This is part two of “Pizza, Beer & Stock Options Don’t Cut It Anymore: Technologists and Social Entrepreneurs” - part I is here. 

In my role with Ethicodes I’m designing a mobile game-type app for ethical and sustainable consumption. In my professional life, I’ve been a designer and programmer for web and mobile. That means I have the unique experience of having been on both the management / programmer table. The work I do for Ethicodes can’t be done alone, and I’ll admit, there are (many) elements of programming that are better left to the specialists. In my juggling of these two worlds, I’ve come across the paradox of social enterprise technology. Most often it comes down to money, understanding and respect. Here’s some advice from both sides of the table.

Part II: Tips for Developers

• No Eye Rolling. Sometimes opportunity is about showing up. We understand everyone from your grandmother to your boss is asking you to fix something. But please be open to the possibilities and try to leave the jaded personality at home. It takes a certain type of person to be a programmer—some say it is a cynic’s exterior over an incurable optimist inside—after all, it is your job to constantly find ways to break your own code, with the expectation that there is a way to make it logically perfect eventually. I suspect the social entrepreneur is the exact opposite—incurably optimistic on the outside (we can fix the world!), with a constant cynicism on the inside (because the world needs fixing badly).
• Consultation Fees. An interview is not a consultation. Everyone understands you are in high demand, and your time is valuable (at least they do if they read the above). However a 1/3 of a total standard consulting fee should be business and overhead related. That means $50 of your $150 fee is there to account for this initial meeting, as well as computer upkeep, and the time it takes to invoice clients. I recently had a very talented developer request a consultation fee before even discussing their skills. They were off the list immediately, but a little further research revealed their skillset wasn’t the greatest—which could have been a costly mistake for me. On the other hand, if they had agreed to an initial discussion, they would have gotten the opportunity to convince me otherwise.
• Understand business etiquette. As a programmer you have a lot of wiggle room as far as business attire goes. In fact, I frequently feel like the older the t-shirt I wear, the more I am assumed to be a talented programmer. Very few people expect you to show up in a suit (and if the above is true, it might actually work against you). So when I say business etiquette, I am not primarily talking about attire (though sweatpants might not be the best idea). Despite what you learned from your brilliant CS professor, some basic social and conversational skills are necessary. Texting and muttering during a meeting are not looked upon favorably by anyone. Inability to manage your own schedule and terse, incongruous and borderline rude emails (despite a footer that says “sent from my iPhone”) are also not working in your favor. You will need to be able to work with other people in some capacity for the rest of your life regardless of how talented you are.
• Be clear about your skills. We all know you can learn as you go along, and too often that is what must happen as new technologies and languages arrive. Hiring managers should understand this. That said, be clear about what you know now versus what you can learn. When I worked at LiveJournal, all the programmers had to learn BML (Brad’s Markup Language - which only existed in Brad Fitzpatrick’s work). Obviously, no one came to the company knowing how to do this (aside from Brad of course) and all of them learned. However, there are always going to be programmers who know Ruby, C+, and all of the main languages better than you. Managers just want to know what they are signing up for in the skills department, so be honest and clear about what you know now and what you would be happy to learn in the future.
• Invest in future employers. You undoubtably will come across social entrepreneurs who are hoping that you can “share their vision.” Sometimes this means working at a discount or being available for questions when otherwise you would not. You shouldn’t do all of their work for free or let them stomp all over you. Make this clear from the start, but also let them know how interested and invested you are in their vision. Try “I {am;am not} really into the goal of {fixing the world;helping the poor;educating children} so I {can help;cannot help}. However I think it would be a good business decision if you hired {me;a specialist;a team} to do x, y, and z.” Knowing your investment level from the start will help them gauge how much they can lean on you when the going gets tough, and will prevent any misunderstandings for both sides.
• Don’t steal ideas. This should be another obvious one, but isn’t. You may have the CS talent to bring an idea to fruition with little help. However, social entrepreneurs likewise have talents that you don’t have, usually business and field-specific ones. They also (hopefully) had legal agreements, copyrights, and precedent over an idea long before they brought you in on a project. It is a much better option for both of you to work together for a common goal than get into messy legal battles later.
• Agree on Baby Steps. Entrepreneurs want a perfect product, and often don’t yet have the backing or technical process-knowledge to make it bulletproof. And you might not be sold on their product or time commitment. A good way to start off is to both agree to a minimum viable product - meaning the smallest commitment you as a programmer can get a way with while still testing some of their business and usability assumptions. It might be as simple as a programming diagram, a series of mobile web pages or a pong-level app (free of fancy graphics or complex engagements).Taking a small first step will help everyone figure out if they work well with one another and how on board everyone is. After that, you can throw in the towel or figure out the next small step.

Just like last time, I’d love to hear from other management / developers about experiences, tips, and frustrations in the comments.

Gabe Scelta is the Innovation Director at Ethicodes and Research Associate at the Ethiopian Global Initiative. A fellow at the Emerge Venture Lab, Gabe’s deep knowledge of the technology industry keeps Ethicodes pushing the frontiers of the fair trade industry. He holds a master’s degree from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and a bachelor’s degree from Boston University. He lives in New York City.

Related articles

• What is a Social Entrepreneur? (fiwal.org.uk)
• Entrepreneurship and the Social Entrepreneur (ruralstops.blogspot.com)
• Four Business Tips for Social Entrepreneurs (bayintegratedmarketing.wordpress.com)

I was at home with the flu last week, but my previous post  (two weeks ago!) elicited a response that got me thinking further on the role of technology in government. Speaking about Ethiopia, I wrote in my response:

 I try to remain impartial to politics (on this blog anyway). What I do wholeheartedly support, is the means for people to choose their own solutions. Current policies discourage both free media and international understanding, which both reflect badly on the government and discourage economic and intellectual investment from local and international communities—no one wins. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem and I don’t propose to have the answer. Which comes first, a more open government that encourages free media or a free media that encourages a more open government? The overwhelming trend in the past few years is that media comes first, simply because media advances more quickly than governments’ can take actions to limit them.

What I am wondering now is: does my stance on the freedom of media make me by default a promoter of American democracy abroad? I don’t know. Promoting an adherence to a strict American style of democracy feels a bit too close to imperialism, and historically doesn’t always translate well. What I think a truly free media does is create a forum for a population—of a nation, town, or just Zuccotti Park—to create their own rules and their own flavor of people-led governance. But in order to have a free media, you need a government that isn’t afraid of what the people might say. Which, in itself might necessitate some kind of democratically appointed government.

What the responder on the previous post was calling for, as I understood it, was an intervention (whether by citizens or outsiders) into a government that does not promote an open media. However what we’ve seen recently in the arab spring and in some US protests, is that media prevails eventually, usually despite authoritarian intervention strategies. Is that just because governments move so slowly? Or because people will always find a way to communicate, even in the most dire of circumstances?

Gabe Scelta is the Innovation Director at Ethicodes. A fellow at the Emerge Venture Lab, Gabe’s deep knowledge of the technology industry keeps Ethicodes pushing the frontiers of the fair trade industry. He holds a master’s degree from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and a bachelor’s degree from Boston University. He lives in New York City.

This weekend I had the opportunity to attend the BuildEthiopia Conference at Harvard University. Hosted by Ethiopian Global Initiatives, the conference aims to “encourage participants to envision and support the transformation of Ethiopia by providing a space for constructive dialogue, learning and sharing.” The program encouraged thought on a lot of topics, and I’ll probably cover a few of them in the coming weeks.

One theme that recurred through several speakers is that Ethiopia (and most of Africa in general), in colloquial terms, has a bad rap. Liz Ngonzi explained this by way of a Google image search. Type in “Ethiopia” and what you get most often is what she aptly described as “poverty porn.” Starving children, barren fields, no water. It’s true, in many areas these things are indeed issues. But just to put things in perspective, areas of California have those things too. Type “California” into a google image search and I bet you get some very different images. 

If you are in marketing you know that bad publicity is very hard to recover from. One rat in the french fry cooker and you are out of business for good. In modern media, these things can follow you around for decades. Ethiopia is not free of problems, no place is. But it is not a stagnant pool either. Victorian and colonial ideas about Africa being “a land before time” are dangerously persistent. Ethiopia’s television media coming-of-age was during the famines of the 1980s. This may have dug them even deeper into the negative media abyss than most other places. 

A quick story: I have a friend, Karen. She is a brilliant chemist and slightly younger than me—putting her in grade school in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Up until a few years ago when she started getting papers published, a search for her full name led to a penpal letter she wrote in second grade to a school partner in Japan. Eight-year-old Karen liked horses. A lot. Those horse followed her around for decades. Ethiopia has the same problem as Karen. But instead of horses, Ethiopia had famine. A lot.

From Newsweek to South Park, the image of starving children cannot be plucked from the collective western mind. Combine those first “Save the Children” television images with problematic ideas about Africa as somehow outside of the movement of time and what you get is the recipe for a public relations disaster that is hard to shake.

The new media paradigm—social networks, global connectivity, mobile web access—all have the incredible potential for reshaping that collective conscience, and doing it quickly, what TMS Ruge termed “Africa 3.0.” The responsibility lies on all of us, in Africa and out. With the relatively recent installation of submarine fiber optic broadband cabling along the east African coast, subsequent connectivity and skyrocketing mobile saturation, it is finally Ethiopia’s turn to lead the conversation.

At the same time, I hope the images that define Ethiopia for this next generation are not handpicked by Ethiopian government and tourism authorities. I don’t expect the famine images to disappear. What I am hoping for is simply reality—from real people, showing the beauties and the difficulties of their daily lives. As in almost every large scale news event, from post-Katrina New Orleans to pre-revolution Tunisia, what is most important in shaping the current dialogue—and shaping history—is media by the people, for the people.

During lunch, I had the opportunity to sit with Tesfaye Yilma, the Ambassador of the Embassy of Ethiopia in the US. While I don’t agree with all of what he said, he reminded us that culturally it is not considered proper to boast, (I think the Amharic word he used was ደልቃቃ — dälqaqa — “an arrogant person”). At a table of mostly young, media savvy people we tried to remind him that marketing and communication is different than arrogance. Marketing and more importantly, the freedom of average people to communicate in new ways, is imperative for the Ethiopia of today.

Gabe Scelta is the Innovation Director at Ethicodes. A fellow at the Emerge Venture Lab, Gabe’s deep knowledge of the technology industry keeps Ethicodes pushing the frontiers of the fair trade industry. He holds a master’s degree from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and a bachelor’s degree from Boston University. He lives in New York City.