Tech for good and not for so good

My thoughts on Wired's story Harmless Hiker, tech for good, Google, LinkedIn and Microsoft for nonprofit organizations

“Technology is best when it brings people together.”

The year was 2008, I was single and working in London with HSBC. Every desi who lands in the western land for the first time thinks that all the blondes are waiting for him.

Reality hits you hard. When you are basically an Asian (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), not even Indian. I had amazing luck. My entire team was occupied with men all above 50.

So who comes for help - Orkut. The grandfather of social networking was more or less a dating site.

Orkut had groups and it had a happening group(many thought so) - Indians in London. With no luck happening, I show up at one of the gatherings to see fellow Indians and smile. I never understood how desis’s change their accent after landing in London.

In the next 15 minutes, I had three Kronenbourg beers and I was pretty much determined to leave the place.

Just when I was leaving I bump into a sexy blonde who loved desis after watching Bend It Like Beckham. Okay, nothing happened like that. Instead, I meet a well-educated Jat who was more arrogant and snob than me. We both came with the same agenda but left becoming best friends.

He became my brother from another mother. The next three years happen to be my best days. All we did was drinking, party, more drinking, traveling, and crazy stuff.

One such crazy stuff was planning a Scotland trip in the middle of the night. And just like that, we rented a car, I printed five pages of a road map from London to Scotland( I didn’t take a GPS because I was too drunk and had this brilliant idea that we can ask people if we are lost somewhere) and that’s how we began our bank holiday weekend.

We entered Scotland in the night and the bloody place was all about roundabouts. Not a single person was outside and even if someone was there I horribly failed to understand their English. 

Finally, we hired another taxi to reach our hostel. I was sitting in the taxi and my friend followed the taxi. The hostel manager kept staring at us when we proudly said that we drove down to Scotland from London without a GPS.

Mostly Harmless

Hiker “Mostly Harmless” printed out 60 pages of the map since he wanted to figure out a path down to the Florida Keys. “I don’t have a phone,” Mostly Harmless replied when a veteran hiker named Matt Mason told him about a route and a map he could download to his phone.

Six months later and 600 miles south, on July 23, 2018, two hikers found the dead body of the hiker. No one knows his name, who he was, where he came from, no ID, no credit card, no DNA match. Nor could investigators understand how or why he died. His cause of death, according to the autopsy report, was “undetermined”, reports WIRED.

Everyone remembers him as a mostly harmless hiker. He was “Denim” at first because he had started his trek in jeans. Later, it became “Mostly Harmless,” which is how he described himself one night at a campfire. 

It is astonishing that in a day when the internet can decode family mysteries, identify long-forgotten songs, solve murders, and even trace down a cat killer is still figuring out who is the hiker.

By the way, Don't F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer - a series of chronicles events following a crowd-sourced amateur investigation became one of Netflix's Top 5 most-watched documentaries of 2019.

The story of this nameless hiker reminds me of the movie Into The Wild based on Chris McCandless. Chris stranded in the Alaska bush, trapped by a raging river as he ran out of food. He died on a school bus, starving. Mostly Harmless case is not the same. It looks as if he wanted to get lost.

Tech for good

Tech has two sides depends on how you want to use it.

With the US Elections swinging the Democrat way, Republicans are all guns trying to prove that the election is rigged. From legal fights to social media, the fights are getting nasty.

Casey Newton informs that this misinformation may have been more likely to spread via robocall, text message, and email than it was via social network. That suggests bad actors increasingly find Facebook and Twitter too expensive or time-consuming to use to spread hoaxes.

Trump’s message spread because disinformation is an effective political strategy. If you lie constantly — and are supported by a network of enablers, cable news networks, talk radio, and platform amplification, and recommendation algorithms — you can amass a huge following. Take your lies to live television, which will air your baseless claims in real-time, and you can build it even more.

In our home turf, we are promising free vaccines to states going for elections and love-jihad laws. From mandir masjid, we have vaccines empowering political strategy.

Everything in tech isn’t that bad

Ash Carter, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, writes about Tech Spotlight to recognize the technologists, activists, and policymakers who are thoughtfully creating and using technology in ways to protect the public good and help shape a better future. 

Out of the three Tech Spotlight Finalists - Thorn Spotlight is a machine learning tool that helps law enforcement in the United States and Canada identify and locate sex traffickers and the children they harm. In the past four years, Thorn reports that it has helped identify nearly 15,000 child sex trafficking victims.

Madhureeta Anand, a 45-year-old independent filmmaker, and writer has created an app that shows if an area is safe. ‘Phree App’, which allows users, particularly women and the transgender community, to rate commercial establishments, streets, and areas for safety.

The app helps create a map marking out safe/unsafe spaces, thereby creating a pre-emptive safety environment for these vulnerable segments of society.

Google for Nonprofit organizations

charity: water sought to expand its presence online using the free tools available through Google for Nonprofits. “To help bring clean and safe drinking water to everyone in the world, charity: water wanted to genuinely engage with supporters to raise funds, increase awareness, and reach new donors by maximizing their presence online.”

Google for nonprofits says: “Using Google Maps, the nonprofit connects donors with their donation – upon making a contribution, donors are sent a set of GPS coordinates and photos where they can track their donations and see the impact they’re making.”

YouTube has allowed people involved with the water project to document its progress by providing a platform for the charity: water staff to send thank-you messages to donors or capture videos on-site to tell personal stories of how new water wells provided safe and clean drinkable water.

Here is a story from the ground where local mechanics in Uganda are working with the nonprofit to provide clean water.

The nonprofit also uses Ad Grants to help increase organic and paid search results, creating campaigns like one that encouraged people to ask their friends and relatives to donate to charity: water instead of a traditional birthday gift.

LinkedIn for Nonprofit organizations

Just like Google, LinkedIn has been working with nonprofits to meet their goals. CHRISTUS Health used LinkedIn’s curated content on their LinkedIn Career Page geared towards nursing professionals and invested in LinkedIn Recruiter, LinkedIn Jobs, and Pipeline Builder to source needed talent.

CHRISTUS also used LinkedIn Sponsored Updates to target their own employees with LinkedIn Learning courses relevant to their careers.

The result: CHRISTUS Health successfully leveraged LinkedIn to grow their brand awareness among healthcare professionals. They have also fostered a “Culture of Learning” and upskilled their workforce by offering their associates ungated access to LinkedIn Learning. (Click here to see more tactical results of the campaign)

Microsoft launches Fundraising and Engagement for Dynamics 365 Sales

Recently Microsoft released Fundraising and Engagement for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, a Microsoft solution built with MISSION CRM. Two years ago, the company released the Common Data Model for Nonprofits, a set of best practices represented as data entities, attributes, and relationships.

The solution supports the most common fundraising scenarios across multiple donation types and channels—including major and annual giving, recurring gift and membership programs, opportunity and designation management, and household and life event management.

Here is how Right To Play has been working with MISSION CRM to digitize its operations in support of an outreach initiative to acquire new donors.

Microsoft launches Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is a free-to-use analytics product built to help website managers improve their website experiences by a better understanding of site visitor behavior. The organization writes:

“With Clarity we’ve built a set of tools that help people who manage websites make more informed decisions about the modifications they should make to their sites. Clarity shows you which parts of your website get the most and least engagement and it provides an invaluable interface for debugging.”

Search Engine Journal writes: Amazingly, there are no traffic caps. Even a site with a million visitors a day can use it. Additionally, it is said to be optimized to not slow sites down.

Want to find out about your website performance, signup for Clarity.

 “At a glance you will be able to see how many users were clicking on non-existent links or how many people scrolled up and down a page in search of something they couldn’t readily find. You can also see things like how many concurrent javascript errors are occurring across your clients or how much time the average user spends navigating your site.”

Before I say Happy Weekend

We haven’t said a proper hello this week. 

Nonetheless, I am hopeful that you are putting a fight with a smile.

For months I have been thinking what should be one advice to my younger self? After a lot of pondering I think it should be sitting with myself.

Today I do that quite often because I have ample time. During my startup days or even prior to that all I did was chasing fancy and shiny objects. Never sat and analysed my thoughts and decisions. In fact, I stopped my age-old habit of journaling.

Had I done it, I might have made better choices in my personal and professional life.

Today when I sit with myself I am in the present. Additionally observing my emotions and writing them brings clarity. I still fuck up quite often but the realisation is quick.

I hardly listen to anyone so I don't believe in giving advice. Try it and see if it adds value to your life.

Good Weekend!

Did you watch the trailer of Rajkumar Rao’s upcoming movie Chhalaang? Here is one of my favorite songs from the upcoming movie.

Love,

PN.