I first volunteered with Asha when I studied at Cornell in the mid 1990s and have stayed involved since. Their efforts are among the most sincere and most successful in basic education in India, with an all-volunteer staff and hundreds of active projects. One of my memorable Asha experiences was surveying tsunami relief efforts in 2005 with my wife, in Chennai and nearby, coastal villages. Asha does not usually provide disaster relief, but when needed, they had the resilience to organize and provide everything from food to boats to backpacks for school, for thousands of children and families.

More recently in 2008-2009, the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire captured hearts around the world. Of the millions who saw it, many wondered what they could do to help children from India’s slums.

Asha for Education volunteers have funded and organized dozens of projects in slums across India, including the slums shown in Slumdog Millionaire. Below is an excerpt of an article I wrote in early 2009 for the main Asha for Education web site, to help spread the word about Asha’s good work. In the article, I included several photos I had snapped in India of related Asha projects.

I’m updating this later in 2009 to add: the article and photos have been viewed by millions of people around the world via Asha’s site, my flickr stream, and web sites who have republished the photos and badges. The photos have also been used in unrelated fund raising campaigns for Asha. I couldn’t be happier to help tell the stories and rally support for these kids, to help give them the opportunities all children deserve.

Helping Children From India’s Slums

The Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire has captured hearts around the world. Of the millions who have seen it, many wonder what they can do to help children from India’s slums.

Asha for Education volunteers have funded and organized dozens of projects in slums across India, including the slums shown in Slumdog Millionaire. Asha has been working to help these children for more than 10 years, with 93 education projects focusing on children from the slums.

One of the best things you can do to help is to make a donation to Asha for Education — please use the Google Checkout form on the right side of this page. Asha has been given the highest possible rating by Charity Navigator and has been a top-rated nonprofit on many Charity Navigator lists, including “10 Slam Dunk Charities.”

In the sunny metropolis of Chennai, a 115-year-old school called Olcott Memorial is dedicated to educating the poorest children. The Chapter Coordinator of Asha Chennai, Lakshmi Suryanarayanan, is also Headmistress at Olcott Memorial. Lakshmi oversees the many education projects focused on helping children from slums in Chennai, funded and informed by Asha volunteers around the world.

A hard-working student at Olcott Memorial, funded in part by Asha for Education. Click for a larger version.

Lakshmi greets some of her eager students. Project funded in part by Asha for Education. Click for a larger version.

Lakshmi anchors the dedicated staff at Olcott Memorial, here including kitchen staff who provide for students' nutritional needs. Project funded in part by Asha for Education. Click for a larger version.

Project Bridge is Olcott Memorial’s attempt to bridge the digital divide. There is a growing divide between children from poor families, whose access to computers is almost nonexistent, and the growing computer use by children from wealthy families. Future plans for Asha funding at Olcott Memorial include purchasing increased Internet connectivity for their computer lab, teacher training, and improving science labs.

Any amount you donate can mean the world to a child, and because Asha is run by volunteers, 100% of your contribution will reach the children. If a general donation is not specific or personal enough, consider giving with Asha’s Support A Child program.

Something else you can do to help: spread the word. Using one of the linked images below or in any way you prefer, share a link to Asha for Education on your website, blog, profile, or in email. If you know someone who may want to support basic education in India, send them here!

Please link images to http://www.ashanet.org/

One of my inspirations in CompassionRise and in life has been Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States of America. Jefferson had a habit of writing every day. He rarely published, more often writing letters or writing for himself, such as annotating his designs and experiments. “Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight,” he wrote. Jefferson was as much a reader, writing in a letter once, “I cannot live without books.” When I studied at Cornell, I read thousands of pages of his writings (extracurricular :) in my favorite library (here and here). For a short stack, check out Peterson’s collection Thomas Jefferson, Writings or as a recent, readable shortcut for getting to know him, read Ellis’ biography American Sphinx.

As in this post’s graphic, the topics in CompassionRise have been far reaching. I have written on practical concerns like “Innovations, Expectations, and Change” with inspiration from Bill Gates and on “Experimentation” with inspiration from Carl Sagan. I wrote on the ethical implications of incredible but near future innovations like “Achieving Immortality” — through scientific and technological, not spiritual means — and discussed the “Sustainability of the Self” in a related article. I sought answers to questions both personal, as in “Compassion and Revenge” and social, as in “Developing the Human Family” while seeking scientific ethics to bridge divisions in global civil society.

My impetus to begin CompassionRise was a gift from my sister Melissa, brother in law Q! and nephew Michael: “Insight from the Dalai Lama” a 2009 daily calendar. Most of the quotations are short and all are inspirational; they are not religious. In CompassionRise, each essay has one, two, or three inspirational quotes. Based on those quotes and other research, I offer my own insight on compassion.

Roughly half of the essays are inspired by Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Other wise people whom I point to: Dr. Hu Shih (胡適 or 胡适), Dr. Carl Sagan, Seattle, Chief of the Suquamish, Duwamish, and Allied Native American Tribes, Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi (મોહનદાસ કરમચંદ ગાંધી), Bill Gates, Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States of America, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Eddie Vedder, Sister Helen Prejean, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (نصرت فتح على خاں), and Pat Whatley Showell, President and CEO of Families First.

While writing the 31st, I found myself circling back to many earlier points. I was thinking more about what I had written than what I was writing, so CompassionRise came to a pause.

Below are the CompassionRise essays, last to first. Click an image to find associated essays in CompassionRise.

Experimentation
Feelings and Forgiveness
Eagle and Thicket
The Great Responsibility
Common Ground
Achieving Immortality
Good Intentions
Developing the Human Family
Compassion and Revenge
Innovations, Expectations, and Change
Pushing Our Human Boundaries
Everybody Can Be Great
A New Independence
A New Spirituality
Community and Inner Strength
Our Sense of Well-Being
Science and Humility
Respect and Responsibility
Our Face of Love
Face of Love
The Purpose of Meditation
Freedom and Creativity
Ignorance and Real Peace
Look On the Bright Side
The Seeds of Compassion
Nature v. Nurture
Resolving to Help Others
Sustainability of the Self
We Are the Makers
Old and New

If I had to sum up the immediately previous graphics in a word, considering the look she wanted and our result, the word would be “urban.” The result was not overwhelmingly street but the city of Seattle and urbanity in general were strong elements.

With an evocative name like “Mango Power Girl” it’s irresistible to play visually on each word. In an urban look, this led to an array of mango colored paint splashing and glow effects. Click the image or link below for more discussion of these graphics’ origins. Graphics included a square “About Me” image and a banner for the site:

“About Me” for Mango Power Girl

400 pixels square, May 2008

–> a flickr version with more details

Banner image for use on MangoPowerGirl.com, May 2008:

The typeface and primary orange or mango color had been retained from her previous generation of graphics for continuity. Mohini wanted a cleaner break this time around. We changed her site’s color palette, typeface, and the general direction of the graphics. If the old look was “urban,” the new look she wanted was “organic.”

Mango Power Girl is about food stories, recipes, and food photography, but there is complementary floral and other photography in the mix. In thinking “organic,” Mohini was partly accentuating both the food and the floral, and partly giving a nod to trends in graphic design. In their article “Logo Design Trends 2008,” LogoOrange Design Group referred to the like as “Leaves Logos.” Anyone watching has noticed not only leaves, but whole vines, branches, roots, plants, and so on, growing all over logos, advertising campaigns, and blog templates. Some of this graphic trend is tied to the sustainability or “green” movement, and some of it is just graphic fashion, spilling into areas unrelated to anything “organic.”

If the organic and floral were the “girl” in this art, the “mango” was still primarily represented in orange colors. The main orange became darker and redder as the entire palette swung toward autumn and winter. Another color motivation was greater contrast for usability in links, headlines, and other visual elements, the colors of which are matched to the graphic art. The “power” in the graphic was a warm, orange glow implying fire. The letters in “Mango Power Girl” were styled like embers. An orange glow, centered between the first “o” and graphic art behind the lettering, created depth and interaction between the title and background.

Banner image for use on MangoPowerGirl.com, October 2008:

In other user interfaces, differently sized banners were in order, so we were careful to settle on an image that scaled well. For Mango Power Girl’s Twitter profile, it became:

With “organic” as the foremost thought in Mango Power Girl’s mind, and with a nod to her college major of mathematics, her new favicon picked out the spiraling vine:

Mohini shared with me a few of the reviews from her readers, including “pretty banner” and “Gorgeous banner!” Excellent!

I’ll write more in another post about related work to improve and customize search on Mango Power Girl, the site’s underlying template, and its integration with other tools Mohini uses to produce content.

Besides all of this, give Mango Power Girl a read. If you’re not hungry yet, you will be!

While modernizing the efforts of volunteers and staff, the Foundation has created online tools of possible interest to other non-profits, including:

(1) Online forms used by grant recipients to submit annual reports. The forms include requests for human interest stories from the recipients, which have come in handy later.

(2) A means of raising funds online. At last glance, there was a big button to click for donations from the foundation’s Web site.

(3) A volunteering log. Volunteers perform many tasks for Haas Foundation, especially media related. Volunteers are not only working locally, and often they are working online. The foundation receives credit for every hour volunteered, so a log helps with tracking and also managing volunteered work, especially when it is performed asynchronously.

Haas does not always create their internal tools from scratch. One recent publication was a great example of coordinating their original online tools, other readily available online tools, and volunteer efforts. Volunteers used Lulu to publish a collection of success stories, which grant recipients had entered into the online annual report form. The finished publication was volunteer-edited and sent as a thank-you to donors of a certain amount.

The Haas Foundation is modernizing these efforts quickly but does not yet have all the answers. Michele expressed their general need for coordinating a variety of online tools for volunteers. They also want a better way volunteers can connect to form a community online. The Foundation has have used Microsoft SharePoint, but SharePoint has been difficult to maintain over time, “from a usability standpoint” as they reported.

The presentation session at Seattle Net Tuesday which originated this report was brief. Our immediate group did not have an opportunity to discuss potential solutions. My instincts tend toward a private wiki like PBwiki to make collaborative working and intranet connectivity front and center. Community building can be on the side of a PBwiki, either linking to and from it and social networking sites or integrating their widgets into it. It is also possible that a custom social network like Ning would be a better glue for Haas Foundation volunteers.

The Haas Foundation would be happy to hear more suggestions. Tell them Michele Fugiel and Seattle Net Tuesday sent you!

Visit them at HaasFoundation.org.

This article was written based on a presentation by and follow-up with Volunteer Michele Fugiel at Seattle Net Tuesday in 2007.

Saul & Dayee G. Haas Foundation photo credit Mel Hazen, 2007

Try Noonhat “to take lunch to the next level,” as creator Brian Dorsey has said. The site matches you randomly with people for lunch, on a day and within an area you and they have pre-selected. This is not a dating service; you are encouraged to go to lunch with more than one other person. With its randomness, Noonhat is purely about tossing the social salad. It is what Dorsey calls “an anti-niche technology.”

To Seattle Net Tuesday and all those interested in non-profit technology, Noonhat represents what one person is capable of:

(1) in his or her spare time,

(2) using free, open source tools, and

(3) with a bit of help from the Seattle community.

Dorsey spends $15 per month on hosting, and Noonhat has no other cost except his time. Noonhat is free to its users. Brian Dorsey works full time as a software developer, but not on Noonhat! He spent what he calls “50 software guy hours” to build Noonhat from its beginning to being featured in mainstream media and industry leading conferences, including Seattle’s KING 5 TV News and Gnomedex 2007.

Clearly there are great possibilities for building with free, existing software, and the opportunities for starting something new in Seattle are promising, too. Dorsey’s other essential message for starting a new venture was: be willing to do things before you’re entirely ready. His Noonhat home page went public before there was automation for matching people to lunches. Even though he had to manually perform matches in the early going, by opening the site early on, he proved the concept. Ultimately the Noonhat process was improved through a trial by fire that forced Dorsey to be practical.

Especially let a practical, timely opportunity lead you into taking the next step when the time is right, even if that is before you feel ready. Brian Dorsey and Noonhat were voted from a small Ignite Seattle event into presenting a few days later at Gnomedex, an internationally attended social technology conference. Within that one week, visits to the Noonhat site went from dozens per day to more than 1,000 per day. Dorsey took advantage of the Gnomedex spotlight to launch Noonhat nationally — not that he was ready for that, either!

Dorsey also mentioned that in the span of its first few days of mainstream exposure, large companies had approached him regarding use of Noonhat internally by their employees. Take one opportunity, and look for others to open. Not only KING 5 TV News and other network news, but the Seattle Times, the Seattle P-I, and other print media gave Noonhat increasing attention. If Noonhat had waited to launch until everything was perfect, or if it had missed its opportunity to shine, who can say the spotlight would have come again?

Noonhat is a liberating way to meet new people. To paraphrase Dorsey’s words: in a time of increasing professional specialization, narrowing and shrinking social networks, and pick-your-perspective media sources, this is social networking turned inside out and with no strings attached. If you’d hesitate to meet someone new alone, just bring a friend or two along to guarantee a good time, but with a twist.

Of Noonhat, I say: may it live long, and prosper.

In other words, give it a try at Noonhat.com. Pick your location, date, and cheers!

My comments on defending science were recently included in a collection of comments by signatories of the Defend Science Statement. Today, I thought right away to invite Vice President Gore to broaden his defense of climate related science to a full-throated endorsement of the scientific method. My emailed reply to Vice President Gore included the following.

Open Congratulations to Al Gore:

Congratulations, Mr. Vice President!

I would like to take this opportunity to encourage you and everyone to broadly embrace and defend science, in this and in every endeavor.

See comments from me and others on defending science at:

http://www.defendscience.org/fund_signatory_comments.pdf

Please sign and share the Defend Science Statement at:

http://defendscience.org/

Your compatriot,

Brian Glanz

Al Gore’s announcement email, Subject: I am deeply honored, in full text:

Dear Brian,

I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change–the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis–a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.

My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.

Thank you,

Al Gore