 Thank you for that introduction. I'm Claire Diaz Ortiz and I lead social innovation at Twitter And I'm also the author of a book called Twitter for good which came out a few months ago Which basically talks about how people use Twitter to make a difference in the world and today I'm going to be talking to you about The connection the inextricable connection between mobile technology and social good and this this is a topic that I am Extremely passionate about this is why I wake up in the morning and why I go to bed at night This is what I do in my daily work, and it is what I do as my hobby It is trying to find connections between technology and social good and trying to find a way to make the world a better place Using the technology we have at our fingertips So today I'm going to be talking about the four essential qualities that mobile technology offers that are particularly Poised to creating social change in this world, but before I talk about those qualities I'm going to tell you a story and This story is about the best phone that I have ever owned Now it's here if you can't see it I just tweeted about it also and this is a Sony Ericsson something or other if you heard Chris Hutchinson from milk talk earlier He was talking about some of the crappy phones in Nairobi crappy Nokia phones. Well, this is not much better But this is by far the best phone I have ever owned and I'm going to tell you why and then I'm going to tell you what happened When I almost lost this phone. So come with me. Let's go back seven years to 2005 Where I was working For a stint in Jaipur, India, and it was hot as hell in India that summer and I'm from California and California is warm But nothing like Rajasthan in the summer But more than the heat I Was annoyed because I could not get online I was working at a university The internet was out all the time. I would walk a mile which felt like forever in that heat to an internet cafe It would be out. I was going crazy and I said, you know, it is time for me to get my own connection So I went to a mobile store and an hour later. I emerged with this and I spent what for me was a small fortune on this at the time over three hundred dollars and After an hour with the man in the store He showed me how to connect my Bluetooth dongle to my clunky laptop and how to bring the connection into my fingers and into the laptop And as I left I thought I have all the power in the world in my hands right now. I can do anything and For the next two years I Traveled to over 40 countries the vast majority of that time in rural areas and the way I lived and worked and breathe was through this pathetic dirty Phone and after two years of that travel. I said I want to settle I want to be in one place for a long period of time because I cannot handle all the movement So I went to an orphanage in Kenya now normal people when they say I want to settle I want to stop traveling. They don't go to an orphanage in Kenya to live But suffice it to say that is a story for another day I will tell you now that simply fate collided with me on a road in Kenya and told me this is where I should be for the year so I went to live in an orphanage and That year 2007 was undoubtedly one of the most important years of my life It was the year I met my son Who is now graduating high school in the USA it is the year I started using Twitter I was one of the first residents of Kenya to actively use the platform and it is the year that I Clarified my professional passion for marrying technology with social good Now I'm going to tell you a story about something that happened on one random day in Kenya that changed Things for me and that might have changed things even greater One day in Kenya it was 6 p.m. And 6 p.m. In neary Kenya Which is rural Kenya a few hours outside of Nairobi in the shadows of Mount Kenya right on the equator? It's 6 p.m. That means the Sun is coming down It is coming down fast and it comes down at the same time every day every year Because that is what I just like to live on the equator And I retired to my bedroom to do some work I had a few hours for a deadline. I was meeting in the US at the time I was living in this orphanage as a volunteer running a nonprofit organization But I was still working with my small internet company out in the US So I needed the lifeline of my phone to get my deadlines done each day. So I went into my bedroom I didn't have a desk and I sat down at my bed and I connected my Bluetooth dongle with my laptop and I placed my phone on the window ledge behind me because the window ledge would hopefully get better signal and I connected now if you were living in Kenya in 2007 and you were using the safari calm Internet service, you knew it was not reliable And so when it cut out, I thought nothing of it. Oh, there it goes it cut out again And I fiddled with the Bluetooth dongle, but it wasn't helping and then I saw the notice no device Connected and I said well what on earth is going on now has the phone dropped and I looked behind me on the ledge behind me The ledge of the window and the phone wasn't there And I said oh, okay, it must have dropped behind the bed Or it must have dropped outside the window and I pulled out the bed and there was no phone And I looked out the open window and there was no phone and I said well, this is strange and Then I thought oh a child has taken it It's a silly joke a bad joke but a silly one and so I go to the window and I yell and there's an alleyway outside the Window where all the orphans in the orphanage do their laundry and it was quiet and usually it's full of loud kids Washing things and I go out to that window and I yell Charles Moy bring me back my phone No one said anything and then I said Jimmy Jimmy James. I see you bring me my phone There was no one there and in that moment. I realized what had happened And what had happened was terrifying on two levels and I'm going to tell you why one Well, what happened was is that someone had stolen the phone? This is a closed compound. It had to be a child. There are a hundred and seventy children There are two full-time staff members and there was me Now this is terrifying because I was not going to get my work in that night Surely if the phone was stolen it was going to take me a week to deal with getting all the way down to Nairobi and buying a new phone and coming back But it was terrifying on a second level for much graver reasons and that reason is because the Cardinal sin of living in this orphanage with a hundred and seventy children and two staff members was stealing if you steal You are kicked out and all the children knew this And so I now had in front of me a situation in which I knew a Child had stolen my phone and I knew what would happen Scared I left my bedroom and I went and I knocked on the door of the orphanage manager's office and I said Eunice Eunice something bad has happened a child has taken my phone and she said no No that can't have happened our children. They do not steal no Claire And she said we will go look your room again. We will go search. She came into my room She searched the phone was not there and she said oh my and she said we will go tell Guka Guka is a cuckoo you word for grandfather and the grandfather and founder of this orphanage of two Mayani children's home in Niri Kenya was an 85 year old man who is one of the most famed Christian pastors in East Africa and he had created This home out of nothing out of hope out of sweat out of tears out of faith and these children regarded him as their God But he was a strong disciplinarian We went and told Guka. We said Guka The phone has been stolen and he said oh no, this is bad and he rang the bell And if you were a child at to I to Mayani children's home in that year or in any year around that and you heard the bell You came running fast The bell only rang a few times a year and it meant something bad had happened and so quickly all the 170 children Grounded up into the dining hall where they had recently finished their dinner and they sat on the little benches and Guka said to them a Phone has been stolen and there was silence and he said you know the consequences of this But if you confess now, I will forgive you and no one said anything and Then he said okay. I will give you one more chance if you confess now. I will forgive you And no one said anything So then he said fine everyone sits here in their seats until we find the phone And he called three of the oldest boys And he said search the compound for the phone And we all sat on the benches me and all the children waiting for them to find the phone and half an hour later The three boys came in holding the phone here. It is Guka. We found the phone It had been on a high ledge in the boys outhouse Now I Was a little bit thrilled that the phone was found but I was still sad about what was about to happen in front of me And Guka took the phone and he said since no one confessed you know the consequences of this But if you want to be forgiven in your heart you will still Tell us all you did this now so that we do not have to sit here all night and in the back of the room there was a rustle and A nine-year-old boy stood up And everyone was silent as he said Guka Guka it was me me. I took the phone Nuka looked at him and he said why Because if this was a Western child a nine-year-old who had stolen a phone in Boston, Massachusetts say It might have made sense the child would use the phone the child would sell the phone the child would do something with the phone But this child this nine-year-old is an AIDS orphan. He has no mother. He has no father He likely has no relatives. Otherwise, he wouldn't have ended up at the orphanage since so many children in the community are always clamoring to be in and Surely if he even knows anyone in his small community in 2007 with a mobile phone surely there were some Less so than now there were some if he knew of any of them There's no way in God's green earth that he knew their phone number So what was he gonna do with the phone and Guka looked at him and he said why? Why would you do this and the little boy looked up and he said? to call and Guka said but but you have no one to call and this is what we were all thinking This is what we were all thinking and Guka said who would you have called? and the little boy He said anyone and This was when my heart broke I ran out of that dining hall and I ran into the dark night With all the stars and I started weeping because this is one of the saddest things I had ever heard This was a nine-year-old boy who was risking his life to make a phone call to connect with someone Because do not be misunderstood getting kicked out of this orphanage is risking your life for these children But this is what it happened Now I tell you this story not To depress you But because I think it shows at its core our base human desire to connect and In this story is the kernel of why mobile technology has such a strong power to create Incredible social change in the world around us Today I'm going to be talking about the four essential ways that mobile technology does this the four qualities that mobile technology possesses That are so perfectly poised to creating social change And we're going to start With connection These are some of the children I lived with in 2007 and I've told you why connection is important But now I'm going to tell you about people who are using the essential quality of connection on mobile phones to transform the world This is Mark Horvath And Mark Horvath is passionate about Uplifting homeless populations in the USA Now if you live in the USA, you know that one of the sad realities of our developed nation is that we cannot Care for all of our citizens. We cannot house. We cannot feed. We cannot employ everyone there And as a result there are homeless people in the streets in major cities And if you know anything about charity work, you know that homeless homelessness Is not a sexy charity topic. It is not a cute puppy or a smiling child Homeless people are usually older often men Veterans often times with mental and physical disabilities. They are the people you walk by on the streets and Mark Horvath the man here knows that and that's why when he created a nonprofit organization Aimed to help homeless people connect He called it invisible people An invisible people is The name he chose because he knows what it means to be invisible Mark Horvath doesn't just work with homeless people He has been homeless and not once but twice Once in the 70s on the streets of LA. He then climbed out of that became a television executive traveled the world and And then lost it all again and the second time he lost it about seven years ago lost his lost his shirt lost His house ended up on the streets That was the time that made him realize that he wanted to use the skills He had in technology to help other homeless people And so what Mark Horvath does today is he travels the US telling the stories of homeless on The streets and he does that through video and he does that through audio and then he sends it out through social media And this in itself is incredible because he is sharing incredible stories But Mark Horvath does something much more than this also He doesn't just connect the stories he finds with the outside world He helps homeless individuals connect with one another and when he first told me about his work I said but mark I there's something I just don't understand. I mean forgive me and I and I don't know in a lot enough about homeless populations, but But how do they connect if they don't have a mobile phone? And he looked at me like I was crazy and he said oh you think homeless people don't have mobile phones in the US and Then he told me that some vast majority of homeless people in the US have phones that they've either saved up to buy or that they've Been given by a shelter because shelters give out homeless phones for safety security reasons and he said If I ever became homeless again that would be the first thing I would buy because it is a connection as a homeless individual in the US you feel alone and This is a way to not only connect with individuals, but it's a way to connect with resources that you need and this This impresses me. I want to tell you the story of someone else who is using the incredible power of Mobile technology to connect with the outside world And this person is one of the most amazing people I have ever met and her name is Katie Davis and this this is not Katie Davis I will tell you who this is in a moment Katie Davis looks nothing like this girl Katie Davis is white She's 23 and she's from a wealthy suburb of Nashville and when Katie was 17 She came to her parents and said mom dad. I feel called by God to become a missionary and To work with orphans in Africa and her parents said oh Katie That's such a wonderful desire honey But but you're from this beautiful town of Brentwood and you're gonna go to to college And you're gonna have a great career and they sent Katie on her way But a few months later Katie came back and said mom dad I Found this great opportunity to go to Uganda for just three weeks just a three week trip. Can we please go? And her mother said oh, I guess this will get it out of her system and they went to Uganda It didn't get out of Katie's system and Uganda She realized she never wanted to leave and the only way her mother got her on the plane Was because Katie made her mother promise that she could spend a year after graduating from high school living in Uganda and working with orphan and vulnerable children and So that's what Katie did after high school. She moved to Uganda and She started as an English teacher living in a small dormitory and in a school and Working with orphans at night and after a few months She realized no my calling is to be with the children all day to be with these orphan and vulnerable children all day And she moved into a large house that had four bedrooms And she said what am I gonna do with such a house, but it had fallen in her lap and it seemed to make sense and Then slowly she started her own nonprofit organization called a mazama, which means truth in Lugandan And slowly slowly slowly more and more children came to eat in her feeding program in her yard In her house and she said oh this makes sense This is why I needed such a big house because of all the children eating in my yard And that was what she thought for months until a house fell down on her street and when I say house It's not a real house. It's a shack a shack fell down in a rainstorm and when it fell down The community realized that the people living in the shack were not adults They were little kids two little girls And the community said oh we can't handle this anymore. What are we gonna do? We need to deal with this these children can't be living by themselves in this shack that now doesn't even exist and Katie said Well, I have four bedrooms in this big house. They can stay with me And so they did and a few weeks later when one of the girls started calling Katie mama Katie said yes Today Katie has adopted 19 children Katie runs a feeding program that feeds 1500 children Katie is 23. She's single She lives in Uganda and a house with her 19 adopted children Now some people say That Katie is like a mother Teresa, but I do not agree I think Katie is far more effective than mother Teresa and the reason I say that and the reason I have told you Katie's story is because Katie has been able to galvanize others to come in on her movement And that's because the second Katie landed in Uganda the first time she started a blog a Little blog talking about what she was doing And then that blog grew bigger and then she got on Twitter and then she got on Facebook and now the whole world Starting from her rich suburb in Nashville and reaching out To the rest of the 192 countries in the world can see what Katie is doing and can be inspired Because even if you cannot be Katie and you cannot adopt 19 Ugandan girls and Live in rural Uganda you might be able to do something by following her story And this is how the power of connection and mobile technology has allowed Katie Davis One person to truly influence the world I'm gonna talk about information now. We've talked about connection now We'll talk about information the spread of open information is perhaps the most critical thing that mobile technology has helped us with This is my favorite journalist, this is Nick Kristoff next Chris Nick Kristoff is one of the best journalists on Twitter He's won the Pulitzer Prize twice the first one long before Twitter existed and he is passionate About empowering women around the world. He wrote a book recently called half the sky Which which has had huge success because of its message That we need to help women out of situations of sex trafficking out of poverty out of uneducation And Nick Kristoff has done many amazing things on Twitter He takes his phone everywhere and he reports what he's doing and he along with many other journalists has done an incredible job of Changing what we think about journalism today But Nick Kristoff Hasn't done something as amazing as this in a long time and this was in November when he live tweeted a brothel raid And this is a powerful thing And we maybe forget what this means because we live in a world of Twitter and Facebook And we live in a world where we are getting news in the second that it happens But this could not have happened five years ago and The implications of a journalist live tweeting something so powerful is Incredibly far-reaching now You don't have to be a journalist to create this kind of news though This is a photo from when a plane landed in the Hudson River and this photo was taken by someone in one of the rescue boats and This photo immediately which was then set out be taken via Twitter was the photo Accompanying the article about this terrible crash for so long and this was just taken by a person. It wasn't taken by a journalist The Arab Spring is clearly our best lesson of this. I Will give one small example from that and that is that the January 25th hashtag hashtag JAN 25 Was not created by a journalist It was not created by Andy Carvin from MPR or from Nick Kristoff or from anyone from Al Jazeera Who was in Cairo on January 25th of 2011 it was created by a 21 year old female student and it Was the Twitter hashtag that brought all the tweets on that day and in the weeks and months to follow together This is the best story though. This is James Buck and James Buck reminds us all that the power of mobile technology to tell information to share information is real time It is instantaneous and that is why it works so well James Buck is a photojournalist and blogger from California and in 2008 again This is not 2011 or 2012 in 2008 James Buck went to Cairo to cover some political protests He found himself in a predicament at one of these protests He was arrested and when they put him in the back of the cop car They did not take his mobile phone and so he sent out a tweet that said arrested Maybe he sent it via a smartphone. Maybe he sent it via SMS. I Don't know but I do know that it said arrested and I do know that within hours This tweet had connected his family and friends back home and the US ambassador to get him out and The next tweet he sent was freed and this is the power of News the power of the information That we can send to be a mobile technology when each of us are journalists and information purveyors and change makers The third thing I want to talk about is geolocation and Disaster relief experts say that Perhaps the single greatest Change in disaster response efforts in the last generation if not the last century has been the introduction of the mobile phone into daily life and into the hands of many of the people that are Experiencing a disaster and we have seen this time and time again And we are almost becoming blind to it Blind to the fact that this has completely changed the way people think about disasters and the way people think about relief Ultimately a mobile phone allows The people in trouble to connect with the people who have the support These are pictures from Japan, but these could be pictures from anywhere. These could be pictures from Haiti or Chile or Turkey These could be pictures of Hurricane Irene I Want to tell you the story of Ushahidi, which is a nonprofit organization that if you know about mobile technology You may have heard of and Ushahidi means to bear witness Kiswahili word It means to bear witness and this organization started in 2008 in Kenya after some political violence there there was a disputed presidential election and Many riots were breaking out in Kibera, which is the largest slum in East Africa, which is right outside Nairobi in Nairobi And some individuals came together and they said we need to find a way to place The concerns that people are having in this slum on a map so that people know where to go or where to find water Or where to avoid and so they came together this crisis mapping organization called Ushahidi And now there are many crisis mapping organizations that do similar things and this is just one example here This is health map. This is an initiative I helped work on last year nine months after the Haiti earthquake the cholera epidemic struck so far the cholera epidemic in Haiti has killed over 6,500 people disease scientists are saying that the new Incredible way to track the spread of an outbreak is via Crisis maps just like these which you can see it's hard to see from there, but essentially people are reporting Incidences and reporting where relief is and connecting The people that need the support to the people that have the support to give and that's the essential purpose of How mobile technology is changing our response to disasters the last thing I want to talk about is economic opportunity because There is perhaps no sure way to positive change in our world than to create then by creating economic opportunities And this may be the area in which we are most familiar as a mobile user You hear amazing stories about how people are Transforming the way we send money the way we make money the way we work via mobile phones, and I just want to share a small story about this I'm going to tell you the story of Marlon Parker Marlon Parker is a South African and He started a nonprofit technology company called restoration labs It's called our labs and I met him because when I was doing interviews for my book Twitter for good Someone told me there is this man in South Africa, and he has created Twitter schools for gang members, and I said what does that even mean? And so I talked to Marlon, and he said yes in the Cape Flats in Slum area outside of Cape Town. He had Created Twitter schools essentially social media training Schools for gang members who wanted to get out of the life. They had been leading and These schools taught them the tools of social media gave them the phone gave them an internet connection and Taught them how to use it and then provided them with small and micro work opportunities And now Marlon has been involved in many many such endeavors over the years And this was just the one that he first introduced me to one of the others that Marlon has worked on Has to do with agricultural Farmers as you've heard as many of you in this room have heard Farmers lives are changing because of mobile phones And this is a farmer here in Ghana in this picture. He is next to his crop. I don't know what kind of crop I don't know And he is holding his mobile phone and this man is in Ghana But he could be anywhere because what is happening now is that if you are a farmer in the Andes Growing coffee and you need to bring it down to Cusco You don't have to take all your coffee and take all your mules and walk down for five days and then see if the price is right You can use mobile technology to find out Find out the prices find out the information you need So that you can make better sales make more money and what happens to this man after he finds out the information He needs about whatever product he wants to sell is that then he can go and he can send that money He can you and pay side to send it He can send it to his mother in another rural village And she can pick it up at the health clinic to pay her bill and the world is changing because of things like this and Because of the ways that mobile phones have given us the power Someone a an Egyptian blogger told me that she believed that mobile phones were hand with the equivalent of handheld democracy And and I agree with her, but I would go one step further and I would simply say that mobile phones give us handheld power We can share our experiences with the world learn about the experiences of others and Ultimately change the world as a result So I want to share these stories with you today And I hope that as you move forward in the next 24 hours of this conference that you feel inspired To think of ways that you can make a difference using the skills that you have More people on this planet have access to mobile phones than have access to clean water And I will end this speech with the first sentence of my book Twitter for good Because of this very fact the greatest challenge of our age is to figure out ways to use this technology to make a positive difference Now I don't care if you're working with AIDS orphans or if you are doing financial counseling in Seattle You can do something to make a positive difference in the world using your skills and your knowledge about mobile technology And I hope you will do that. Please join me on this journey. Thank you