Creator, what's better: a Creator who designs the specifics, or a more elegant design that generates the system in which all this complexity arises?"

I try to be very sensitive to all of these issues. The fun thing is that I can put a lecture out, and if it generates a lot of debate - there is a lot of debate often in the intelligent design videos, half the people thought I was a crazy creationist, and half the people thought I was an atheist (laughter) just because of the nature of the topic. But I can keep adding videos. I can say "well, you all said this, and I want to be very clear that this isn't what I said - I said that." And I can keep adding context to it.

I kind of look forward to those videos - I need to experiment with it more, but I think on some level it can be a better format than what you traditionally get. Some of these topics, they're so heated and controversial that I think people completely shy away from teaching them. If you talk to someone about any of these conflicts around the world, 90% of what comes out of either side of the argument is usually just outright factually incorrect. And I think just getting the facts straight would be hugely constructive.

The piece that I think would be difficult is that debate that you have within the classroom, where you're all sitting around a table. But even there, you have message boards now, and people can put response videos. We have yet to see it, but I think it will be a good format for this type of stuff.

HM: It sounds like you're almost aiming for what Wikipedia calls its "NPOV", which is Neutral Point of View - where the goal is not to say that A or B is correct, but rather to portray each side (or all sides) as best as possible.

This seems to also tie in to the possibility of version control of videos. I'm wondering if you see the possibility of having "video sets", or something where you might have a sort of "parent video", and then subvideos on different aspects or different ways of of portraying it.

SK: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. You've seen the site - most of the site's topics are very linear. You start the playlist, and you keep going and it advances. But I think in some of the social sciences, that's going to be the way to go.

You do a high level - this is the 10 minutes of what you've got to know about what happened to the Western World in the 20th century. And then you can do 10 more videos on each of the decades, and then 10 more videos...and keep drilling down into further detail.

HM: Another idea that comes up is the whole idea of 'learning paths'. Typically if you're learning calculus, there's a pretty clear progression of topics. In other areas, it's not so clear what the linear path is.

And yet, at the same time, you can imagine there's a sort of graph of dependencies, where there are topics which logically come first, and topics which come afterward. How do you see putting in advice to learners, as to which videos might logically follow on - you should watch A before B, A after B, or if you like A, then B might also be of interest - how might that be integrated into the site?

SK: The simple answer is 'yes'! (laughter) You mentioned this graph structure, where you think certain concepts might have certain prerequisites, and they feed into others. And you can imagine this kind of node-directed graph map of concepts.

That's actually what the software has. When a user logs in, they can click on something called their 'knowledge map', which is exactly a node-directed graph - the node all the way to the left of the screen is '1+1=2', and if you become proficient in that, it leads to level 2 addition, and level 1 subtraction. You can do it at your own pace, and you can proceed really far down one node while not so far down the other node.

I'm completely with you on that. I want to do the exact same thing on the videos. The modules on the software side have videos associated with them, so it kind of happens. But I want to do that exact same thing, and the direction that I want to take this in is that everything is integrated - so we know what videos they're watching, who they are, what exercises they're doing before and after the videos, and how effective the videos were in getting over the hurdle in that exercise.

And then doing exactly what you said - saying "look, for someone like you, we found that this is probably the next video you should watch". Or "you might want to review this stuff, because we've seen that when a lot of people did so, it led to good outcomes". I'm extremely data-driven, and it's really just a matter of getting down to doing it. But it's completely feasible, completely possible, and I think that's one of the exciting dimensions of something like this.

HM: Let's talk about how this might be applied to, say, teaching environmental or other such topics. So let's assume that somebody wanted to get a citizen's-level view of climate change. The first possibility would be to have simply a playlist: "here's 10 videos which tell you the basics of what you should know."

What comes to mind in terms of how initiatives like Khan Academy might complement what's already out there, in terms of information on topics that are large-scale and long-term, and perhaps where there isn't a clear sense of what the core knowledge is as yet?

SK: This is an area where I'm not an expert, so I'm talking as someone who wants to find 'the true answer'. You hear a lot of noise on both sides. I have an opinion, but I'm not 100% sure. I can go watch CNN and I'll have people screaming at each other - not just CNN, I can watch any news channel and watch people on both sides of the equation equally angry and sounding equally sure of themselves.

And the only fact that I can go on is "oh, this guy's got 80 scientists behind him, and that guy has 10, and the guy with 80 is probably right". But who knows? That's not how we should decide.

I could go listen to Al Gore's talk, which is a little more in-depth. But if it's important for you to prove it to yourself, that still may not meet the hurdle. You'd want to have someone show you the charts, and show you why it's statistically relevant, and why this isn't happening by chance, and why this isn't happening because of the natural cycles of the Earth, and why these claims are statistically implausible. You want an analysis - but you can't get an analysis right now, because it's just in papers and textbooks which, even if you can read them, are going to put you to sleep.

So I think there's a gap there. And I think that's where 10-minute videos would be ideal. I would love the leading climate experts to, in a very conversational style, distill why they are convinced of their argument. And not just resort to "oh, well I've got more people on my side than you do" or "oh no, you're just saying that because it's popular to say that". I want to see him analyze the data and show me why it's statistically unlikely that the other guy is right.

HM: How might this format also be used for topics which are 'how-tos'? Let's say for example that I believe that there's a real problem with climate change, energy use, and so forth. And I want to figure out how to carbon-reduce or energy-reduce my product or lifestyle.

There is a lot of how-to information out there, and I'm wondering if the how-to side is different from the knowledge transfer side in terms of how you would approach the teaching.

SK: I think how-to is on some levels easier. You don't have to necessarily whip out equations or analyze charts - you just show people.

The format I use could be good. You could talk it out and write it down, and maybe it will leave some kind of imprint on peoples' brains. I could also imagine a video that would be equally good or maybe better, where I see "oh, this is how he uses his computer to control the power sockets in his house".

I think this format could be one of many formats. I don't think it's necessarily the format that has to be done for how-to type topics.

HM: You mentioned the developing world as being one key target, and also the possibility of offline snapshots that could be transferred over there. First question on that front: do you have a sense of what kinds of views you've had so far from around the world?

SK: Looking at YouTube data, I would say that probably a fourth to a fifth of views are coming from the non-Western world - you know, outside of North America and Europe. If I had to guess where those are coming from, the ones that are watching us online live, it's probably some relatively affluent people who have both the computer and broadband access. Right now it's not reaching the poorest of the poor. And non-English - it's people with some reasonable proficiency in English.

There are groups - one is called uconnect.org, and the other worldpossible.org - that have taken offline snapshots of the Khan Academy. They're distributing them to villages in Uganda, Ethiopia, Nepal, and Latin America, with the view that it is a 'school in a box' - a very limited one, it's really just content right now.

What I hope to see, and I'm talking with some foundations about this notion, is this idea of - I think broadband access will become pretty ubiquitous over the next 5 to 10 years. Maybe one of the reasons it's not more ubiquitous is that people don't see the rationale for giving broadband access in a lot of the places - "if I give them broadband access and one of the new hundred-dollar laptops, what are they really going to do with it?" There are stories of people using these laptops for lighting, because they don't have lights at home.

What I envision is, if I'm a foundation, NGO, or government, I'd go in and instead of giving every child a computer, I'd set up a village center and have a handful of computers, and hire a local guy or gal to man the computers and make sure nothing goes down. It could even have a slow internet connection. And what you do is, you put the software, the content, locally on their machines. So students in the village - which could be the young kids who you normally associate with being school age, but it could also be their parents - on their own time, they can learn asynchronously.

The problem with traditional schools is, one, you can't find teachers for many of the advanced subjects. Even if you can, it's hard for the students to even go to school, because they have to work - oftentimes in the year they just can't make it. If you have something like this, they all learn at their own pace, and you don't have the teacher shortage issue because you have essentially a virtual teacher.

The big sell for the philanthropists is that, for the first time, they can actually have data on how those assets are being utilized. Right now, if I go build a bunch of schools in India or Africa, I have no idea what's happening with them, especially with the computers. In fact, even in the U.S., in some schools they have no idea how the computers are being used, or whether it's advancing the kids' understanding of anything. But now if you have this 'school in a box' with the software and the content, the data can connect with the mother ship, and the person who's allocating the resources can see in real-time: "gee, these 10 kindergarteners in Malaysia are doing great - let's throw in some more money at that NGO, because they seem to be a really effective one."

The sell really is asynchronous learning, 'school in a box', more economic than the current model, and data-driven so for the first time people know what's actually happening on the ground.

HM: There are interesting questions about to what degree we might want to have topics that are more directed at development. So for example things like personal finance, or basic agricultural knowledge, or basic health.

Similarly we might want to find the equivalent of Salman Khan in each of these countries, who might him or herself be the one who makes it even more personalized to that region. What are the key next steps or challenges on that front?

SK: Well, regarding the internationalization of it, there are volunteers who have come out of the woodwork who started translating. There's actually a Khan Academy in Espanol, and it's a chemistry teacher from Uruguay. It comes off quite well, far better than I would have expected - it sounds like he's teaching it in Spanish, it doesn't sound like a translation.

So there's potential for that. I think it would be even better if there were people native in the language who maybe even redid the videos. It may be that in certain cultures a different approach might be better than the way I approach things. But at minimum, they should be able to be translated by volunteers, and you really don't need that many volunteers to do it.

That's one big step that seems to be happening, although my experience right now is...volunteers are very well-intentioned and I will never turn away well-intentioned inspiration and energy, but it's often hard to get full completion and follow-through. If we get foundational support or some governmental support, we could institutionalize that, and make sure it happens.

The other next step is, as I mentioned before, to hire a small team of 3,4,5 developers. Then we can really support the more interactive parts of the virtual school, well beyond just the videos.

HM: You mentioned contributors. What would you most be looking for from contributors, aside from competence and follow-through?

SK: Actually, that's pretty much it! (laughter)

I've got a lot of friends who I think would be brilliant teachers, on the software side brilliant people to help with that - they want to, but you don't get the follow-through. I don't know what the secret sauce is, but I think on a volunteer level, follow-through is huge - you can't underestimate that. It's sharp people who have follow-through, who really connect with the vision, because that's what's going to create the follow-through.

It's difficult for me right now, because every day I get emails from quite a few people, and to manage that volunteer process would take me away from the videos and doing what I need to do. I'm still struggling with that - on what is the best way to utilize this resource out there, that people are giving out of their own good will. I'm open to suggestions.

HM: It seems as though one ready avenue might simply be to try to find those excellent teachers who are already paid for pedagogical activities. If you found the world's best astronomy teacher, could he or she be the one who might take on the videos for that?

On the follow-through side, that might help to alleviate some problems. I'm thinking of groups like the Teaching Company, where they have videos on a lot of topics, mostly for adult learners. So that kind of tactic, where there's a single person who comes forward or even who you approach, who might be a subject matter expert but also a fantastic teacher - someone who really gets this approach and runs with it.

SK: Yes, I'm very open to that. I've been talking with some people who clearly have the expertise - Ph.D.'s in X, Y, or Z where it would take me years to get that expertise, if I even wanted to go there. And they volunteered to be that person. I said, "you should make the videos no matter what - even if it has no association with the Khan Academy, it will have value, and people will watch them."

If they do have the same 'feel' as the Khan Academy videos, then I'd be more than happy to include them. And 'feel' doesn't mean good or bad - I'm not making value judgments. There is a kind of branding here, in that if there is someone other than me teaching, I want students to feel like they're getting kind of the same thing - the same conversational style, something that's not too pedantic but at the same time is not sacrificing rigor.

I'd make sure that people know that this is from this other teacher out there, and they'd get the credit for it. The purpose of having the Khan Academy involved is so that it gets proper exposure.

HM: You're actually then mitigating the risk of them not doing it - you just ask them for the playlist, as opposed to good intentions.

SK: Exactly.

HM: Last few questions...I'm curious about challenges and lessons, and what you see looking forward.

So first question, Salman, is what do you see as being your key challenges over the next couple of years?

SK: I think the number one challenge is making the finances sustainable, as we talked about already. I don't think it's an insurmountable challenge - I think it's going to happen - but obviously once that shoe falls, it's in a sense downhill from there. I quit my job because I feel like it is already downhill, and has reached that critical awareness where it's picking up on its own. But to get some funding on a significant level would be a huge boon to the effort.

When I started this, it was amazing - a lot of people would come to me who were skeptical. "How are you going to convince school systems to do this? Why is this different? Why do you think you're going to be able to do something that all these other people have tried and failed at?" Regarding the school systems, I'm just doing it out of that context, and I think that was the right approach. As soon as you try to interface with the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy will take over your effort, and your ability to produce will go to zero.

As far as the question of differentiation goes, I think that's been answered, and gotten confirmation from usage, the media, and even other institutions - showing that this is something real. The big thing is just making sure it's sustainable, and hopefully that won't be too hard a challenge.

HM: And what lessons have you learned doing this?

SK: You know, I've done other entrepreneurial things in the past, and this is by far the most pleasant of all the entrepreneurial activities I've ever done. And the reason is a couple of things.

One is, in the back of my mind I always had very ambitious or even grandiose ideas, but I was happy with small successes. I was happy with just reaching my cousins, and just being of use for my cousins, and then just being of use to the 20 or 30 people who were watching it on YouTube. So I think when you're happy with the smaller achievements, you're not going to go through this emotional roller-coaster where you try to start the next Google - it's either a billion or nothing.

So that's one pretty important lesson I learned. Second is this idea that if you do something that you find generally rewarding, you've got to stick with it. Don't necessarily give up your day job. There were moments three or four years ago, where I got really excited about Khan Academy, because I got a little bit of a slap on the back from somebody. I was thinking, "this is going to be huge - I'm going to quit my job today!" And it was important for me to go home, talk to my wife, calm down, and realize that you shouldn't get too optimistic too fast - we need to eat and live. The idea of being able to do both at the same time, and incrementally on a small scale - I think that's also a huge thing.

Probably the single biggest thing that made this pleasant was that I thought very early on, would I rather be a dot com billionaire on the cover of Forbes, where my main success is the number of zeroes in my bank account? Or would I rather make a good living, a respectable living - maybe what a professor might make - but have something out there that's being used by millions of people, and that will be used maybe for many years after I'm dead? And when I put it that way, the second seemed a lot more appealing to me.

Making it a non-profit made it a much more pleasant experience. One, when you approach people, they know where you're coming from. A lot of dot coms or for-profit companies said "oh, we're out to revolutionize education, we care about kids." But you look at their capital structure, and you know that's not the direction their capital structure is going to push them in. With Khan Academy, it's very clear that this guy is not doing this for any other reason. And so people come out of the woodwork to help you.

The other positive is, I'm not paranoid about competition. I embrace competition. I don't even view it as competition - I want other people to do this. If someone else says they want to do videos, I tell them how to do it. I'm coming from a point of view of abundance, as opposed to scarcity, and I don't think anyone is going to undercut my ability to do this. I'm giving it away for free!

The funny thing is that I'm fairly confident now that if I were to get competitive about it, that it would be difficult for someone to turn Khan Academy into the next Friendster, by introducing the next Facebook. Even if there are other Sal Khans out there, and I hope that there will be, who have their own styles, and their own base of students who really appreciate it - I think there will always be some subset of the world that will say "hey, I like how this Sal guy teaches, and I connect with him on some level." It doesn't have to be all - it could be only 5% of all students, but that adds up to be huge.

HM: Some words of wisdom there. Last question and last word to you Salman: tell us what your dream is looking forward.

SK: If you allow me to get as grandiose as I'm capable of getting, I imagine a network of initially one center - I won't call it a school just yet - a center in every major city, and eventually every village in the world, where students go.

When you go to that center, it would look like a fun, engaging, one-room schoolhouse if you will, where kids of all ages are. But they're not just limited to that school - they could interface with the software and the videos, and other members of the online community. Essentially those are all rooms in one worldwide networked campus.

And the software and the videos and the online piece of it - it does all of the analytics, it takes off the plate all of the stuff that the computers can do. And the rest of the kids' time is freed up to do truly creative things, and truly interact with each other, and truly mentor each other.

And it's cross-generational, cross-age. Each center can have one paid director who is a very inspiring mentor, who is there to guide the students in whatever endeavors they take, but Khan Academy is the core infrastructure that connects everything, and frees people to pursue other creative activities.

HM: Salman, thank you so much for speaking with us.

SK: Thank you!

(With thanks to Misha Ishaq for transcribing help, and to Sebastien Paquet and Michael Nielsen for the inspiration behind the interview.)

For more terrific interviews by Hassan Masum, see:

• Worldchanging Canada Interview with Mark Anielski | Hassan Masum
  
• Atamai: creating a New Zealand eco-village | Hassan Masum
  
• Interview with Gregory Greene, Documentary Filmmaker | Hassan Masum
  
• Worldchanging Interview: Thomas Homer-Dixon | Hassan Masum
  
• Worldchanging Interview: Paul Gipe, Wind Energy Pioneer | Hassan Masum
  
• Joshua Farley, Ecological Economist | Hassan Masum
  

On Saturday, I returned from Ottawa where I attended the last few days of the 2008 Governor General’s Canadian Leadership Conference (GGCLC). Held every four years and hosted by the Governor General , the GGCLC, “brings together Canada's future leaders from business, labour, government, NGOs, education and the cultural sector for a unique two-week experience aimed at broadening their perspectives on work, leadership, their communities, and their country.”

I made the trek to Ottawa because I was a participant in 2004, and this year, alumni like me were invited to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the program over the course of three days. The highlight was a special event at the Museum of Civilization attended by Ed Schreyer, the original patron of the GGCLC.

Inspired by the Duke of Edinburgh’s Commonwealth Study Conferences (held since 1956), the Canadian leadership conferences began in 1983 with a vision of Canadian nation-building. What’s particularly powerful and unique about the program is that the 225 members of each Conference are Canadian citizens from different regions of Canada, with different perspectives and different careers.

Through a combination of examination, debate, and discovery packed into an intense two-week period, the GGCLC is designed to help broaden the perspectives and enhance the leadership qualities of its members. After all, how often do you get to spend two weeks in a melting pot of people representing all facets of Canadian society, debating a range of issues that relate to the Canadian experience?

No topic during the GGCLC is taboo. Indeed, members are exposed to issues ranging from inner city poverty and the treatment of First Nations to regional economic development challenges and innovative approaches to addressing local social issues. And, by ensuring a diversity of participants, members are forced to confront their own biases, prejudices and tightly held perceptions.

The conference begins with a three-day plenary session in a Western Canadian city where a range of noteworthy speakers set the context for that year’s theme. For example, this year the theme was Leadership and Community; in 2004, it was Leadership and Diversity. Plenary speakers this year included Peter Lougheed, Phil Fontaine and Sheila Watt-Cloutier. In 2004, the roster included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Bernard Kuchner, the founder of Doctors Without Borders, and Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsi Cola International.

Following the plenary sessions, the 225 members divide into 15 groups that travel to different parts of Canada where they engage in an action-packed tour of that region, meeting and debating with local business and community leaders of various shapes and sizes. An average day starts at 6:00 am and ends as late as midnight after a study group session where members discuss the day’s events.

The GGCLC ends with four days in Ottawa where members prepare a consensus presentation for Governor General on what they have seen and learned. With all those teams of A-type people, most presentations incorporate a range of creativity—poems, theatrical vignettes, songs and art—to help communicate their message. Then, the Governor General engages the group in a 20-minute discussion where she explores further that group’s themes.

To call this a life-changing experience is no overstatement. Members leave with a newfound appreciation for Canadian values, enriched perspectives on all aspects of Canadian society, stronger leadership skills, and a range of friendships with current or emerging leaders across the country.

As part of the alumni program I attended, we were treated to a private tour of Parliament Hill with Pat Martin, the MP for Winnipeg Centre and an alumnus of 1991. The tour ended with a chance to watch Question Period on the last day the House sat before summer recess. Pat left us at that point to take his seat on the floor.

Sitting in the gallery, we were all taken aback by the rancourous, mean-spirited and, frankly, childish display of our elected officials. The kind of cat calls, insults and accusations flying across the floor would not be acceptable in a classroom or at a dinner table, yet it was on full display that day in the House.

Speaking with Pat during the tour, he suggested that Parliament and all Canadians would benefit from having elected officials participate in a program modeled on the GGCLC prior to taking their seats in the House. I agree. Doing so, MPs would gain a new appreciation for other parts of Canada, be exposed to the complete spectrum of actors that make up Canada, and move beyond a purely partisan perspective.

Just imagine the kind of political leadership, and by extension, the kind of Canada, that could emerge from that experience.

Another terrific article by Peter ter Weeme, Stemming the tide of greenwashing, was chosen to be reprinted as a chapter in a textbook by BC Open Schools, in a module focussing on environmental literacy, nutritional literacy and media literacy.

In the past few years two ideas that were once considered preposterous have begun to seem ever more reasonable: the space elevator, and solar power satellites. Many of the biggest engineering issues have actually been solved for both these projects. But one huge issue appears to have been neglected.

Consider this: on any given night, you can look up (if you're not in a city that already drowns the stars) and see satellites. They're hundreds of kilometers away, and the biggest are no larger than a compact car—yet you can see them. Most are the size of a barrel, but perfectly visible.

Consider Bradley Edwards' ribbon design for the space elevator cable. This would be a meter or two wide and curved, so that it is effectively visible from all angles. So it's about the width of a barrel, but infinitely longer. Its reflective surface over one kilometer's distance would be at least as great as the ISS; but please multiply that light output by 35,000 because that's how many kilometers long it would have to be. A Hoytether (open meshwork) design would presumably reflect less, but how much less?

You could paint the ribbon black. Then again, how much would a coating weigh that had to cover 1 meter x 35 million meters of area? The black coating would heat the cable because the sun is so intense in orbit, so you wouldn't want it to be totally absorptive. But here's the thing:

The moon is black.

Actually, overall the moon's surface is about the shade of an asphalt highway. It absorbs almost all the light that hits it. The moon appears pearly white to us only because of the tiny fraction of light that's reflected off the lunar blacktop.

As if all this were not enough, the only practical means of powering the climber cars (which would be visible too) appears to be multi-megawatt lasers, aimed at solar cell arrays on the climbers. As Wikipedia puts it:

The proposed method is laser power beaming, using megawatt powered free electron or solid state lasers in combination with adaptive mirrors approximately 10 m wide and a photovoltaic array on the climber tuned to the laser frequency for efficiency.

So, the climbers are in the cross-hairs of, essentially, a set of a huge spotlights. Maybe you could use infrared or ultraviolet lasers, but if not, then even for the most efficient solar cells (40% or thereabouts) 60% of the laser light will be absorbed or reflected. Add to that light from the sun reflecting off the (presumably large) collectors, and you get something fiercely bright climbing the already bright cable.

This issue doesn't just affect the space elevator, by the way. It's also relevant to any substantial effort to place solar power satellites at geosynchronous orbit. Their immense surface area would pretty much guarantee that they'd shed a vast amount of light on the Earth.

But why should we care? Here again we can refer to Wikipedia, in its entry on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution">light pollution:

Life exists with natural patterns of light and dark, so disruption of those patterns influences many aspects of animal behavior. Light pollution can confuse animal navigation, alter competitive interactions, change predator-prey relations, and influence animal physiology.

...Studies suggest that light pollution around lakes prevents zooplankton, such as Daphnia, from eating surface algae, helping cause algal blooms that can kill off the lakes' plants and lower water quality.

Lots of other life forms are affected—everything from birds to frogs. It doesn't take very much light to have a big effect. So, in the absence of any direct physical effects, the space elevator would still have a large, if not catastrophic, ecological impact.

I wish this weren't true. I'm a big fan of the elevator, and an even bigger fan of solar power satellites. But the devil, as they say, is in the details. If these structures cause the amount of light pollution I'm suggesting, then they are very far from being green options for energy and transport—regardless of how much carbon they may offset.

In July of 2009, Karl Schroeder gave a fascinating talk on Rewilding at OSCON (the O'Reilly Open Source Convention). In it, Schroeder elaborated on ideas that made one of their first published appearances here on Worldchanging Canada, in his terrific article on Vertical Farming, Rewilding Canada.

For more great WorldChanging Canada articles by Karl Schroeder, see:

• The Roots of Resistance 1: Battling Agents | Karl Schroeder
  
• The Roots of Resistance 2: Moral Filters | Karl Schroeder
  
• Canadian Geothermal | Karl Schroeder
  
• Rediscovering Terra Preta | Karl Schroeder
  
• Colonizing Planet Earth | Karl Schroeder
  
• No time for the Singularity | Karl Schroeder
  
• Technology is Legislation | Karl Schroeder
  
• Gradually Greening: Test-Driving Zipcar | Karl Schroeder
  
• Gradually Greening: Empowerment through Laziness | Karl Schroeder
  
• Gradually Greening: Neutralizing my Car | Karl Schroeder
  
• A Rare Audacity | Karl Schroeder
  
• Safety Glass | Karl Schroeder
  
• Community | Karl Schroeder
  

For years sustainablists have been pushing the corporate sector to go green. A key question or doubt has hung over this push—will consumers really buy green stuff? For years pundits have pointed to polls that show that consumers are interested in buying green. The results have been mixed, if not downright negative, with green product sales often failing to live up to expectations.

The traditional analysis was quite simplistic: Canadians say they care about green in polls but are not willing to spend the money on green products at the checkout. This seemed to sum up the entire story.

There are a variety of reasons why green products have not lived up to expectations. People are often uncomfortable with anything new. Green is associated with being less effective, or requiring some type of compromise. Green can at times be more expensive (sometimes due to our backwards system of laws and taxation). The list goes on.

Over the past year or so dramatic statistics have surfaced. It turns out the belief that customers simply cannot be bothered to pay more is not the end of the story. Just over a year ago TerraChoice came out with their landmark study looking at over 1,000 ‘eco’ products at a Canadian big box store. TerraChoice believes that free markets, combined with credible claims about green goods, could be the most powerful factor in creating a green economy. They were also concerned about the possible rejection of ‘eco’ products in the marketplace. This study featured ‘The Six Sins of Greenwashing,’ which are listed at the end of this article. TerraChoice outlined six ways in which companies can intentionally and unintentionally misinform consumers through green claims. The ‘Six Sins’ have garnered global attention and the organization is currently working on a follow-up to the study.

Surprisingly, the TerraChoice study showed that almost 99% of the more than 1,000 assessed ‘eco’ products were guilty of some kind of greenwashing. Green claims associated with those products were found to be false, over-stated or misrepresentative. This only began to cloud the green product picture.

Environics did some polling last year and helped plug another gap in the equation. It is not simply that Canadians are cheap. Environics found that a majority of Canadians (51%) only believe that some claims about green products are actually true. 75% say that only some or few of the claims about green products are true.

Clearly, many people do not believe what they are being sold when it comes to ‘green’ products. If people don’t believe these claims are valid, why would they bother taking the chance on a new product or spending more for the greener option?

Well over half the country doubts they can consistently find valid green products on the shelves, and if the TerraChoice study is of any indication, it can be difficult to find any truly green mainstream products. TerraChoice’s results (99% of products failing) make the group of serious doubters look relatively small. These numbers do not allow us to compare apples to apples, but they do paint a richer picture.

Last summer, the Federal Competition Bureau came out with guidelines, unexpectedly early, that are meant to inform companies about what kinds of claims they should and should not make about their products’ green credentials. The new guidelines will take effect in July 2009 to give companies time to adjust. Larry Bryenton, the Competition Bureau’s Acting Assistant Deputy Commissioner, says that the hope for these guidelines is to encourage companies making green claims to provide greater clarity, avoid vagueness, and only make verifiable and substantiated statements.

According to one other Competition Bureau employee, when they pass such guidelines, they find that 85% of the market place automatically falls in line and follows the new suggested rules. The problem is these are guidelines, not laws, and it is not expected that they will be enforced. According to Scott McDougall at TerraChoice, these new guidelines are not materially different from the last set of guidelines, originally issued in 1991. He said that the only factor that would make a major difference would be real enforcement of the guidelines.

Even if these new guidelines are top notch, what do we do when 15% of companies fail to tow the line? Consumers are, as we have seen, justifiably skeptical, and every time we read another story about some company greenwashing, consumers become that much more disillusioned with the entire green movement. People become jaded and disempowered, and are less likely to believe true green claims anywhere. We cannot afford to have even a small minority of companies continue to sell ‘brown’ products under the veil of green.

Scott McDougall does not believe that all of the false green claims are made intentionally. Multinational companies, he says, only make major changes in the face of shifts they perceive as real trends in terms of consumer preference. The flood of ‘green’ goods in the marketplace is clearly in response to newfound interest that is expected to have a lasting effect.

He also notes that each company has a legal team vetting all the communications they put forward. While this procedure does not always have the impact green advocates are looking for, these legal teams do make efforts to ensure their companies are not making inappropriate claims for which they could be found liable.

Scott McDougall goes on to say that so long as people are reminded about the ever-growing environmental problems and believe they can do something about them, they will remain engaged and motivated, potentially through the purchase of greener goods.

While the picture is not rosy, our understanding of the situation is improving. Only a few years ago, we would have thought that we would have to find a way to subsidize green goods and calm consumers’ insecurity about these purchases. Now we can see that other challenges may take priority. We need to look at mechanisms to ensure consumers have the necessary knowledge to make good green purchases. Ideally, with better information, people will also be included make fewer, more targeted, purchases. Here at WorldChanging, we’re very interested in such mechanisms.

We can see the beginnings of a private sector ready and willing to do its due diligence. Tools and studies like the ones highlighted above can help in development of a green marketplace. Finally, a clearer sense of the effectiveness of guidelines can help policy-makers decide when and where stricter enforcement is necessary to ensure that claims made by the private sector are relevant, verifiable and truly green.

Front Image: Credit: jdurham
Inside Image: (Image of Scott McDougall) - Credit: TerraChoice

The following are the Six Sins of Greenwashing. Go to the link below on the TerraChoice website to read the explanation of each 'sin.'

The Six Sins of Greenwashing

1. Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off
   
2. Sin of No Proof
   
3. Sin of Vagueness
   
4. Sin of Irrelevance
   
5. Sin of Fibbing
   
6. Sin of the Lesser of Two Evils

The BBC is planning to follow and report on the progress of a container around the world for a year. They have painted a container and bolted a GPS transmitter to allow is readers to follow its progress around the world on their map [as of the end of October 2008, this container is in Shanghai, containing whisky].

The BBC named their project "The Box" after The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, an interesting book on the history of containerization, and its effect on globalization, by Marc Levinson. (Here is a book review from Ethan Zuckerman and an essay by Witold Rybczynski).

I read the book earlier this year and enjoyed it. I would have liked more economic history and statistics in the book, but the main problem was that people mocked me when I told them I was reading a book about containers. However, containers have become an essential part of global trade and of its rapid growth.

Below are some maps of parts of global trade. They give a bit of an idea of where such a container is likely to move between.

The book—The Box—includes lots of interesting history of the container system, and how as a system it lead to innovations, efficiencies, and had many unintended consequences. One example is that it made many old ports obsolete, while reshaping many city centres (over decades). Also, the creation of new ports—and the changes in container ships they triggered—caused ongoing shifts in global trade patterns.

One key cycle of change was a positive feedback between ship size and port attributes. Because the fuel consumption of a ship does not increase proportionately to the number of containers a ship can carry—containers ships have become bigger and bigger—which has had the effect of focusing trade into ports that can handle the large ships and the trade volume. These big ports then lead to the construction of more of these bigger ships. Wikipedia lists the world’s busiest container ports. The busiest are Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenzen, and Busan. This concentration of big ships in big ports has had the effect of making world trade unexpectedly (for economic theory) “lumpy.” Paul Krugmann explains:

[Economic theory suggests] a country like China should export a wider range of products to a small country, like Ecuador, than it does to a big country, like the US. Why? Because Ecuador, being small, probably has fewer industries that are cost-competitive with Chinese exports. In fact, however, China seems to export a wider range of stuff to bigger economies.

A possible explanation is the lumpiness of transport costs: there are more container ships heading from China to US ports than to Ecuadorian ports, so that it’s worth sending over a bigger range of stuff. It’s like the reason there are fewer food choices in supermarkets on St. Croix (where we spent our last vacation) than in New Jersey—there’s just one boat with groceries coming over every once in a while, so you can’t keep, um, arugula in stock.

Reading the Box also makes it clear that while higher fuel prices will reshape trade patterns and probably boat designs, neither global trade patterns nor transportation costs will return to those of the 1960s or 1970s. This is due to huge improvements in logistics that have radically dropped the labour cost for shipping goods long distances, and this has also decreased fuel costs.

The rapid expansion of skills in logistics is a hidden environmental efficiency of the moden world economy—in that it allows things to be moved around for less cost than earlier in history. However as occurs with most increases in efficiency, modern society undoes the environmental advantages of efficiency by using the cost saving to simply move more stuff for the same amount of money.

Logistics makes at least parts of the world “flatter.” And the ease of making these connections appears to make it easier to spread tools and ideas as well as goods. The World Bank claims that countries with the most predictable, efficient, and best-run transportation routes and trade procedures are also the most likely to take advantage of technological advances, economic liberalization, and access to international markets. Countries with higher logistics costs are more likely to miss the opportunities of globalization. The World Bank ranks countries using a logistics performance index which measures the ease with which the country connects to the global economy. Singapore, Netherlands, and Germany are at the top as the most accessible; while Rwanada, East Timor, and Afghanistan are at the bottom of the rankings.

Of course, novel solutions also produce novel problems. Discarded containers litter landscapes worldwide (finding uses for them has become a standard architecture project), container ports are centres of environmental and biotic pollution, and the ease of using containers is also useful for smuggling.

And at least my impression from reading The Box, was that containerization has not finished transforming the world economy.

—

P.S. Ethan Zuckerman also has a long post Mapping a connected world discussing containers and world trade.

—

This article by WorldChanging Canada writer Garry Peterson was originally published on Resilience Science.

On the first Saturday after Obama's inspirational inauguration, and just days before Canada's parliament reconvened to debate a controversial budget, 140 web geeks, designers, academics, government staff, local political players, consultants, and social innovators came together to "re- imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation".

This was ChangeCamp, the inaugural Canadian "unconference " on the question of how we interact with government. ChangeCamp was held in the MaRS Centre in downtown Toronto. The 8 hour day was packed with small, ad hoc, group discussions, as well as participant proposed sessions organized using guidelines from the "Open Space Technology" meeting methodology.

This event was recognized as a continued evolution of the BarCamp model. BarCamps had originally been organized to provide web developers with opportunities to share and collaborate on innovative technologies. The focus on technology prevalent at BarCamps was certainly on display at ChangeCamp. Wifi laptops abounded. Conversations were often punctuated with open source computing jargon. It was easy to find familiar faces and themes from related local conferences, such as Open Everything, Transit Camp, and Open Cities.

Across the sessions and discussions was excited talk, and example after example, of how government-at every level from local to national-was going to become more transparent and collaborative through the use of new technologies. A few simple but powerful examples I learned about were created by the U.K. programmers at MySociety.org. From both within government, and outside of government, MySociety have created tools that empower citizens to communicate with their elected representatives (WriteToThem.com), hear from members of parliament (HearFromYourMP.com), track what members say in parliament (TheyWorkForYou.com), access government information (WhatDoTheyKnow.com), and report local infrastructure problems, like broken street lights and pot holes (FixMyStreet.com). Their biggest success was being asked by Number 10 Downing street (the official residence of the British Prime Minister) to create a web site to facilitate online petitions. With over 8 million signatures from over 5 million unique email addresses, the online petition site shows that people are interested in making their opinions available to government outside the election cycle.

Similar North American projects also exist. HowdTheyVote.ca scrapes the records from Canada 's Hansard records from parliamentary debates. OpenSecrets.org gives insight into money's influence on U.S. elections and public policy. GovTrack.us tracks U.S. federal legislation and information on Members of Congress. VisibleGovernment.ca is promoting tools for transparency of Canadian government information. The SeeClickFix.com collaborative tool allows for reporting on local problems. But none of these have the official legitimacy of the above mentioned petitions.number10.gov.uk , which can now be considered a political player of sorts, frequently referenced in the media.

The most interesting initiative I learned about was from the Citizen's Briefing Book component of Barack Obama's change.gov campaign web site. There, 70,000 people posted and voted on tens of thousands of policy suggestions for the incoming President. The top 10 suggestions were:

1. End marijuana prohibition (92,970 Points)
2. Become the “greenest” country in the world (70,470 Points)
3. Stop using federal resources to undermine states' medicinal marijuana laws (66,170 Points)
4. End government sponsored abstinence education and provide age appropriate sex education (65350 Points)
5. Fund bullet trains and light rail (65,100 Points)
6. Permanently close all torture facilities (61,250 Points)
7. Revoke tax cuts for the top 1% (57,080 Points)
8. Get the insurance companies out the health care (55,080 Points)
9. Revoke the tax exempt status of the Church of Scientology (52,470 Points)
10. Bring back the Constitution! (50,160 Points)

These results are obviously more representative of the web savvy Obama supporters than the general U.S. population, but it is notable that some of these specific suggestions (e.g. supporting rail) are rarely discussed in the media and represt a fresh grass roots perspective that is lacking from the typical general opinion polling that is often designed in reaction to the mainstream news.

Similar to sites like Digg.com, services like UserVoice.com, and Google's new free Moderator application, Obama's high profile-and open ended-approach to gauging public opinion could set a new trend away from polling and towards crowdsourcing. We should keep our eyes open to see what initiatives the newly created Federal Office of Public Liaison may demonstrate further in this direction.

All this optimism must be put in a realistic perspective, since the "digital divide" still exists. The most prolific online users are not demographically representative of the general population. To get a better sense of the informed voice of the people, participants can be organized into a representative sample of the larger whole. Case studies of such approaches can be seen in the Ontario and BC Citizen's Assemblies and more recently in the Australian Citizens' Parliament. These multi-day, face-to-face, approaches may not have the Web 2.0 sparkle of twitter.com or FaceBook, but their informed and deliberative approach can provide wiser recommendations than most current online voting systems.

What's next? In Canada, look to organizations like Ascentum and MassLBP, who are breaking new ground in both online and offline democracy between elections-and watch what emerges from upcoming ChangeCamps in Ottawa and Vancouver.

Image: Matthew Burpee

For more great articles on collaborative democractic practice, see:

• Citizens' Assemblies: Wise Democracy from the Minipublic | Jason Diceman
  
• Policy from the People | Jason Diceman
  
• Dotmocracy in Venezuela | Karl Schroeder