Henry Poole's blog

Several years ago, while Aaron and I were working for Jerry Brown on the online strategy for his Attorney General race in California, I mentioned an idea to him that might save the State quite a bit of funding for police departments, and other emergency services. The idea was simple, use cell phones to automatically message everyone within a geographic radius in an emergency. Imagine that you're in need of immediate support, and you hit 111 on your phone, and immediatly you are connected to everyone in a party line within a 6 block radius.

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CivicActions client Rare Conservation has a first of it's kind Masters Program for Conservationists, available in 4 languages. "Students from areas of highest biodiversity around the world implement an entire social marketing campaign designed around a specific conservation goal, by mobilizing constituents in their communities." The degree requires positive impact.

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WebEnabled is a Free and Open Source (FOSS) hosted platform that "makes it easy for teams to focus on building awesome web applications." Provisioning applications from their library is fast. Bevan reported getting a Drupal 7 instance up and running in a few minutes. The service offers full SSH, SCP and SFTP access. You can also manage your code revisions and collaborate with others using SVN.

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I was fortunate to have a chance to see Paul Romer talk on Monday night, after a nice dinner at Greens with Jim Kiles. Paul Romer is very well known for his work in the field of "new-growth theory". We were in for a treat. At the Long Now event at Fort Mason in San Francisco, Romer unveiled his "Economic Theory of History" and talked of his upcoming Bridge Cities Institute.

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Just ran across this on the Witness Hub. When a young teacher is found dead outside her apartment building in Ruian, the police report concludes suicide, but her family and students suspect a cover-up. Over a thousand people take to the streets in protest, and are met with police violence. Protestors film the clashes on their cellphones, and upload the clips to Chinese video-sharing sites, but the clips are rapidly taken offline - only to re-appear on other sites, as respected English-language Chinese blog Danwei reported.

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After receiving invitations since Jerry's first retreat, I finally attended Jerry's weekend this year at the Marconi Center just north of San Francisco. I met some truly amazing folks there, and I drew this maze for Jerry in my 'off-time'. I began drawing mazes like this one for my two boys years ago...

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I just received this moving note from Sunil Paul, a friend, co-Founder and National co-Chair Cleantech and Green Business for Obama. He's been on the ground in Florida, helping to get out the vote.

Today I saw things I will never forget for as long as I live. I saw mothers standing the rain for hours, with babies in their arms, waiting to vote. I saw thousands of people waiting in lines in the heat of the Florida sun and under the drench of tropical downpours.

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I recently submitted a proposal for a session at next year's South by Southwest Conference titled "Flexible Technology Strategies for NGOs and Social Ventures". There are hundreds of great topics that have been submitted this year, and one of the methods that the organizers will use to pick the topics is to open them up to public vote. If you would like to see me present this topic, please vote for it at: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1378 Summary:

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