 So, I think one thing I noticed with a bunch of the check-ins on the last time was people explicitly mentioning a desire to learn programming for social impact. So I thought it would be useful to talk about some of my work and some of the things which inspire me. So this is just sharing a little bit about what got me into the field of sort of social change and hopefully it's useful. So I guess the first sort of question is like why in terms of why even care about social impact isn't it just enough or hard enough to earn a living and make a business and that sort of thing. And for me, I spent the first, God, seven years of my career not really thinking about social stuff at all. I was just building a business, learning programming, enjoying life. And it wasn't until I started to explicitly investigate and research global issues that it shifted the course of my direction. And that's, I mean, how many people feel like they've got a good handle on like global issues sort of stuff. Some people a little bit. For me, it's sort of like sense of what's going on, but when I found diving deeper into it one sector at a time, it really just changed my worldview completely. The sort of things that I started to dig into were like if you look at species extinction and environmental stuff, pretty much all living systems on this planet are in decline. And they're in decline because of us, like the impact humanity is having on the life support systems of this planet are severe and rapid and accelerating. And you see lots of symptoms of this, but the life support systems which keep us alive as a civilization are slowly getting worse. Global poverty, 1.4 billion people live in environments or situations which are pretty much unimaginable for most of us. It's something which we as a civilization have the resources to fix. It doesn't cost that much to change these people's lives dramatically, yet we do not do it. And we haven't done it and we've known about it for ages. The energy which we use to make our society work, which everything relies upon, is finite. It's dead dinosaurs in the ground. And we're depleting it faster than we're replacing it with alternatives. And if you look at the consequences of energy depletion and energy shocks in our society, they are catastrophic. So that's another one. When we burn the stuff, we also trash the climate. And when you look at the, this is like there's no undo button for the stuff we're currently doing to our climate. And it's one of those situations where the short term feedback cycles aren't there. So it's long term feedback cycles which humans aren't really good at. We're sort of good at running away from tigers. We're not really good at orienting our decision making for 100 years in the future. If you look at the financial system, money is debt. And that sort of thing, how money is created, how it is used, it's a deeply flawed system which only functions in a situation of perpetual economic growth. The technology advances we've done in the last couple of hundred years have created an environment where things are always growing, things are always progressing, things are always getting better. Our economic system has adapted itself to that environment. So when things stop growing, when we start hitting limits of growth on our planet, our whole financial system doesn't work and it fails. You sort of see glimpses of this in the sort of the 08, 09 crashes where some numbers changed on some computers and hundreds of thousands of people were kicked out of their homes. Like the connectivity of our financial system is pretty big. Our education system was developed a couple of hundred years ago. A huge amount of people go through our schooling system thinking they're failing when it's our system which is failing them. We get people and put them into batches like manufacturing products and one year at a time move them together. It's in crisis in some places, but for a lot of people it's education which should be something which is universally accessible, which is, you know, we have a wealth of knowledge as a civilization. People should have access to that and the way we're doing it doesn't work that well. For me, the biggest thing though is that most people don't know about this and don't care about it, you know, the pressures of life is just earning and learning and living and whatnot is that that's what fuels our thoughts and our actions and that, you know, the majority of people spend their working life in wasteful bureaucracies or helping earn shareholders a few more points of growth rather than spending their life energy on the most important things and doing stuff that really matters. And so that for me felt like one of the core pieces of all this. And if you look at the history, a great book is Collapsed by Jared Diamond. Civilizations have collapsed in the past. You know, there's case studies of how civilizations fail, what it looks like, what happens. This is the biggest and most connected civilization that has been on this planet and there is a real possibility of it collapsing. You know, it could collapse in lots of different ways. It could be a graceful decline. It could, you know, re-discover itself in the future. But, you know, there is a lot of indicators that we are facing a severe collapse in the next 100 years. And that's, you know, that's a shitty thing to sort of think about. And so I guess all those sorts of things, like I really encourage you, if you're interested in this or you haven't come across it, just spend time, you know, spend a couple of months just researching and diving into it. But come to grips with the current situation and what things are like. Like the information's out there pretty easy to find. When I went through that process myself, I started to think about, okay, what do you do about this sort of thing? Like what's the use of having that information? How do I orientate myself around it? And for me, I found a lot of heart in just thinking, I did a bit of a thought experiment. I figured that if I had a long run and a full life, I might have 80,000 hours of working in me. Like that would be my sum total contribution. You know, 40 years, 2000 hours a year, rough math. And it really, you know, it put things a little bit into perspective, but it became a useful way to orientate myself in terms of, hell, this is just an optimization problem. What's the best use of an hour to make impact? And I'm an engineer, and that was really useful for me. So I started to do short experiments of 10 hours, 100 hours, and so on. This was about five years ago, so I've used up 10,000 of my hours. Probably more like 12 or 13, it burned a bit too much. And I found that that frame of reference, if I'm going to spend a little bit of time learning, I'm going to spend a little bit of time doing stuff. And I'm going to try and measure the outputs of my actions, was, you know, it's agile, and it's stuff that I knew, and it made sense. Because at the end of the day, we're all just a drop in the ocean, like 80,000 hours is nothing, when you think about the cognitive surplus of humanity. But it's what I've got, and that's all any of us have got. And this is a great story about Copaña in Thailand, about kids who loved soccer and didn't have any way to play. So they built a soccer field on the water. And I think that it sort of speaks to me a little bit about the ethos around the maker community. Like we make things, we create things. When you don't know what to do, make something. And, you know, we all have a tremendous amount of potential to build things which are beautiful and meaningful and used by millions of people. So when, you know, you hear global stuff and big numbers, we can build things which touch big numbers. That's what programmers do. One of the, so I'm going to jump into sort of some things that I've seen which inspire me. But first, in 1992, the UN called the Rio Earth Summit. Who's heard of that? Few folks? So basically, they got together to talk about ecosystems, environmental protection, social justice, perpetually growing economies. It was a UN event, delegates from huge, all the countries, a huge amount of wealth, power, knowledge, information in a room together. And they made binding commitments. They were talking about, this was the foundation for things like the Kyoto Protocol and our response to climate change. It was a foundation for the international accords on biodiversity. And 20 years later, it failed completely in what it wanted to do. It just, it didn't work as an intervention. Pretty much at the same time, the first GSM network launched in Sweden. And 20 years later, you have more cell phones than people on the planet. And when you look at the impact cell phones have had on people's lives, both in the developing and the developed worlds, it's been massive. And so I would argue that cell phones have changed people's lives much more than the whole government's getting together and making binding treaties. And the lesson I took for this was sort of, this is how I think change propagates in a complex system. Is that somewhere in the whole world, people come up with something that's just better. Other people look at it, they see it's better and they copy it. And it replicates like a virus throughout the world. So when I think about how to affect these big systems, it's about coming up with something which is better than the status quo, has a positive impact and is copyable. And again, when you think about software and open source and what we do, that's the heart of our craft. And I think there's always opportunity to sort of draw inspiration from the work of others. And you see the art community do this explicitly, but you also see it happening in technical and business communities. And so now here's a few stories about the stuff that I look at for inspiration in my work. First one is the natural world. Like billions of years of R&D have gone into pretty much every living organism. It has adapted through massive changes of environment and there is some really cool stuff there. So if you look at how information networks work and look at how the natural world does it, if you look at the way the natural world evolves and responds to change, if you look at how it uses energy and so on, there is just a wealth of knowledge in the world around us. And I think that that's one of the, there are lots of reasons to protect the natural world, but that's definitely one of them. Who knows this guy? Tim Berners-Lee, creative internet. Or the guy who led the team who created the HTTP protocol. So that's the internet. But I think one of the things that, when you look at the origins of the internet, HTTP, SMTP, you know, FTP, all that stuff, they're basically protocols. They're rules and commitment, sort of shared agreements about how we're gonna interact together as information system. And if you look at the stuff that's come along in the last 10, 15 years on the internet, it's not so much about protocols, it's much more about platforms. You know, if you look at Google, Facebook, Twitter, like the big internet, like the cornerstone architectures of the internet, which it just wouldn't be as useful if that stuff wasn't there, that is no longer a protocol which is distributed and commonly held. It is now a for-profit entity answering to the shareholders first. And so I think that one of the inspirations I take from sort of the origins of the internet is that what was exciting and what was powerful was that it was distributed and open and collective. No one owned HTTP. Anyone who wanted to could plug in and they were in the network. Know this fella? Yep, Linus Torvalds. So basically, probably one of the biggest milestones in the open source community was Linux. It was the grandfather a lot and it really proved that a bunch of volunteers who don't know each other can get together and build something very sophisticated, very useful and very competitive. And this slowly took over one server at a time until it became pretty much the foundation of a lot of the internet architecture. He also was one of the creators of Git, which if you've ever used anything before Git, you'll realize as a blessing from heaven. And I think that, but to me, that concept of people together contributing to something which again is collectively held. So this isn't so much about protocols. This is much more about stuff. It's about software and applications. But the idea that a bunch of people can collaborate and build significant things is probably one of the most, one of the places I find the most inspiration in. When you look at the significant scale of the problems, you know, the solutions we need need to be able to scale and they can and we know they can. Who knows about Gov.uk? So one of the things which I've seen a lot in terms of the tech community and just sort of progressive community in general is that there's a lot of disillusionment with government. Like it feels like our governments have deeply failed us. They have not led, they have not. You imagine if only I ran the government, what could you do to make the world a better place? And I think there's one idea which is governments are really a reflection of the world. Like they live in the world of political feasibility. That world has boundaries on it. But it's also a world which, not just the directive forces of government, as in this is a legislation we're gonna write, but the administrative forces of government, like the people who move data and stuff around to make a difference in the world. And you know, it's short, like everything here, it's got its flaws. But the concept of using technology to change the way government happens, I think is fundamentally inspiring to me because at the end of the day, the government is ours. And if it's not failing, it's our responsibility to fix it. I would really encourage people not to give up on government and to instead engage and help change it. One small thing at a time, like it's a big beast like everything here, and you can't say, hey, government move, but you can craft little viruses which ripple through government. And I see this and I see the potential for a virus which can ripple through all governments in how they interact with their citizens and how they work. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. You know, who knows where Bitcoin's gonna go, but I get the sense that the future of money is being created right now. If you look at how money is created and how it is used and who controls it, it is the financial class and bankers which create money and hold that power in society. And for the first time, there's an idea around what if we had a protocol and a distributed commons, which is how money is created and moved around. No one owns it, no one profits from it. And again, you see people building apps and businesses and so on in the ecosystem of cryptocurrencies. But the fundamental premise of that this isn't owned by a financial class, that this is run as a collective protocol-based system, I think has immense possibility. And so if, you know, there's interesting stuff here, but for sure. This is a more personal and smaller scale one. Last year, my girlfriend and I went to Cambodia for five months. We had an idea about how maybe we can help people to teach people how to program and do some good, as well as experiencing life in another place. I met the fella in the middle, Monkho, tall one. And he was basically young guy, 24, did a computer science degree, got a scholarship to go to the Czech Republic, came back to Cambodia, had a whole, you know, started, was very interested in education and helping people. He started working at one of their small universities. And basically there's a room, there's some chairs, there's a board, and there's a bunch of students, and that's it, teach computing. They had labs, but they had limited access to the computers in there. He had to spend most of his monthly salary just to buy materials to, you know, pen, paper, books and so on, that you don't get them. And so he started to talk to the students and say, hey, do you want to do some projects and earn some extra money? And they're like, yep, but we can only do it for one or two hours a day because that's when we've got access to the labs. And so he was like, okay, let's start to get some laptops. So they basically started to build websites in exchange for laptops. So one deal at a time, that's why they're all holding them. They started to build WordPress websites for people, get laptops so that the students could continue learning in their own time. But the lesson that I learned here was that it takes maybe like a hideously small amount of energy to change people's lives. I showed up there, 50 hours of work. I was still doing my day job. I just helped out a little bit. And you can touch people. The Inspiral Folk always makes shit of me when I cry when I talk. It's like, oh, Josh, you get so much, and I'm just like, this is important. Another one. I think that there's a fundamental trade-off that you can do when you're trying to make a difference. Like you can just resource yourself and go straight for impact. But you can also say, I'm going to bet on other people. And fundamentally, when you look at the Dev Bootcamp teachers and the organization itself is saying, if we spent the rest of our lives making stuff, we could have X amount of impact. If we help other people get the skills to make stuff, so much more. And I think that when you look at sheer helping people get skills to participate in the modern economy and to use those skills for building useful stuff, building beautiful and meaningful things, that is a really effective strategy for making change. When I first started Inspiral four years ago, my only strategy was find people who want to make the world a better place, do whatever I can to help them. Help them find contract work, help them start businesses, help them meet people, whatever. And that's really paid off as a strategy, but education, doing it better, and to me, it's really exciting to be part of this community and to see what's happening here. And Pisa in Kenya, like this stuff is seriously cool. This is a photo from the first ATM withdrawal by cell phones. So no cards you go there, you text the ATM and take your money up. This originated as going into villages where they didn't have banking systems and you would text money around to friends and family. They basically leapfrogged the whole financial system and went straight to mobile. You see this a lot in the developing world. Like it's mobile is definitely the future when it comes to social impact. The cost of Android smartphones is going lower and lower. It's getting down about $50 a unit, what we saw in Cambodia. And if you look at, in general, the impact computing has had on our lives and our world and our countries, it's significant. Like imagine 30 years ago and now, just what the difference is. A lot of that potential has only lightly touched the developing world. You know, if you go to Cambodia, I think 8% of people ever report having been on the internet in their lives. About 15% of people have Facebook accounts and it's on their phones. But that's still 15%. If you think about all the other people who've never engaged with technology in a substantial way, they will be getting smartphones in the next five years. There'll be Android and there's billions of them coming. So one of the key opportunities that I see for social impact is help people in developing countries get the skills to build mobile and web apps so that they create the solutions they need locally and that they can be part of the economic opportunity but also the social opportunity rather than us just coming up with solutions and building stuff for them. So fundamentally backing and supporting people, because there are programmers there but they're small, they're under resourced. It's really easy to help them out. Anyone know Mondragon? They're a Spanish organization started in the 50s. They currently all have about 80,000 staff, 230 companies. They're a real conglomerate, cooperatively owned. Their staff own everything. And so when you look at the story of cooperatives and collectives, it's largely an untold story but approximately 3 billion people on the planet earn their livelihoods through collectively owned enterprise. And I think it's really important to remind ourselves of that particularly in this part of the world where the world sort of looks like VCs, founders, equities, stock options, all that sort of stuff but collective ownership and cooperatives. There is large success stories. There is a huge amount of work and money and energy in this ecosystem and I also think that technology has a powerful role to play in making cooperatives more efficient, more effective and more available to people. So definitely check these guys out because the whole cooperative movement is a place that I've drawn deep inspiration from. This is something that we're doing in partnership with the government in New Zealand where we are basically helping young people build mobile apps to address youth mental health issues. So the thing which really inspires me about this is that again it's not about I've got a solution and here's how I'm going to use my skills to change your life and to build an app which will fix whatever it is I'm trying to fix but it's about engaging with people to deeply understand what are the challenges you're facing what are the solutions that you can envision and how can we help you with the tools so that you can respond to it. We'll provide some support and some skills and some time and so on but fundamentally it's about helping people respond to their own issues because as people interested in social change it's really interesting, it's really easy to come in and try and save the day and it is the wrong way to do it. Go in to serve people, achieve their goals is the most important piece of advice. Another one we've been working on is Lumia which is about decision making and so this is essentially a bunch of occupied people who were camped on the lawns of the Wellington City Council for a bunch of months and so they saw the opportunity for technology to change the way people make decisions because when you look at the status quo which most people are used to we organize in pyramids and that's been the most effective and efficient way to organize humans until the internet came along. You would take the best people you had, the smartest people, you would give them money, information and control and you would have them set direction, instructions and the rest of the organization would follow suit. If you're organizing with courier pigeons or telephone or what not, that makes sense even if you're just doing email and forums that's still the best way to organize but when you build deep and powerful information systems you can consciously distribute money, information and control within an organization and build a fundamentally more efficient way of organizing and so their vision is for every person in the world to have the opportunity to have a voice in every decision which affects them and if you think about all the decisions which affect you in your life how would you even know that they're happening how would you have a voice into them like it's a non-trivial exercise and they're starting to do it and they're working on the Wellington Lawns to consulting with the Wellington Council about how to engage the citizens in their decision making and policy it's a long journey ahead but the thing which really inspires me about this crew is just that they're willing to dream big and they're willing to throw everything at that dream In spiral I'll just talk briefly the company that I started four years ago I took my personal consulting company and used it as a vehicle to help people who want to change the world I started to form companies together it's now a network of maybe 150 people and 12 companies doing stuff and that's my playground where I practice most of this stuff and try and figure out how do I turn some of my 70,000 hours that are left into positive change that's an upper limit there's always the opportunities for misfortune in this world and I think finally this is our first company retreat I drew a lot of inspiration from the people around me people who are just like me who are doing this stuff and so yet having a community and surrounding yourself with people who you draw inspiration from is one of the strongest pieces of advice I'd give anyone considering this sort of line of work so if you think about where you're at and what you're interested in and what is it that you need to succeed I think here's some advice if you want it first thing is to get strong if you are going broke or you don't have skills or you're stressed out you're not going to be much help to anyone and so I think that everyone here is committed and dedicated to upskilling and that's a really viable and great strategy it's just to say I'm going to spend five years focusing on getting really good at something then I'll go help and just stop that stuff likewise you can't be much help if you're worrying about how to make rent next month building up your financial strength and it doesn't mean I'm going to get five years salary in the bank and then I'll help sort of thing but it does mean having your house in order so that you're not worried about money it's also about growing your networks and reputation because in this work who you know and how you work together is as important as anything else master something there is a pursuit of excellence which is just what humans like to do when you look at things which drive happiness the things people do for fun like surfing, playing guitar all that stuff there's an element of mastery in there getting better at something is really important and really useful that could be programming that could be something else but whatever it is I would suggest to understand and connect with what your craft is and figure out how you want to get better at it and pursue that with vigor take risks do stuff which scares you I mean it's easy to take small incremental steps but that will only get you so far I'm a huge fan of agile like if you're doing something risky do small steps hell yeah but also take risks take steps in a direction which scares you don't limit your actions based off your understanding of what you're capable of because every one of you is far more capable far more capable then you can imagine connect with people and make friends like a community of practice and people who you support and support you is the heart of achieving things in this world and finally I'd say like look at imagine if all these social issues weren't around what if they weren't there what if you had money in the bank what if you didn't need to work for a living what is it that you would do for the pure joy of it find that and connect with that first and foremost if you don't know what it is try a bunch of stuff till you find it do short little iterations until you say cool that's what I love but find the thing that you love and then find a way to get paid to do that and for me I feel really fortunate that programming and software development is such an enjoyable and rewarding craft like it is fun and a whole bunch of the programmers I know I'm just going to go home after work and program on something because it's fun or because there is a sheer joy in creating stuff the makers of the world are really powerful and so I'd say but if that's not you that's okay find what it is you is the most important thing I think to connect with and then once you have that thing orient it in the direction of service so it's really easy to find a skill and then to start to commercialize it and build things but I reckon it's you know definitely work on your financial strength but orientate your skills in the direction of service so that's some advice from me here's another place where I've drawn a lot of inspiration so a short video which will hopefully be good it is nonviolent it has no cluster farms no armies and no helicopters it has no central ideology a male vertebrate is not in charge this unnamed movement you can clap for that the unnamed movement is the most diverse movement the world has ever seen the very word movement I think is too small to describe it no one started its world view no one is in charge of it there is no orthodoxy it is global classless, unquenchable and tireless the shared understanding is arising spontaneously from different economic sectors cultures, regions and cohorts it is growing and spreading worldwide with no exception it has many roots but primarily the origins are indigenous culture the environment and social justice movements and the subsectors are intertwining, morphing and largely this is no longer simply about resources or infractions or injustice this is fundamentally a civil rights movement a human rights movement this is a democracy movement it is the coming world what you're seeing here is the beginning of a list of the 130,000 minimum organizations in the world who work towards social and environmental justice and that's the minimum it may be 250,000 groups it may be 500,000 groups read these names they're unfamiliar to you most of them I'm sure they are we do not know how big this movement is it's marked by kinship and community and symbiosis it is pachamama it's mama walking back, waking up what you see is your kin on that screen and to give you a sense of how big this movement is if I had started this tape on Friday morning at 9am when this conference began and if we sat here all day Friday, all night Friday all day Saturday, all night Saturday all day Sunday all night tonight and all day Monday we still would not have seen the mass of all the groups in the world it's so new we can't recognize it we're familiar with armies and governments and war and churches and religions but this is, there's no precedent for what we're doing what you're creating is completely unknown it is everywhere there is no center there's no one spokesperson it's in every country and city on earth it is within every tribe and every ethnic group in the world this is the first time on earth that a powerful non-ideological movement has arisen during the span of the 20th century big ideologies were worshiped like religion they dominated our beliefs this is to speed it up so you don't have to stay here until Monday night ideologies dominated capitalism socialism, communism in the words of Ed Hunt ideologies stock the earth cloud and armor a fought for the control of our minds and the lands and it wasn't pretty and we were told that salvation would be found in the domination of a single system this is where salvation will be found we know that as biologists we know that as community organizers we know that as ecologists it's found in diversity this movement is humanity's immune response to resist and heal political disease economic infection and ecological corruption caused by ideologies so it is up to us to decide how will we be, who will we be this is what it is we're building the capacity to respond it is about possibilities and solutions humankind knows what to do I think it's interesting that he didn't mention technology on there one in terms of when you look at the environmental and social justice movement technology is under represented and underutilized and I also think that the reason that has happened that movement can see itself is because of the technology that we have built if you were just having books and letters there would be a very different situation to what the internet has made possible and so I think that as programmers and as developers you have immensely valuable skills you have immense capability and power to effect change in the world and so my hope would be that you consider using that for things which are a bit more than just working in a bureaucracy helping shareholders earn a bit more money you know people find meaning and purpose where they do you know and so it's a very personal choice about what you work in and what you care about but this for me is where I've drawn inspiration and how I've decided to orientate myself so thought I'd share it that's sort of it for me happy for questions or who knows