Jesse Schell’s talk at the Long Now Foundation, tilted “Visions Of The Gamepocalypse” is the most intelligent and comprehensive treatise on this phenomenon.  He is an extraordinary speaker, and will connect especially well with those who appreciate the dry humor implied by the paradoxes revealed by a systems perspective.

The video highlight embedded here (chosen by the editors at FORA.tv, a cool new-to-me site with smart talks and panels from conferences), is a clip about how advertising fits into the gaming world, provides a peek into the style and pace Schell brings to the topic.

If, like so many of us these days, find yourself in uber-overwhelmsion (tip to Sally), and the idea of watching a 2-hour video is absurd, you owe yourself this treat.

This fall, we will be engaging a targeted pilot of the platform, and our team will get back out into the world, demonstrating the concept we have been talking about to you for more than a year now.

As the writing and research for the business plan slows down, I hope to have more time to get back to blogging.  If you’re not following me on Twitter, it’s a good place to see some of the pieces of things that are moving by in my field of attention.

Thanks for reading — I look forward to more engagement soon.

Building on crowdfunding concepts best exemplified by Kickstarter, UnReasonable believes this approach will reveal the most active, creative and resourceful entrepreneurs, while also integrating the kind decentralized funding that we need to seed the next generation of social entrepreneurs and sustainable ventures.

Four projects are already funded over $1,000, and two are 25% of their way to the $6,500 goal.  A few of our favorites include:

• Light Up Malawi — a project to get the whole country off the grid and on to renewable energy.
• Rickshaw Bank — a project to help bike-based rickshaw pullers to earn their own rickshaw, and become stable businesses.
• Swayam — a project creating equity-based education, removing the financial costs of education in India.
• Cogknit Semantics — a project that uses a hardware and software integration to speed learning in India.
• Uber Housing — a project that provides low-cost temporary shelter for refugees.

Which one will inspire your support?

“We tap into local talent, and strengthen that talent,” Amadei says about his philosophy, a more sustainable approach than typical imperialism still practiced by a majority of aid agencies.  Amadei’s latest project is recycling trash into fuel in developing countries, like Afghanistan.

Enjoy the video, a great investment of four minutes.

The project is an answer to an obvious problem: a maze of data and a warren of information stores permeates the field social innovation, rarely crossing myriad organizational boundaries and doubtfully overcoming technology hurdles.  This leaves the change agents, social entrepreneurs, non-profit execs and foundation program managers at a loss for answers to questions as simple as “What has been tried in this sector before? What has worked? What problems have stopped progress in previous attempts? Who are the experienced implementers?”

As Pete writes at the nuPOLIS blog,

“In response, social innovators and philanthropic funders and private investors in social innovations cope in various ways. Those who can afford to, such as organized philanthropies or large nonprofits, undertake costly information searches to develop their strategies and ideas; they fund staff or turn to outside experts to develop the information they need. The rest either engage in low-cost searches, finding what’s easy to find and using, rejecting, or adapting it without much comparative information or analysis, or they patch together a more disciplined and costly search that starts and continues as resources allow, but is slower than desired. In other words, rampant inefficiencies in the information market for social innovation create debilitating costs and low speed of development.”

“This almost unsolvable “information maze” is a universal obstacle to accelerating the development and spread of effective social innovations. In the “age of information” it is a notable breakdown in the field of social innovation, a missing but fundamental “decision-support” capacity for the field’s development.”

Here’s our proposed solution (PDF download). Funders are interested, but they’re not moving quickly.  Want to get involved?

Beyond “you heard it here first,” Rick is seeking:

1. feedback on the bill (this would be your lawyer or friend starting an L3C)
2. supporters for the bill (this would be your state rep or senator)
3. people to testify for the bill (this could be you)

Ping Rick to get involved.

If you have read this far, and are still wondering “what’s an L3C?”, it’s a new legal and tax designation that appears to most obviously benefit for-profit partnerships that are seeking program-related investment (PRI) or mission-related investment (MRI) from foundations.  Wikipedia has a more robust description.

Although there is some debate on the relative merits of L3C designation vis a vis some other business forms that may come down the pike in coming months and years, we see it as a signal that sustainable and triple-bottom-line ventures are being taken seriously by state legislatures.

If you care to dig in on the debate further, we’ll engage just such a discussion at an upcoming gathering of the Sustainable Venture meetup, which Rick and Caryn co-founded with us.

Rest in peace, Dr. King.

The i4c campaign (as in “I forsee… a better tomorrow”) is a project launched by Boulder-based TouchPoint Trust Group to connect the entertainment industry with sustainable and triple-bottom-line oriented ventures.  The first initiative in the campaign is a million dollar venture fund set up in partnership with Lileth Fair, who is also the launch partner of i4c. The fund is seeking positive cash-flow sustainable ventures (or a reasonable facsimile thereof).  Applications are being accepted through January 21st, and the funds will be dispersed this spring.

Working with our technology partner, Business Catapult, w1sd0m (what is w1sd0m?) is helping source and manage the applications and screening process.

Although this first project launched pretty quickly,  we expect more big announcements (including new funds) from i4c and TouchPoint, in coming weeks and months.

In his new paper — Hedge Fund Investing, Capital Markets and The Sustainability Challenge (PDF download)– Jed sets out with this premise:

“As I learned more about how he approached hedge fund investing, I was struck by how many of the aspects of Fundamental investing (as described to me) were similar to investing practices of Sustainable finance. Not the same, mind you, yet quite similar nevertheless. Simultaneous to this internal dialogue, an external dialogue evolved with investors Uhuru was engaged with around our work. These investors raised a related question: While they appreciated the attributes of our core Fundamental strategy, they asked if we couldn’t create a truly “sustainable” fund of hedge funds product. What they sought was a “Long/Short” investment strategy pursued in a manner consistent with an investor’s commitment to Sustainability. Was such a thing possible?

These conversations became the genesis of this current paper—a basic exploration of that question.”

Jed’s intro alone is brilliant and entertaining, and puts to rest the simplistic “good vs. evil” frame of reference in this complicated issue.  The rest of the paper is a unique view on the evolution of sustainable finance and the current equity and debt markets that will shed light on the issue for even the most sophisticated investor, while providing great grounding for those us who don’t live and die by the valuation of a group of securities.

You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll know more than you do today.  What more could you want?

With that, my midwinter haitus ends, and it’s back to a regular schedule of posts on the intersection of transformative IT, impact investing and sustainable business.