TEDxJohannesburg live blog

Hi all. I know I said I wasn’t blogging here, but now I am, just for the day.

It’s 9:30am on Sunday, and outside the city is complete chaos. I’m safely ensconced in the Theatre on the Square, where they’re keeping me under close protection from cyclists (and vice versa.)

The occasion is:

… TEDxJohannesburg, an innovative day of ideas and cleverness, organised with commendable verve and energy by Alicia Woolf. The idea is to live-blog the event. Essentially, that means I’ll be taking notes, and updating this post in chronological order. If all goes well, you won’t be spammed by multiple e-mails or RSS updates. Reload this frequently if you want to follow the proceedings during the course of the day.

Some notes and conventions:
* Normal text constitutes notes. Unless otherwise specified, or obvious from context (such as descriptions of videos or presentations) they’re as near to direct quotes by the speaker most recently identified.
* My own comments will be in [square brackets]. Don’t blame anyone else for them.
* The Twitter hashtag for today is #TEDxJohannesburg. I’m fairly sure lots of people will tweet the proceedings.
* PS. This post is, I hear, 7000 words long. It contains errors. I’m not going to fix them. I understand typos are horribly offensive, but I trust you’ll get over it within weeks.

10:24 Introduction about ideas worth spreading, and the format of independently organised TED events, known as TEDx. The day will include a selection of talks and lots of conversation about them. Videos from the official TED events will also be shown.

And Alicia Thomas-Woolf, the local organiser, takes the stage. Everyone wrote something they’d like to do before they die on their name tags. [Mine is “Colonise the moon”] We want to leave a legacy, because changing society starts with individuals who talk to each other. It’s been a very collaborative effort, organised by people with lots of passion, little sleep and too much caffeine.

The sign in the photograph is by Sidney Matebula, who sits on the corner of Coleraine and Ballyclare, selling newspapers and making beaded sculptures.

First speaker is Iain Thomas, a creative writer. Talking about “ambiguous micro-stories”. Stories are shorter and shorter. People consume their environment in smaller and smaller chunks.

You are the main characters in a project I’ve been busy with, called “I wrote this for you.” We create these very very short stories. We leave out a lot of detail, and there’s a reason for this. By leaving out gender, age, race, location, people apply the stories to themselves. There’s no story I can tell you that’s as powerful as the story you tell youself. The site, a blog, has been winning awards worldwide. It’s become very popular: www.pleasefindthis.blogspot.com

You and I, we are the same. We’re not always the unique snowflakes we imagine ourselves to be. You understand the story, nobody else does. Everything I write is written for you.

Several people are working on similar micro-story projects. Post-secret, for example.

Dan Rodrigues takes my stories and makes songs of them. My blog helped me retweet information from the Phillipines during floods. Now he’s telling a brilliant story about his interaction with a prostitute, who was on the edge, and now is “helping to save the world”. Never before have we been able to help so many from so far away, and never before have we been able to do with the simpiest stories.

Iain Thomas. Now MC for the rest of the event. Next up, Marc Anthony Zimmerman, aka MaZ.

[There’s a loaf of sliced bread and two bananas on a little table on the stage. Weirdness.]

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

The interesting thing with a banana, is that if you stick your finger down the middle, it tri-sects. This may not necessarily be of use to you right now, but there’s lots of stuff like this that we know.

So what I’m going to show you is how the Brocolli Project. I’m the head of Brocolli. I’m going to present an idea soup.

Idea 1: 4 billilon people live on less than $2 a day. Prahalad.
Idea 2. The bottom of the Mazlow pyramid is hunger/shelter.
Idea 3: Web 2.0 is usefull.
Idea 3.5: Social objects - Juries Engstrom. Each object is for a specific verb or action. AT some level, there’s a value exchange. You get rewards in return for using social objects.
Idea 4: Web 2.0 was built for and by the people at the top of the pyramid.

Blend these ideas together, and you have a rewards programme at the bottom of the pyramid.

About $20 billion has been poured into Africa over the last 50 years. (The rest goes to Toyota to buy the aid workers Land Cruisers.) Still, Africa is no better than it was 50 years ago.

So we worked on incentives to get to the 80% of the people at the bottom of the pyramid. “Rewards that Matter, in exchange for Positiive Social Behaviour, to solve the World’s Wicked Problems.”

[Thought provoking, but not enough explanation — too short, in my opinion.]

[Video: William Kamkwamba, the guy who set up wind-powered electricity for himself and eventually his village in Malawi. He’s very charming. Nervous. It’s a great story. Find it, watch it. Or see here.]

11:00 Susan Woolf. Zaps and other signs. I.e. taxi hand signs. [White people have no idea how they work…but they’re very effective.]

Susan Woolf is an artist, and wanted to carve a taxi hand sign. Her domestic showed her one. It turned out to be a raised middle finger. Photos of the result. Very funny. Was exhibited as “Jacob’s Ladder”, on how we judge people.

Back to real taxi handsigns. Millions of passengers, 15 000 taxi drivers. The hand signs fascinated me. I started doing little paintings, and went to speak to a taxi driver about them. I wanted it to be a normal “social art” project, exploring the significance of hand signs as silent, short, functional communication, how they were learnt and used.

I created a book with hand signs, their meanings, as well as coded shapes usable by blind people. [Very cool encoding idea to describe hand shapes, gestures and actions. Also, interesting how to get both blind and sighted people to understand the coding.]

The Taxi Hand Signs Book for the Blind was launched on 30 September 2009 at Museum Africa. The book for the blind came out before the book for the sighted, in January, along with the National Stamp for 2010, for which Woolf won a competition. The stamps will contaiin both the pictures, and raised “firmography” to “show” the sign for the blind.

There are stories behind many hand signs. For example, the sign for Mothibistad is a gesture that reflects the murder and castration of a local chief. Locals find it offensive, but it’s in general use.

Diepsloot is a wave action, in Johannesburg, but in Durban the same sign would indicate the sea. Orange Farm is indicated by the same sign deaf people use to indicate Orange (an upturned palm with fingers grasping a sphere. We’ll do more work to tie the taxi signs in with standard sign language.

The potential here is to create a dialogue, a forum. [And it all started with a sculpture of a zap sign. Fascinating talk.]

11:16 Hennie Eksteen. On earthworms. “Earthworms can addle your brain”.

We have a misconception about earth worms. They are animals. They lack immune system. They lack teeth. They’re like an old man.

The more rotten the environment, the better they survive. There are 3000+ species. The smallest is 2mm, the largest 7m. (Yes, metres!). They multiply at a teriffic rate.

They have great potential to create fertiliser, compost, to help solve the food crisis in Africa. Cultivation in Africa tends to destroy soil quality within five years. Extreme conditions, and intensive farming are the reason.

I want to talk about their ability to create, sanitise and fertilise soil.

They live off bacteria. They can distinguish between beneficial micro-organisms and pathogens. They correct the pH of anything they consume, with calcifying glands. Enzymes are complex and powerful, and a lot of research is being done on them, in the hope of extracting the useful ones. (So far, they’re getting nowhere.) One could be the solution to the HIV virus. We know it’s there, but not how to isolate/extract it. They can also encapsulate toxic heavy metals before excreting them, which leaves the metals isolated in a hard shell. This is what happened after Chernobyl, and why the local environment looks so good now.

They produce anti-fungal and anti-bacterial substances, over 500 of them. A teaspoonful of earthworm castings is very rich in bacteria, many of which are useful probiotics or antibiotics. What exactly they produce depends on what they eat. Tick resistance trials underway in Namibia, using substance created by earthworms.

This is why they’re such a powerful tool to restore the soil of our contaminated earth. Unlike all other animals, earthworms eat rubbish and excrete good food.

Agricultural use is extraordinary. Not only to enrich the soil, but also to sterlise the soil and combat crop diseases. It compares well with industrial chemical fertiliser, and has been responsible for some of the highest yields on record. but you can breed earthworms and feed them anything to produce vermicompost, which is a perfect solution for poor farmers. [He’s rushing through examples now. Impressive, if accurate. He makes a good case. I wonder why this doesn’t occur to farmers without the need to advocate for it, however…]

[It’s now 11:30. Video about Aimee Mullins and her leg prosthetics. Using technology not just to help disabled people become equallly able as others, but to make them super-able. After all, why not? It took a child to say, “Why don’t you want to fly too?” Reference to Cheetah legs used by Oscar Pistorius. Also, showing a very cool pair of wooden legs, elaborately carved from solid ash. Everyone thought they were boots when they were first modelled. This is “wearable sculpture”. Human-ness is not the only aestethic ideal. She’s cool. Takes this notion to a great new level. “Whimsy matters.” Her legs are now an expression. She can change her look, her height, and friends said, “but that’s not fair!” The conversation today is about augmentation, not replacing loss. So people whom society once called disabled, can now redesign their bodies from a place of empowerment. Combining technology, robotics, and art, we’re coming closer to understanding our humantiy. Very cool video. Inspirational.]

11:40 Glenda Tutt. Talking about “menstrual cup”, an alternative to sanitary towels.

Discovered it when I was broke. If you have R4 and your period starts, you’re not empowered. So I used this thing someone had given me. It was brilliant. Resuable, convenient, inconspicuous.

But it costs R600 to import it. So I started trying to make them. Got a sillicon expert, an investor, and got it off the ground.

Sanitary pads and tampons are a R720 million industry. But 60% of women can’t afford them. Also, they’re not exactly environmentally friendly. Disposal is an issue.

[Good example of someone seeing a need in the market, and filling it.]

11:46 Toby Shapshak, tech editor. Wearing an old SABC test pattern.

Five years ago, Skype was illegal in South Africa. Today, it’s the largest carrier of voice minutes.

SMS was a reporting mechanism for network management. Then Scandinavian teenagers found it, and look at it now.

@ is the most important symbol on the Internet. It gave everyone an identity. You could be anonymous, but you’d be someone@somewhere. We’ve become obsessed about our online identities. Everyone (except Ivo Vegter) is on Facebook.

The greatest telecoms hack that we’ve seen in the world, is called Pay As You Go. Vodacom came up with this idea, and it’s gone global. The default application of technology in Africa is still the radio, after all these years. Until pre-paid came along. People have developed “please-call-me” codes, so they can communicate free.

Mxit. Twitter. The first time I heard about it, I thought, “Who gives a shit?” But Iran gave a shit, and used it to start a revolution.

Is the next thing Google Wave? I don’t know. I’m still at the “who gives a shit stage”.

[Nice to be reminded some times of the massive leaps in technology that hacked our lives and changed them irrevocably.]

LUNCH BREAK. — brb. Glorious food. Also have pics of lots of people, but the food seemed more important:

13:10 We’re back, with poet, Nhlanhla Buthelezi. He’s very good. I’m not going to transcribe. It’s an ode to literature, an ode to poetry, and an ode to being able to read them, which he wasn’t able to do, in English, until 10 years ago. “Before I could learn how to read, I first had to learn how to feel… the meaning behind the words that my tongue could not hold…” … “our illiteracy wounds” … “But whoever told you literacy is an impossibility probably has a long nose. My story is proof that it is a possibility.”

[He learnt his English by resorting to poetry. Then he went on to win all twelve of the poetry slam he entered.]

If you give people content they relate to, can see, they’ll understand it. If you give them something that happened to someone else somewhere else in a world they cannot comprehend, they are not interested.

Message: national literacy is possible.

13:17 [Room goes pitch dark again, for a video with Wade Davis, from TED 2003.

Davis is on about the “ethnosphere”, a web of cultural knowledge and legacy. It’s being eroded just like the biosphere, and if anything, it’s much worse with the ethnosphere. The indicator is language loss. When you were born, there were 6000 languages spoken on earth. But they’re far more than just a means of communication. They are loaded with history, meaning, handed-down wisdom, and so on. [Going through a catalogue of cultures he’s lived with, and their linguistic habits, traditions and myths. He talks too rapidly to keep a list. Check out the video on TED.com if you’re interested in this kind of ethnolinguistic sociology. He’s interesting, and very funny at times. And that’s what he promotes: telling stories from multiple cultures, to weld together and preserve that ethnosphere.]

[Can’t find my square brackets and function keys…and since there’s no 3G here (thanks Vodacom, let me know when your under-serviced area rollout reaches Sandton City) and I just broke my Wi-Fi by hitting a button I can’t see, so this puts me in a difficult blogspot.]

[Back online.]

13:40 Verity Price on stage, singer, songwriter, and all-round interesting person.

[She used Edward de Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats” to solve the problem facing all musicians. So instead of recording an album, which would cost a lot, she sold an album she hadn’t recorded.]

This got me thinking, couldn’t I use the same model to make a difference, one opposing violence against women, the other helping other struggling young artists.

Within a few months, I had a website, and The Lucky Packet Project was underway. My word was creating my world. The way I spoke about it, about my desire to make a difference, was determining what was happening, and I got the idea that I’m possible, it’s possible… Today, over 2000 people from all over the world said yes to buying an album that didn’t exist. So I recorded it, and sent each one a copy, with their names on the artwork. And I could help POWA, and got a young artist a recording deal.

I discovered in myself an ability to persist and persevere, and it’s been very rewarding to have it pay off in beautiful and unexpected ways, including standing here talking about it. If I hadn’t started it, I wouldn’t have known about the generosity that’s out there. I couldn’t have anticipated that bloggers and media would pick up the story, and got involved. So it happened that a Brazilian, with nothing other than my name and my country, sent an envelope with $20 with someone travelling to SA, to help the project.

“…gaps that unexpected miracles can sneak through…” [beautiful phrase]

Eventually, I wrote to Edward de Bono, to thank him for his ideas. And in return, I got a photo of De Bono, holding a copy of my album. I’d come full circle.

I started listening to the voice that said I can do things differently. And I’ll never have to look back and think what it would have been like, to sell and album that didn’t exist.

I hope this story will be a reminder what evertyone of us is capable of. And that the best part of being South African is that it ends with “I can”.

[Another very incredible story. Remarkable. She deserves a medal. Now singing “I give you permission to shine.” She’s actually pretty damn good. Catchy jazz-pop. Nice (albeit electronic) keys, but I’m a sucker for piano/keyboards.]

13:54 Marcus Neustetter. Climbed Klimanjaro. Sketches. Lives on the 16th floor in Braamfontein.

I want to show you four projects I’ve been making. Then we’ll do a little experiment.

The first one is my engagement in hillbrow, with Stephen Hobbs. We spoke to Senegalese immigrants, and they spoke French. Later, we were going to Senegal, and we thought we could get to know the Senegalese immigrants in Hillbrow. We asked them to draw maps to direct us, and tell us their stories. We used no other maps. [Badly-drawn maps on the screen.] We went and found a guy called Richard, in Dakar, to pass a message from Ali, in Hillbrow. When we got back, we told the stories back to the Senegalese, based on their maps. That built so much trust, and we’re going to expand this work with the Senegalese community in SA, and build it.

Then went to a school in Soweto, and got to thinking about how they can use their creative skills. We asked them to think about what they could do, and where they came from, and draw it on the walls. We got them to build sculptures with broken chairs on dead trees. We got them to make brick poetry, with words on bricks that later became part of the driveway. Then we got the Goethe Institute involved, drawing, creating and imagining things they could do, wanted to do, using art as a means of expression, using only the resources at hand. It got them to think about possibilities and the future in a whole new, optimistic way.

Sutherland Reflections. At the foot of this observatory, there’s a community, that is very disconnected. They’re impoverished and see little future for themselves. We got them to fly kites, create landscapes, and start to dream and imagine. Some of their work made it into the Sutherland visitor’s centre. They started an annual kite festival after we left. You can look up, but you need to look at the every day reality to understand.

Vredefort Dome, outside Johannesburg. Ancient impact crater. We gave some local kids lasers and LEDs and glowsticks, from the China market down the road, and they started discovering orbits and lines and built runways for aliens and just experimented. At the end of the night, they collected all the lightsticks and threw them in the air. The resulting photo made me want to see the northern lights.

[Now setting up a demo, with low-frequency sounds from Aurora Borealis, through an amp, a big speaker, some water, and with a laser reflecting off it. Pretty weird. Kind of organised static, but the patterns on the screen are pretty cool. So, from glowsticks and lasers for kids to play with in Vredefort, to the arctic, and back to lasers in Johannesburg. Lots of free, undirected imagination here. Fascinating to watch.]

The experiment is a beginning. We’ll see where it takes us….

14:13 Clarke Scholtz. Professor Clarke H. Scholtz, of the University of Pretoria. he’s talking about dung beetles. Don’t sneer, the earthworms thing was pretty good.

SA is the 3rd richest in biodiversity in the world, with the measurement based on vascular plants.

E.R. Wilson, winner of TED Prize in 2007 said if humans disappeared, the environment would regenerated, but if insects disappeared, the environment would collapse.

70% of all animals are insects. 70% of insects are beetles. 70% of plants are pollinated by insects. 70% of all wood, grass, etc, is decomposed by insects. 70% of all dung is removed by insects. And 40% of animal carcasses are eaten by insects.

The Sacred Scarab of Ancient Egypt…. dung beetles were revered in mythology, because of two things: rolling dung balls represented Ra rolling the sun across the sky, and their disappearance into holes, and reappearance without their dung, represents reincarnation.

[He has a good sense of humour about being a dung beetle specialist…quotes Far Side on the African bagel beetle.]

References to dung beetles are widely known in many mythologies.

[Eek. Half a dung beetle, entire screen. Scary at that size.]

“Dung is fiercely contested. You need to be the first to get there to get it while it’s hot. They also need ladle-like mandibles, because they know you don’t eat soup with a fork.”

Dung beetle is named after Sisyphus. But there are 700-800 species of dung beetle, few of which are rollers. Most are tunnellers.

If you watch dung beetles, you’ll often see two of them. One does all the work, the other does nothing. The male does all the work, and the female is the backseat driving. Once the ball is underground, they mate, and the male abandons the nest to recuperate from nest-making, while the female starts the work of rearing the kids.

They can create huge balls, the size of tennis balls, and can bury up to 5kg of dung a night.

One cow produces 12 cow pats a day, avg 3kg each. That’s 36kg a day. 10 million cows in SA makes 120m pats, is 3,600 tons of shit. That’s not counting elephants and politicians. If it wasn’t for dung beetles, we’d be in a heap of shit.

In Australia, the native dung beetles went extinct, becasue they couldn’t handle cow manure. Result? Problems. Flies, both the nuisance and blood-sucking variety, multipllied alarmingly. [Horrifying photos.]

We had a dung beetle research unit in Pretoria, and exported our superior kind of dung beetle to Australia. The formal programme no longer exists, but there’s now a guy near Perth who breeds them, and conditions have improved dramatically since dung beetles were re-introduced.

In SA, we’ve started a campaign to stop people driving over wildlife pats, or dung beetles. [Funny road signs.]

Farmers who make anti-parasitic drugs orally fed to livestock also cause a problem, and we’re working on solutions in this area…

[Well, now I know a lot more about shit.]

14:32 Karen Michelle Brooks on stage now. The future of writing. Also focuses on story-telling.

Mobile storytelling pioneered in Japan in 2005. My claim to fame is that I wrote two fantasy-fiction books, and sold 50 000 chapters in 6 months via MXit.

Each chapter is 50c. I’m not getting rich on it, but there’s a possibility here. “Uploaded wisdom, downloaded wealth”. people in rural areas have mobile phones. Let’s give them the ability to use it.

Ken Robinson (TED.com) talks about how schools kill creativity, and that in 30 years, your MBA will be worthless. So we need a system through which you can upload your stories, your wisdom, and from that, get something sustainable to.

14:37 Scott Colin Cundill on stage now.

99% is an interesting number. It’s not often that you get 99% of people thinking something is a good idea. But that is what happens with planting your own food.

So we started a viral project to get people to commit to planting a seed on 22 September. We had 100 000 people plant a seed on 22 September, by sending just one e-mail.

Next one is 20 March, and we want to get to a million. 150 sites have our Planting Season banner on their website. That’s amazing.

The viral component is what made this work. It was incredible. People were just flooding in.

When you start planting your own food, it reconnects you with the world. You start asking questions about how to grow plants. About what you’re eating. About your water quality. It gets people talking. Suddenly the gardener is no longer just some guy who comes on Friday. He’s someone you can learn from. The conncetions of nature become more apparent. It brings more life into suburbia.

I foresee the day when we won’t be walking down the street anymore, we’ll be walking through food forests.

99% of people say it’s a good idea. That leaves one question: “Why the FUCK aren’t we doing it?”

14:43 One I’ve been looking forward too. Steve Barnett, The Silent Conductor.

That’s was the Silent Conductor. He was, after all, silent…

[Very cool. Audience is the orchestra. Humming. And using coloured tubes of different frequencies. He plays them, well, like an orchestra. He’s got an impressively complex performance going. Everyone on their feet now, rocking TEDxJohannesburg. Rocking! Brought down the house.]

BREAK TIME

[Returning with a video from Jill Bolte Taylor, on the human brain. Having a brother with severe brain disorder, and having had a massive haemorrage herself, she’s well-qualified to speak on the subject. Look up the video on TED.com.Hair-raising description of what happens when you have a stroke. Graphic detail, vividly described, of her experience. Terrifying, and chances aren’t all that low that you’ll experience it some day. Amazing performance, and very touching. Her stroke, is such things often are, proved to be a catalyst for the realisation that life is what you make it, you are what you choose.]

16:14 Shane Immelman, a very smart guy who founded a company that makes a very simple thing: the Lapdesk.

1996 changed my life forever. That was the year I lost my brother to AIDS. It was not a tiime of affordable ARVs and effective treatment, and the hopelessness we felt as a family is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. His experiences, as he wasted away, will forever remain with me.

But I also experienced my own awakening after his death. I asked myself what this kind of experience must be like for others, without access to the resources or support structures we had.

I committed myself to fight against the disease, the ignorance, and the prejudices… [sorry, got interrupted by a passing Lapdesk.]

Six years later, a chance conversation happens, and I learnt that 4 million people go to school without the benefit of a desk. Without a writing surface, children are at a great disadvantage, and teachers have a hard job teaching them.

So I thought about the problem, and did some research, and six months later, I had an epiphany. During those six months, I noticed that the demographic of kids without desks and societies that suffer most from AIDS, largely overlapped. So the epiphany was to create portable desks, sponsored by corporates, and printed with AIDS education information. And the Lapdesk was born.

I was told by everyone, this will never work. I cannot describe how this motivated me. I wasn’t qualified. It was government’s problem. It was just not doable.

I did experience a steep learning curve, and I thought if I could convey it effectively, I could get the traction I needed to get Lapdesk fly.

After 12 months of R&D, this is what transpired: nothing.

I got positive and constructive feedback from the schools that were meant to benefit, but I had no money left, and I’d exhausted every kind of external funding option. Bye bye house, retirement annuity, investment portfollio. Just the kind of motivation you need to stay focused.

Another 12 months. I’d figured out the manufacturing methodology, but still couldn’t get loans. The minister of education didn’t support me. The IDC didn’t fund me. VCs weren’t interested. And I’d just spent a fortune on buying the wrong equipment.

But I still believed, based on the feedback from the field testing. So I parked my ego, visited my mom, and got her permission to use her pension as collateral. I’d made some progress with the chairman of the parliamentary portfolio committee on education (not the minister herself), got some VC’s biting, and got interest from some big corporates.

So here’s where we are now. My mom’s pension is safe. Desmond Tutu is our patron. A million kids have a Lapdesk. 105 local jobs were created and 80 in Africa. We’re going live in India, Latin America and several other countries. We’ve won awards that add a tremendous amount of credibility to what we do. We’ve got coverage and support from MIT, INSEAD, and the like.

The message is if an ordinary person like me can tackle something like this, then so can you. So can anyone.

And important to me personally, I’ve honoured my pact, and the memory of my brother.

]Deafening standing ovation… remarkable!]

16:29 Maggie Momba, from the Congo, up next.

Water. We don’t have enough. Especially not to drink. And there’s no water being made.

By volume, only 3% of all water on earth is fresh, and most of this is unavailable. 3/4 of it is locked up in ice caps and glaciers.

So, only 1% of all water is surface or ground water, of which 52% is in lakes, 38% is in soil, and 8% evaporates. 1% is in rivers, and 1% accessible in plants.

Global population of 9 billion by 2050 means we need far higher volume of water, and far more serious consequences to inadequate water supply and management.

[Intriguing-looking stats on distribution of water use versus population growth, but I don’t understand what they mean.]

Recent estimates suggest that climate change will account for 20% of increase in global water scarcity.

By 2025, more than 2.8 billion people will live in 48 countries facing water stress or water scarcity, SA among the latter, which means less than 1,000 cubic metres of water per capita per year.

Majority of water used by agriculture, and most of the rest by industry. Municipal drinking water is a small fraction. This also reflects the origin of most of the pollution. Agriculture pollutes heavily, with pesticides, etc. What is the impact of that pollution on poor people? At least you and I are the privileged ones.

What little water we have, big companies are stealing. We think informal settlements with illegal connections steal water. But that’s not true. Big companies, industrial, residential and commercial users, are the big thieves. Coca cola, for example. They use too much water.

Poor water quality is a deadly burden. It affects health and physical ability, and even if you can work, you lose your income to medical costs. Water-related diseases, like dysentery and cholera, kill.

And what about HIV? Did you think the water that you give to people can deteriorate the health of HIV positive people?

What can we do? I’ve spent ten years developing strategies how we can ensure sustainable production of safe drinking water: protection of sources, adequate purification, maintaining the integrity of the “disinfectant residual”, safe handling and storage of water by consumers. These strategies cover delivery of basic sanitations, treatment of wastewater, and public education. And we can’t ignore someone because they didn’t go to school.

My conclusion is, let us work together so we can educate local municipalities. Don’t say this is a matter for the government. The government is over there, but we have brains here. We have talent. What do you do with that?

16:46 Guy Lieberman up next, to be followed by Claire Janisch. Both talking about biomimicry. This should be interesting.

He’s a film-maker, and made a film called “Second Nature” for National Geographic on the notion of copying biological structures and techniques in our own engineering, i.e. the biomimicry evolution. Nature-inspiired innovation.

This idea is applicable to a wide variety of fields, from chemistry and materials science, to product design, architecture and structural engineering. “We’re not the first one to solve these problems.”

Example: zebra stripes. Theory is that black stripes absorb heat, and create rising air currents, which go across the white stripes, where the sweat glands are. So there’s a cooling mechanism building into the exterior surface. Why not try that with buildings? This is the kind of animal testing anyone can get behind.

16:57 Claire Janisch

[She picks up on the back-to-nature idealism with which the film ends.]

An idea as powerful as this needs people to learn it, and relearn it. I was trained to be a chemical engineer building fertilizer process plants. The irony is that they’re called plants.

There are things in nature, that also make materials that are useful, like fertilisers, but do so in a way that is conducive to life. And I wanted to learn that.

The field is young, and radical. We can’t even get biomimicry accredited as a master’s degree yet. We pull a lot of disciplines together, from biology to chemistry to engineering to business.

And everyone loved it. Everyone wanted to learn it. [So does 80%, at a rough guess of hands, of the audience here.]

We’re developing a biomimicry hub in South Africa, to integrate into engineering courses, schools, and so on, and I want to give you a taste of it.

Everything in nature is connected, and in harmony with each other. We need to re-remember, re-search, re-cycle, re-vive, re-think, re-design, re-imagine. [She talks quickly, not easily digestible into notes.]

The design of termite mounds, for example, is extraordinary, once you look at the totality of its functions. we need to realise that carbon is a building block of nature, and we can use it as a building block too.

I like to say I want to become an alchemical engineer. There are many biological models for things we need to do.

“The future is not to be predicted, but created”. — Ervin Laszlo

17:08 Malan Joubert, about mobile technology in the healthcare space.

I’m a techie. An Afrikaans techie. And I’m not much of a talker. But I think this is an important message, that can change the world, so ignore the packaging, and focus on the message, please.

Healthcare, almost everywhere, sucks. Globally, the rich consume most of the healthcare budget, and the poor get the raw end of the deal. We’ve replaced discrimination by race with discrimination by economic status.

USA versus SA, in terms of healthcare. Ironically, the USA has not implemented universal healthcare, but it’s surprising how much more is spent on healthcare there. Government healthcare spends $3,000 per capita in the US, versus $350 in SA. But we have 1,000 TB cases per 100,000, They have 4.

Now, let’s do some other comparisons. SA is a leader in the world in mobile telephone. The US has a great fixed line network, while ours sucked. But we have the ability to leapfrog. We have more mobile phones per capita than the US.

Now everyone with a mobile has a lot more than a phone. And we can use those features and capabilities to solve other problems. It’s not a magic cure, but how can we combine our healthcare needs and our mobile phone leadership to reach a solution?

One of the problems is that we have 1 doctor for 1,200 patients. Now, the government is working hard to move a lot of the primary healthcare burden away from hospitals, to community health workers. They perform a number of crucial services that do not require the sophistication of a primary healthcare facility, but is a huge burden on them.

If you do move a lot of the burden from hospitals to homes, you solve a lot of problems. You reduce the need for travel. You permit hospitals to improve care for remaining patients. But you also introduce new ones. Tracking and monitoring the performance of community health workers, and the health status of patients, is difficult. And getting data back to hospitals is hard. Worse, it’s highly private and confidential. This is a tough nut to crack, and paper doesn’t crack it.

Case study: Khayelitsha. There are a number of NGOs there that provide healthcare-related services. One has developed a mobile application (well, we designed it, but it was their idea). It uses a modern smartphone, with digital camera and GPS. Patients get a 2D barcode, which contains patient information. This data, along with location, medication data, and a record of the visit, is sent by the health worker to the hospital. The data is immediately available for decision-making and escalating cases, if necessary.

By leveraging SA’s mobile phone penetration, we can provide health workers with simple tools to improve their performance. It has the potential to revolutionise healthcare.

[Are you listening, Dr Shaheen Khotu, CIO of the Department of Health? It’s not that hard.}

[UPDATE 09/11/16: The project is called Zanempilo. Malan is with FireID, but the project is run by Geomed, and funded by Vodafone, as a CSI initiative. ]

17:24 On stage, Sister Anna Mabunda. A nurse, who’d choose to be a nurse again if she could live her life over. Talking about “things we do not think of.”

[Background on her work with victims of violence, both domestic and sexual. She does trauma counselling too.]

When we deal with victims of sexual violence, we used to take the woman’s panty for DNA testing. It never occurred to us that for many women, it’s the only pair they have. This is the sort of thing we never think about.

So I started a Panty Campaign, so that when we can replace the ones we take for evidence or medical reasons.

If you want to see a change, put a man in the spotlight. Against every policy and protocol, I recruited two male volunteers to work with me with survivors of gender-based violence. People think survivors hate men. And people think men don’t care about rape. But when we confronted these men with the victims, who did indeed hate men, something special happened. They got it. Soon, in Tembisa, these two are organising a march against gender-based violence.

17:33 Richard Mulholland up next. Tatoos, hair, face metal and all.

I heard about all these people using music to build communities, and using communities to make music, and shit-eating insects, and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m just a filthy capitalist. That’s about all I got going for me.”

Like most people, I followed the model the Jesuits started, of donating money and hoping things will happen. That eased my conscience.

Then I read Tom Peters, “Re-Imagine!”. It’s written in bite-sized chunks, so it’s good if you read while you crap, like I do.

[Oh dear. I’m not going to keep up. If you can get to see him speak, make a plan and do so. He’s entirely insane. Exsmple: He’s pissed off about 9/11 because it happened while he was on honeymoon, and you don’t get laid much while watching CNN.]

America got caught fighting yesterday’s war. They thought they were strong, because they won by the old rules. But the big guy gets beaten by the little guy who doesn’t stick to the rules. But hindsight is a bitch. She’s always right.

We’re not asking why enough. Quoting Alvin Toffler: The illiterate of teh 21st century will not be those that cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

Imagine you’re all 18 again. I’ve gone into the future, and I know when you’re going to die, and how much you’ve spent on clothing. So I come back, and I give you a credit card with all the money you need for clothes on it. Good deal? But then I tell you, you’ve got four years to spend it all, and then can’t buy clothes never again. Still a good idea?

No, it’s not okay. So why is it okay with education?

We need to learn from Kimani Nganga Maruge, who lived [says the screen] from 1019-2009. He was a Kenyan, who took up the president’s offer that anyone who wanted education could get it. He became head boy of his school at 90 years old.

Kofi Annan said Africa’s problems should be solved by Africans. [Everyone agrees. He switches to a photo of Annan shaking Mugabe’s hand.] Oh shit.

[Proceeds to relate Leipzig uprising that led to the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, with police and soldiers watching impotently.]

If we tried to make that change for them, the Berlin Wall would still be there. We’d still be arguing about money.

The only way to uplift, educate and empower a community is to empower them to do it themselves. [Big applause]

17:48 [With a rebel yell, Alicia Thomas-Woolfe takes the stage. And burst out in tears. This was a great day, and she’s worked damn hard to do it. She deserves the applause.]

I’m already having big dreams, inspired by the people who spoke today. Think about it. I am. I’d like to thank everyone who made this day such a great day. Please take the ideas, and spread them.

[Everyone wants to attend next year.] Alicia: haha, you complained about the forms this year! What’s going to get you in, is what you did between now and then. What did you do that was amazing.

I want to end the day with a big thank you for those risk-takers who made this happen.

TIME FOR TALKING. DRINKING. DOING.

[Thanks for reading. Hope it was useful. And my own congratulations to Alicia and the bunch that put this together. It was a terrific day.]