Social Media for Social Good
Mr. Gopi Kallayil, the Chief
Evangelist at Google+ , was definitely the most popular colloquium speaker of
the year. He is an award-winning Toastmaster and a TEDx Berkeley speaker, and
so it was a not a surprise that his talk became quite popular. He opened the
talk asking us all, “Do you know how many organs are there in the human body?” Many guesses went up in the air. Then he said
“When I asked my most trusted source of information - Miss Google… Miss Google
told me there are 78. I wanted to add to it the 79th organ. “The smart phone!” He pointed to the fact that 6 billion out of
the 7 billion strong global population has access to some sort of a mobile
device. And so his topic for the day was “Social Media for Social Good”.
Mr. Kallayil said he had a moment
of epiphany about all this. He took us on his journey from the rice cultivating
village of Chittilencheri in Kerala, India. While he was a small kid, the whole
village had access to only two telephones and he was considered a child prodigy
as he had the entire village’s contacts memorized. When he was recently visiting
the same old village for a ceremony, he was delighted to see almost everyone
with a mobile “organ” in their hands enjoying the benefits of the all-pervasive
technology. He emphasized on the fact that, without any discrimination, a great
amount of the population has access to this computing power. He then said, “The
important question is – what kind of social good is coming out of this level of
interconnectedness between billions of people?” To showcase that, he shared
three stories with us.
The first one was the story of
Zack Matere from Soy, Kenya. His potato plantations were repeatedly failing. He
tried learning about the problem from books but could not get much. So to quote
Matere’s own words: “I did the search!” He learnt from one among the search
results that ants were the problem and suggested sprinkling wood ash over the
plants. It solved his problem and he got excited about the technology of
internet. He then made a wooden notice board for the community there as all did
not know to use the internet. As he got news or relevant information on his
searches, he posted them for the benefit of the community. Matere said, “When
people have access to knowledge, they find solutions to problems.” Kallayil
commented that Matere’s genius lied in connecting a 2 years old technology and
a 2000 years old technology for the greater benefit.
The second story came out of
Ontorio, Canada and Scotts Valley, California, USA. John Butterill and Corey
Fisk from California suffers from multiple sclerosis and it had been 10 years
since she walked. She has great interest in photography. John Butterill a
professional photographer from Canada is an expert in doing Photo Walks, where
he takes photography learners to scenic locations to shoot and discuss
techniques. Butterhill hosted a Photo Walk hangout and Fisk said “For the first
time I feel like I am not trapped in my body!” Photographers from all over the
world soon joined this project and helped many other people similar to Fisk to
embark on a virtual journey.
The third story connected Cape
Town, South Africa and Dharamsala, India. When Kallayil was ideating on the Google+
rollout, he imagined a conversation between His Holiness Dalailama and His good
friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu on peace and compassion. Kallayil said, “When
you imagine these crazy things, somehow the universe mystically aligns itself
to make it happen!” Four days after he wrote this idea on a piece of paper, a
fellow colleague from Google South Africa, who Kallayil had never met called
him about the forthcoming birthday celebrations of the Archbishop and the
celebration plan to invite His Holiness Dalailama. There was some logistics
problem and asked Google if there was some technology with which the situation
could be helped. The technology was not rolled out by then but was arranged for
in less than 3 days making the impossible possible. And now the Dalailama has
more than 12 million online followers.
Kallayil concluded that what was
profound across these stories was that the community becomes the platform and a
fertile ground for human beings to thrive, survive and do social good. Kallayil
kept the session very interesting and interactive. He magically kept
remembering names and let us all guessing how he knew our names. He also gave
us answers and spoke to us about Google Cars and Google Glass. He deeply
appreciated our then theme for our business fest – “Business Beyond Profits”.
He left us all to ponder about how we could leverage social media for the
social good.
No comments:
Post a Comment