Garages in Silicon Valley; Inventors in Laos

Recently organized a talk by the founders of Inveneo at my real-life job. There were several stand-out moments.

First, met Bob Marsh and learned about the Homebrew Computer Club during the hey-day of “garage-days in silicon valley” (coming to a theater near you). He was a little prickly at first, and I’m imagining it was because he hadn’t as yet recognized the inner (and really ‘outer’ if you look hard enough) geek in me behind the carefully selected formal robes I had on for just this event. I’d like to think that the few moments crawling under tables, ferragamo sandels notwithstanding, to hook up laptops and projectors brought us onto the same wavelength.

Second, I learned about pedal-powered PCs (no kidding, its a bycycle hooked up to a computer) and their invention in Laos by Laotians (as Bob candidly described -and I must say, with the joy of a geek recognizing the talent of a fellow geek). Inveneo, btw, provides really cheap, durable, replicable infrastructure for basic communication and information needs of villagers in remote areas of developing countries. Currently they’re testing their stuff in Uganda. And any company that has a Chief Geek who’s Okay can’t be all that bad. (Scroll down on the linked page to get this very bad joke)

The folks from Inveneo felt like good people, enthusiastic and with a love for their work and its potential. I do hope they advertise that inventions and innovations are not the sole purview of those of us explicitly named in the West. After all, the politics of who’s named and who isn’t will by default relegate the inventors of the pedal-powered PCs to ‘the people in Laos’, or ‘people’, or ‘Laotians’, not Inveneo or Your Name Here.

I did come into the talk with real skepticism for anything that might sound like ‘the tech panacea for poverty’ (a la ‘the tech panacea for education in the U.S.’) but I left feeling at least like there was some humility around the problem – and the relative contribution of their solutions to peoples lives.

I remain conflicted about how these (tech/science) approaches, with great intentions, and indeed positive short-term impact, by their very preponderance compared with (the much harder) systemic approaches addressing core issues such as poverty and its real causes, can shift the discourse and therefore the possibility of truly sustainable and effective long-term change. In the meanwhile, 3 cheers for Inveneo.