A lot of people ask me what Google.org is, given it’s hybrid for-profit/not-for-profit structure. My personal take on it is that while Google has adopted the motto “Don’t be evil,” then the mission of Google.org is to actively do good.

The reality, however, is much more complicated. I highly recommend this piece from the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Do No Evil”. The article is a detailed look at the six-year trajectory of Google.org, highlighting its transition from a grant-making institution to a engineering-driven, distributed organization within Google. The article also highlights the incredible difficulty that faces the young organization as it attempts to tackle global problems that others have wrestled with for decades, with questionable results.

I’m proud to be a part of Google.org, in large part due to the scope of its ambitions. However, this piece is a healthy reminder for everyone attempting to do social good to approach their work with humility.

Leaving Samasource.org

The Samasource.org team and I said our goodbyes Wednesday night, after a long evening of well-wishing and reminiscing (and strong drinks). We had a lot to celebrate about. I joined when Samasource was just Leila and two other insanely-devoted people working out of a conference room. Nine short months later, the organization has more potential than at any moment in its history. Every month, Samasource has brought in larger and larger contracts to bring ever-increasing numbers of people out of poverty in South Asia, East Africa, and Haiti. The young organization is proving its model.

The team has grown substantially, and fortunately I leave Samasource in very capable hands. David Yoon assumes technology leadership as the new VP of Engineering, after years of experience building sites like Donorschoose.org. Noah Bradach is the new VP of Sales, closing deals left and right. Chelsea Seale continues to wrangle order out of the chaos of their operations. That’s just a few of our amazing staff. The office is full of dedicated people like Caitlin, Luke, Rebecca, Joon-Mo, Kala, Marcia, Pamela, Tanya, and so many others before them who pour their heart and soul into the organization. And, of course, there’s Leila Janah, who continues to lead with immeasurable grit and intelligence.

The decision to leave Samasource was very difficult. The short of it is that I’ve found an opportunity to work on another problem of enormous scope. If you’re interested in this project, read on.

Google Earth Engine

The world is slowly getting serious about putting a dollar value on greenhouse gas emissions reductions.* One of the mechanisms for mitigating climate change that gained substantial traction in Copenhagen last year was REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). REDD is based on a simple fact: the world’s forests represent a massive carbon sink, sequestering huge amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. How much carbon? It’s estimated that the the amount of forest the world loses every year results in more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world’s cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships combined. Clearly that the world’s forests represent an enormous value, even if we only consider the value of the carbon they sequester.

The major challenge to the REDD mechanism is verification: How can we know that our actions are actually preserving forest and reducing CO2 emissions? Monumental sums of money are at stake in answering this question properly, as the world must reduce CO2 levels at the lowest possible cost. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of uncertainty about the effectiveness of forest preservation efforts. For example, legislation that protects forests in one region may simply push logging activity somewhere else. What’s needed is a global forest monitoring solution. Until we have this, only token investments will be made in REDD. Today, we see nations pledging a few billion here or there for forest preservation, but the market should theoretically support orders of magnitude more than this.

My new employer, Google (and more specifically, Google.org), is aiming to provide exactly this with Google Earth Engine. The product will serve as a central clearinghouse for all available satellite data and earth surface monitoring algorithms. It will be a place for scientists and policy makers to answer big questions at global scale, and to prove that their methods are best. If our small team succeeds, we will enable these forest preservation markets at a scale we have all only hoped for until now.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with the Earth Engine team half-time for a few months, now, but next week I will transition over completely. I’ll be returning to my roots in frontend engineering. This means designing and building the web applications that people will need to access and understand the vast stores of data that Google Earth Engine will be making public.

Wish me luck!

More great articles about Google Earth Engine:

• http://solveclimate.com/blog/20100429/google-powers-its-earth-engine-eye-saving-amazon
• http://news.mongabay.com/2009/1216-googleearthengine.html

One algorithm for analyzing satellite data

I couldn’t resist…

People often ask me why I take such issue with all of these moronic games people play on Facebook. This article articulates my unease with them better than I have in the past. In short: “Social” games like these aren’t actually based on strengthening our social ties — they’re engineered to exploit them for profit, creating incredibly low-fidelity simulations of gifting and reciprocity behaviors that are just compelling enough to addict players. These games use our nature for someone else’s profit.

This pattern isn’t anything new: our whole society is based on generally-less-egregious versions of it. But this is the point: stupid Facebook games aren’t just stupid: They’re dangerous because they prime us for more of the same exploitation everywhere else in our lives.

Some guy made the mistake of writing an email titled “Wanted: Recommendations of best Indian or Phillippines ROR consumer web app developers” to a Rails developer list I’m on.

Best response so far: “I’ve been working with some Na’vi developers. You don’t have to pay cause they don’t understand money, and they really get the whole cloud computing idea.”

A more considered email exchange followed, but this was the best part.

For those interested in my very common Vietnamese last name, Jess pointed out that Wikipedia has an awesome article on the subject. It includes audio of both Northern and Southern pronunciations of the name, as well as some explanations as to why it’s so common. E.g.:

In Vietnamese history, many events contributed to the name’s prominence. In 1232, after usurping the Lý Dynasty, Tran Thu Do forced the descendants of the Lý to change their surname to Nguyen. When Ho Quý Ly overturned the Tran Dynasty, he killed many of their descendants so when the Ho Dynasty collapsed in 1407, many of his descendants changed their surname to Nguyen in fear of retribution. In 1592, on the collapse of the Mac Dynasty, their descendants changed their surname to Nguyen and L?u. When the Nguyen Dynasty (the descendants of the Nguyen Lords) took power in 1802, some of the descendants of the Trinh Lords fearing retribution changed their surname to Nguyen, while others fled north into China. The Nguyen Dynasty awarded many people the surname Nguyen during their rule, and many criminals also changed their surname to Nguyen to avoid prosecution. As with all other common surnames, most people having this surname are not necessarily related.

Samasource just got a bunch of HD footage that Ushahidi took for us in Mirebalais while we were over there. It will be a while before we edit it down into something presentable to the public, but here’s a short segment of me, talking about our work there and my own motivations for joining Samasource.

We also recently put up interviews with a couple workers in Mirebalais. Here’s a small excerpt from Richard’s powerful account:

Frednel: How do you feel about doing SMS translations to help survivors of the earthquake?

Richard Pierre: Sometimes, I feel very sad when I translate a tragic message; for example, there was a message that said that there was a person who was still alive under rubble. Sometimes, it’s a baby who is under the rubble, or sometimes it’s a 6 year old child. My heart tears up when I hear these sorts of messages, but I oblige myself to stay strong and make the translations because life is not really easy. Life is difficult, know that anything can happen in life. Life has its ups and downs; this means that a person should be strong and have a lot of courage to resist difficulties in life. Life puts up great fights. In order to live, you have to be a good soldier; when you fall, you have to get up.

I translate the survivors’ messages at the best of my ability in order to understand what they desire to say. This is nearly all I can offer them in assistant. After that, I couldn’t do anything else because I don’t have other opportunities to help them.

I’m going to begin a little exercise, which is to occasionally post things that I’ve created. They may be images from my archives, designs I’ve done, or little objects I’ve hacked together, but the hope is to slowly build a little portfolio that I look back on. I’d like to remind myself every so often that I know how to push things across the border from the dreamt to the real.

Let’s start off lightweight with an image I quickly Photoshopped. Below is my new-dad friend Amos with his little one, Emerson, Photoshopped as a submission to the blog Babies With Laser Eyes.

Okay, complete change of direction. Strangely enough, while looking at the above image, I realized it echoes a pencil drawing I made in high school:

This was made back in my comic-book-drawing days. I know this is a bit of a creepy juxtaposition with the laser eyes thing, but just so you know, the drawing was not meant to be morbid. The idea rattling around in my young mind at the time was that death is something that we learn to fear, and that there might be something joyful in unlearning that fear.

I finally got around to writing up some of my experience in Haiti on the Samasource blog. Here’s a snip:

Unfortunately, the Haitian government is struggling more than ever to serve its people. Aside from the vast neighborhoods that were leveled by the earthquake, there was nearly uniform destruction of all of the government institutions in the center of town. This included the national palace, supreme court building, government ministries, and police headquarters. Almost every institution struggling to serve Haitians today was reduced to rubble.

The resource that remains in abundance in Haiti is human spirit. It is here that Samasource is investing in Haitian recovery. Our newest digital work center is being built by our service partner in Mirebalais, 1000 Jobs/Haiti. Mirebalais is one of those towns many Haitians have fled to. This underdeveloped region is a particularly important long-term focus for Samasource, because a stronger economy here will draw more people from the overcrowded city of Port-au-Prince. By bringing digital work to this area, Samasource is creating high-value jobs where they are needed most.

Here’s a Flickr set of photos I took in Mirebalais, Haiti. And here’s one video, of me teaching one of our students to speak Vietnamese

Here’s a geekier post than normal. A minor release of Quick Search Box (QSB) just came out, and yes in my computer-bound existence these insignificant moments are worthy of celebration. QSB (its predecessor Quicksilver, rather) is one of those little programs that totally changed the way I use my computer. I put SizeUp in this category, as well.

Anyway, onto the celebration. Here are the release notes. There are various speed improvements and a beefed-up plugin system, which will hopefully allow QSB to finally take over all the functions I’ve been missing since the Quicksilver days. Some more tidbits:

• It’s no longer a project associated with Google: “You will also notice the branding has changed significantly. We are moving from being a Google project, to a fully open sourced project.” Google is still the default search. The lead developer was the guy who wrote Quicksilver, and he developed QSB when he moved to Google. I wonder if there were personnel changes that occurred, here.
• I’ve always found the documentation for QSB lacking, but following some links from the Release Notes, I hit gold with this set of knols.
• Aside from a) opening applications and b) finding documents and folders, the most important thing about QSB is its Finder integration. The CMD-G interface for pulling items selected in the Finder into QSB (from where you can move them, copy them, email them, whatever) works again! Here’s the knol on QSB’s Finder integration.