This article was copied from a is the VOA Special English Technology Report, formerly called the Development Report.

Before we changed the name, we went on our Facebook page and asked for story ideas. Some of you suggested that we talk about ICT, information and communication technology.

Well, the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, released its latest ICT Facts and Figures report last week.

Since two thousand five, the number of Internet users worldwide has doubled to more than one and a half billion people. At least two billion are expected to be online by the end of this year.

The ITU says more than seventy percent of new Internet users this year will be in developing countries. Still, only twenty-one percent of the population of the developing world is online — compared to seventy-one percent in developed countries.
Susan Teltscher is head of the agency’s Market Information and Statistics Division in Switzerland.

SUSAN TELTSCHER: “There are still very huge divides when it comes to accessing the Internet, especially high-speed Internet. In developing countries, you have only one out of five people using the Internet. If we look at certain regions like in Africa, for example, the figures are even lower. In Africa we have not even ten percent of the population using the internet.”

Less than sixteen percent of homes in developing countries are wired for the Internet. But, on the other hand, Ms. Teltscher says mobile phone usage has reached sixty-eight percent in developing countries.

The world has almost seven billion people. Nine out of ten now have access to mobile networks.

The ITU estimates that mobile subscriptions will reach five billion three hundred million this year. The majority are in the developing world. And Susan Teltscher says more and more people in developing countries are using their mobile phones to connect to the Internet.

SUSAN TELTSCHER: “Because it’s so difficult to put in place the cable infrastructure and the fiber infrastructure, the mobile networks really offer a great opportunity for them to connect to the Internet over the wireless networks.”

Ms. Teltscher says mobile technology is already improving lives in developing countries. She points to examples like banking by phone, e-health services and farm reports by text messaging. And the possibilities will only grow as broadband, or high-speed, connections become more widely available.

ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Toure calls broadband “the next truly transformational technology.” He also calls it the most powerful tool available in the race to meet the Millennium Development Goals by twenty fifteen.

And that’s the VOA Special English Technology Report, written by June Simms. Join us online at voaspecialenglish.com or on Facebook or Twitter at VOA Learning English. I’m Steve Ember.

Are you looking for purpose in life? For a purpose big enough to absorb every ounce of your attention, deep enough to plumb the mystery of your passion, and lasting enough to inspire you to your last breath? This book is about the reason why we are each here on earth.

Are you serious about looking for such a purpose? How many people do you know who just can’t wait to get to work on Monday because they’re so fired up about what they’re doing? Nobody? When you meet people that are that passionate about their calling, it’s contagious. Find your calling.

KEY POINTS:

• There is no call without a Caller.

• Reality reminds us that all the will in the world will not make us what we want to become.
• Calling in the Bible is a central and dynamic theme that becomes a metaphor for the life of faith itself.

OS Guiness deals with two distortions–the Catholic distortion and the Protestant distortion. The Catholic distortion is that the sacred calling is to become a priest or nun. Martin Luther shattered that myth. Luther wrote: “The works of monks and priests, however holy and arduous they be, do not differ on whit in the sight of God from the works of the rustic laborer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks, but that all works are measured before God by faith alone. The cultural implications of recovering true calling [by Luther] were explosive.

• Calling gave to everyday work a dignity and spiritual significance under God that dethroned the primacy of leisure and contemplation.
• Calling gave to humble people and ordinary task an investment of equality that shattered hierarchies and was vital impulse toward democracy.
• Calling gave to such practical things as work, thrift, and long-term planning a reinforcement that made them powerfully influential in the rise of modern capitalism.
• Calling gave to the endeavor to make Christ Lord of every part of life a fresh force that transformed not only churches but also the worldviews and cultures of the Reformation countries.
• Calling gave to the idea of “talents” a new meaning, so that they were no longer seen purely as spiritual gifts and graces but as natural and a matter of giftedness in the modern sense of the term.

The Protestant myth was that hard work is your calling. Period. However, neither work nor career can be fully satisfying without a deeper sense of calling–but “calling” itself is empty and indistinguishable from work unless there is Someone who calls. God normally calls us along our line of giftedness, but the purpose of giftedness is stewardship, and service, not selfishness.

A sense of calling should precede a choice of job and career. Instead of, “You are what you do,” calling says: “Do what you are.”

No follower of Christ is without a calling, for we all have an original calling even if we do not all have a later, special calling. And, of course, some people have both. Those in modern societies who are middle class or higher can probably find such a fulfilling match between calling and work. But for many others today, and probably for most people in most societies, there is no happy match between work and calling. In many cases a clear sense of calling comes only through a time of searching, including trial and error.

• Life is lived forward, but understood backwards.

• The Puritans lived as if they had swallowed gyroscopes; we modern Christians live as if we had swallowed Gallup polls. The imitation of Christ that is integral to following Him means that, when he calls us, he enables us to do what he calls us to do. Answering the call by its very nature is a stepping forward to responsibility. Responsibility is obedience by another name. What we do then, when no one sees but God, is the test of our responsibility.

• Para-church. The business of “the little church” is to put itself out of business by feeding its wisdom and concern back into “the large church” and so contribute to the reformation of the one body that is central to God’s purpose for all time.

The reverse side of calling is the temptation of conceit. People who are called are especially vulnerable to pride because of the very nobility of calling.

When Jesus calls, he calls us one by one. Comparisons are idle, speculations about others a waste of time, and envy as silly as it is evil. We are each called individually, accountable to God alone, to please him alone, and eventually to be approved by him alone. If ever we are tempted to look around, compare notes, and use the progress of others to judge the success of our own calling, we will hear what Peter heard, “What is that to you? Follow me.”

• Capitalism, having defeated all challenges, such a socialism, now faces its greatest challenge–itself, because it devours the very virtues it needs to thrive. Calling, which played a key role in the rise of modern capitalism, is one of the few truths capable of guiding and restraining it now.

The problem is that money can assume an inordinate place in our lives until it becomes a personal, spiritual, god-like force that rules us–Mammon. When John D Rockefeller was asked how much money it takes a man to become happy, he replied, “Just a little bit more.” As such, Mammon is a genuine rival to God. First, calling means that, for followers of Christ, there is a decisive, immediate, and moment-by-moment authority above money and the market. The choice between Masters has been made. Second, we make the choice to do in life because we are called to it rather than because we get paid for it. Ironically, we eventually cannot afford what we most desire–deep relationships. For if “time is money” and people take time, then the “opportunity costs” of relationships (the gain that we would earn by doing something else) will be prohibitive and intimate friendships will be few. “Spending” time with friends is costly; we could “invest” in better elsewhere.

Probably the worst of all combination of a midlife crisis that pivots on failure. For few things are more ignominious than failing at something that was not worth doing in the first place. At that point many people jump to the opposite extreme where another frustration looms. They go wrong in thinking that “success” failed to satisfy because it was secular whereas “significance” will be fulfilling because it is religious. That is actually the “Catholic distortion” again. Careers that express calling are as fulfilling as careers that contradict calling are frustrating.

• The modern world has scrambled things so badly that today we worship our work, we work at our play, and we play at our worship. The problem with Western Christians is not that they aren’t where they should be but that they aren’t what they should be where they are.

• Grand Christian movements will rise and fall. Grand campaigns will be mounted and grand coalitions assembled. But all together such coordinated efforts will never match the influence of untold numbers of followers of Christ living out their callings faithfully across the vastness and complexity of modern society.

• Once we have been called, we literally “have no choice.” As we make our contributions along the line of our gifts and callings, and others do the same, there is both a fruitfulness and a rest in the outcome. Calling is a reminder for followers of Christ that nothing in life should be taken for granted; everything in life must be received with gratitude. Calling is an essential part of the timing that characterizes a successful life. Unlike anyone before or since, Jesus’ awareness of his calling from God burst the bounds of human thinking.

THE BIG IDEA
God calls men and women who will be committed to their life tasks with no reservations, no retreats, no regrets. They are therefore free to turn from their own affairs and to center their lives on the priorities of their questing. In pursuit of this quest, no pettiness is so petty that it disturbs their meaning. No task so immense that it daunts the courage of their calling. They engage in the world on the world’s terms, yet they are never diverted from their quest because they always have an eye to interests and ideals that are invisible to the eyes of others. Such people are always found “in the gap.” They are the ones prepared “for such a time as this.” People after God’s own heart, they are ready to read the signs of the times and serve his purpose in their generation.

FINISHING WELL
Calling is central to the challenge and privilege of finishing well in life. It is important to finishing well because it helps us with three of the greatest challenges of our last years of life:

1. It keeps us journeying purposefully to the very end of our lives.
2. It prevents us from confusing the termination of our occupations with the termination of our vocation. We may at times be unemployed, but no one ever becomes uncalled.
3. It encourages us to leave the entire outcome of our lives to God. If you know you are in God’s calling, its up to Him. If you bear the entire brunt of your significance, the results are up to you. Perhaps you are frustrated by the gaps between your vision and your accomplishments. Make no judgments and draw no conclusions until God ultimately judges your work.

Forces For Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits

One of the emerging trends in philanthropy is the concept of “giving while living”–with donors taking an active role in their philanthropy during their lifetimes. Actually, this concept is not new, it was pioneered by Andrew Carnegie and outlined in his article “Wealth”, published in 1889. Carnegie encouraged “the rich man to attend to the administration of wealth during his life.” Carnegie also said, “Of every thousand dollars spent in so called charity to-day, it is probable that $950 is unwisely spent; so spent, indeed as to produce the very evils which it proposes to mitigate or cure.” Carnegie proposed that the skills & talents that were used to create the wealth in the first place, were the same skills & talents required to give away the wealth during a person’s lifetime. The Wealth article has influenced both Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.

In fact, these social entrepreneurs want to change the world and have the means to do it. However, “countless entrepreneurs are reinventing the wheel, starting new nonprofits without understanding what has been tried before or what really works,” says Steve Case in the book’s preface.

THE BOOK’S BIG IDEA: The key is finding ways to leverage other sectors to create extraordinary impact. Great nonprofits are catalysts; they transform the system around them to achieve the greater good. In order to create systemic change, nonprofits need to partner with government, business, individuals, and other nonprofits to achieve more than they could alone. They constantly need to adapt to their environment to stay relevant. They share leadership and power within and beyond their organizations, empowering others to become forces for good.

“Greatness has more to do with how nonprofits work outside the boundaries of their organizations than how they manage their own internal operations. At its core, social entrepreneurship is an externally focused act. It’s all about results, not processes. And that’s why it sometimes looks so messy and chaotic from the outside. The solutions to society’s most pressing problems lie in the collective, not in any single institution.”

After years of research, the authors have come up with six practices of high-impact nonprofits which they believe benefit both philanthropists and nonprofits:

1. Work with government and advocate for policy change
2. Harness market forces and see business as a powerful partner
3. Convert individual supporters into evangelists for the cause
4. Build and nurture nonprofit networks, treating other groups as allies
5. Adapt to the changing environment
6. Share leadership, empowering others to be forces for good

On pages 214-223, the authors provide checklists for each of the 6 areas above, to encourage readers to put the ideas into practice. I’m using these checklists at Kinnovation on our next project. These include:

1. Advocate and Serve. Kinnovation is an advocate for standard impact measures and will help facilitate their adoption.
2. Make Markets Work. Our partnership with business recognizes the need for business to make a profit. Kinnovation projects will help get our business alliance partners into new markets. Kinnovation itself will tap into business models that will allow it to become self-sustaining in a reasonable amount of time.
3. Inspire Evangelists. Our work with Halftimers is part of our core mission. We help individuals find their calling and multiply their results as part of our mission. Our vision is to tap into a persons core passions and calling, not his checkbook. We help nonprofits and help fulfill the Calling of individuals simultaneously.
4. Nurture nonprofit networks. We chose the name Kinnovation Alliance to highlight the core vision of creating a nonprofit network strategy. We believe in collaboration, knowledge sharing, and coalition building. Beyond that, our mission is to build the IT tools to enable this.
5. Master the Art of Adaptation. Kinnovation is a group that thrives in innovation, experimentation, and vetting ideas. We work like a VC and idea incubator. Our core competency is technology and our mission it to enable the knowledge of our alliance partners to be captured, shared, and used.
6. Share Leadership. Our board is a group of individuals from various sectors. Our core philosophy is “There is no limit to what can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit”

Since Kinnovation is catalyst and its very nature is to harness the power of existing networks of individuals, business, government and nonprofits (see figure 1.1)

Bottom line: To win at the social game game, it’s not about being the biggest or the fastest or even the best-managed nonprofit. The most powerful, influential and strategic organizations transform others to become forces for good.

Megacommunities, by Mark Gerencser, et al. (a book review with key points posted by Mark Smith)

The problems facing the world are so large that no one sector–business, government or non-profit–can solve the problems by themselves. According to the authors, what is needed is a megacommunity.

A megacommunity is a public sphere in which organizations from three sectors–business, government and non-profits–deliberately join together around compelling issues of mutual importance, following a set of practices and principles that make it easier for them to achieve results without sacrificing their individual goals. The megacommunity is an alliance of organizations, not individuals. In a healthy megacommunity, the three sectors maintain balance by “pushing” and “pulling” at each other according to their respective forms of influence. Order comes out of balancing this dynamic tension. In contrast to public-private partnerships, megacommunities bring civil society (NGO, church, non-profit, etc.) into the equation.

The megacommunity recognizes the kind of legitimacy that civil society represents. The civil sector brings accountability, insight into how to get things done locally, sensitivity to how the issues at play might affect individuals and the environment, and credibility in arenas in which business and government fall short.

Megacommunities do not thrive on chaos with no clear leadership. They thrive on alignment and optimization. In the initial stages in particular, the network needs some person, group or sector to precipitate alignment and catalyze latent energies. This will generally take the form of some “initiator” (or group of initiators) doing something explicit to put the elements in place. But the initiator must be prepared to cede this central/initial leadership role as the megacommunity coalesces and grows, or they may be seen as co-opting local and other interests. No one possesses the title of “CEO of the megacommunity.” The initiators need to believe that the alliance of organizations is the best way to solve the problem. Initiators should come from organizations that value innovation.

To achieve a successful megacommunity, on of the most fundamental habits to change is the habit of “maximizing” benefits. Megacommunity members must learn to “optimize” instead. Maximizing refers to a primary focus on the immediate benefits to your own local domain–either your own organization, our own geographic region, or your own function–whether or not that leads to benefits for the whole. Optimizing refers to the recognition and actualization of benefits to the larger system as a whole.

Those involved in the megacommunity must appreciate the importance of building network capital (that is, the value of investment in relationships and connections). An overlapping vital interest makes the features of convergence all the more real. Convergence is the commitment to mutual action that all members must work toward.

The purpose of megacommunity meetings is two-fold. First, to move toward a common goal (action). The megacommunity will have to demonstrate quick wins for its stakeholders. The second purpose of meetings is to educate the participants, to demonstrate continued and increasing competence and skills. The core group’s task at hand is design; the the design of a solution per se, but the design of forums, practices, prototypes, and experiments through which a solution will emerge. In every one of the participating organizations, there will be many sub-teams with multiple professional background; teams working on marketing, logistics, production, training, communication, legal, medical, engineering, financial, IT, etc.

Megacommunities don’t exist to admire a problem. They are there to take action.

Roles in a megacommunity include:

• Initiator. As a navigator, you keep the group on track, moving forward on an emerging path.
• Program managers who oversee particular projects;
• Media directors, who design, write, and manage the web site through which the megacommunity communicates with others;
• Media liasons, who maintain connection with journalists, editors, broadcasters, and other media professionals
• Subject matter experts, responsible for keeping the other participants informed about technical, scientific, or other specialized areas of interest.
• Megacommunity leadership. The big shift is from “command and control” to “coaching and persuading.” In a megacommunity, the touch is lighter. It is a guiding touch, on that lets constituents self-discover. Along with communication skills–and not unconnected to them–megacommunity leadership requires a certain amount of technological competence.
• Enablers. Some call them coaches, counselors, advisors. they are exceptionally unusual characters that are often invisible. You never read about them. You never see them in th organization chart. They’re very crucial facilitators of leadership effectiveness in new complex, cohesive communities.

In no way should involvement in the megacommunity be perceived as pro bono work, since megacommunity actions directly affect the success of each member organization. In fact, given the importance of any megacommunity’s central issue, it is likely that a participating organization has already committed time and resources to solving that issue. Megacommunity involvement may simply represent a reorienting of this effort, to better effect.

Four approaches that the authors have found highly effective:

1. Develop a Meeting schedule. Frequent contact is key to the operation of the megacommunity.
2. Employ Strategic Simulations. Strategic simulations can be spectacularly effective in uncovering complementing capabilities.
3. Develop targeted forums. Large, cross-sector meetings and conferences can also be an effective means of relationship-building in the early stages.
4. Prototype teams. A megacommunity may involve dozens, even hundreds of people working toward a mutual goal. It may be easier to divide them into cross-sector, cross-organization teams where they can identify and focus on nested projects and subtasks. Regard each of these subtasks as an experiment, or if you prefer, a prototype.

Utilize IT systems to foster communication. Consider using a social networking utility to post all sorts of information relevant to the megacommunity’s purpose. Contents could include contact information, dashboard tools, regularly updated progress reports, and strategic plans. Reporting, in fact, is a key element of monitoring in the megacommunity. The systems could also include shared databases, shared workspaces, and media plans. A good networking tool can provide an accurate picture of how a specific hub is functioning in a megacommunity. New media tools such as websites, wikis, blogs, video blogs, texting, etc. should be utilized.

Some megacommunities have even launched their own magazine.

The bywords of a megacommunity are: communicate, negotiate, act, and learn (then begin the learning cycle again).

Leadership. Each member organization must offer someone who has the authority to commit resources. Leaders can involve the megacommunity in an effort to co-create solutions. To be sure, it takes more skill and time to develop a solution this way; it involves genuine interest in the ideas and approaches that other people have to suggest. It probably involves synthesizing or combining those solutions in novel ways, making the final result more valuable than the sum of the parts. Megacommunity leaders know that pre-set answers are not going to cut it. They are accustomed to thoughtful trial-and-error. And they embrace the pragmatic and new solutions that few others can see.

Bottom line: The authors believe that the concept of megacommunity will have a profound effect on the way we see, and function in, the new world. As part of a megacommunity, all three sectors–government, business and the civil society–are in excellent position to have a real and lasting effect on large and complex problems.