Social Entrepreneurship Gaming and Mobile Technology for the Developing World at Net Tuesday San Francisco March 13, 2007

The second Tuesday of each month, social changemakers and web innovators get together to network, socialize and share ideas at Net Tuesday, an event produced by NetSquared, http://www.netsquared.org, a project of TechSoup, http://www.techsoup.org.

This month our two presenters will be Darian Hickman of the game, Village: Play the World of Social Enterprise, and Reuters Digital Vision Program Fellow at Stanford University, Ken Banks of kiwanja.net.

Darian will be be sharing how Village started, where the project is now, and where they want to be by 2009. Fully developed, Village is a multiplayer real time strategy game that immerses the player into the role of an entrepreneur building companies to bring prosperity to the villages of the developing world.

Ken will be talking about the application of mobile technology in international conservation and development, and the need to consider the social and environmental conditions when designing and applying solutions in the developing world.

Presenter bios:

Darian Hickman is the founder of VillagetheGame.com, http://www.villagethegame.com. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2001 with a BS in Computer Science. After a series of boring high-paying defense-contracting jobs and some world travel, Darian has finally started on a project that he can call a life mission, Village the Game.

Ken Banks is originally from Jersey in the Channel Islands, Ken moved to the UK in 1996 to pursue an academic interest in global conservation and development, graduating from Sussex University with a degree in Social Anthropology with Development Studies three years later. He has over 20 years of high-tech experience from the private, corporate and non-profit sectors. Over the past thirteen years Ken has worked on numerous conservation and development projects in Zambia, Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and for the past three has run his own consultancy, kiwanja.net (http://www.kiwanja.net) specializing in the application of mobile technology in the non-profit sector. Ken project managed the European rollout of the first conservation-based mobile portal in 2003/2004 with Vodafone and has more recently worked with the likes of Microsoft, Fauna & Flora International and United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) on the practical application of technology for social and environmental benefit. Last December he spoke in Bangalore at the W3C Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries. Ken is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University, working on the application of technologies in the developing world.

Official Website: http://netsquared.meetup.com/1/