They’re looking for big, audacious ideas to back in the following categories:

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don’t fit into any category at all.

The deadline for initial entries is October 20th, 2008, so get moving!

via the always awesome Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped

Accordingly, I was delighted to read the announcement out of the FORTUNE: Brainstorm TECH Conference about the first-ever Legatum FORTUNE Technology Prize of $1,000,000 for technology that offers practical and sustainable innovations that accelerate prosperity:

The first-ever Legatum FORTUNE Technology Prize was announced today by FORTUNE managing editor Andy Serwer during the FORTUNE: Brainstorm TECH Conference. The Prize fund of $1,000,000 will be awarded annually to for-profit organizations, or individuals, whose application of technology solutions has demonstrably improved the quality of life amongst impoverished populations in developing countries.

“This new Prize will help us seek out, recognize, and honor individuals and organizations that demonstrate the impact of technology on intractable development issues, establishing these visionaries as role models for a world ready for new solutions,” said Serwer.

Legatum is a privately owned international investment organisation, whose primary focus is commercial investment and which also applies its investor’s expertise in tackling long-standing development challenges around the globe. The partnership between Legatum and FORTUNE highlights a shared belief in business as a powerful force in development and the need for greater engagement in emerging markets.

“History has taught us that technology is a key driver of increased economic prosperity and has the real potential to improve lives in developing countries,” said Mark Stoleson, President of Legatum. “The Legatum FORTUNE Technology Prize is designed to identify the very best technology companies that are bringing innovation to frontier markets around the globe. Our goal is to highlight new model for effective development, and stimulate an escalating cycle of innovation and new investment.”

Competitors for the Legatum FORTUNE Technology Prize will be nominated by a network of technology experts and evaluated by a panel of eminent judges from the worlds of technology, business and development. Under the leadership of Iqbal Z. Quadir, Director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT, the judges’ experience will encompass grassroots development programs, private equity investment, academia, and policy-making.

The program will culminate in the presentation of the first $1,000,000 Legatum FORTUNE Technology Prize at the FORTUNE 500 Forum in Washington, DC in December 2008. For more information, please visit: www.fortunebrainstorm.com/tech.

If you’re applying, let us know in the comment section!

Matthew Morreale, 24, could help answer a question that vexes advocates, politicians and parents of autistic children: Can we help these adults be more than a tax burden? Matthew is thought to be the first local example of a statewide trend. He runs a microenterprise, a small niche business that can be launched with minimal funding yet make a steady profit.

There are adults with developmental disabilities running mall kiosks and selling hand-made bags. They own floral businesses and they stage puppet shows for children’s parties.

Matthew runs the Matthew James Co., a shredding business that began this year with a single client but is already looking to hire additional employees. His brochure promises that he’ll “shred the competition.”

Matthew is one of a growing number of disabled entrepreneurs who are successfully running their own business. By focusing on his abilities and interests, his job coach, Cassandra Novak at Goodwill of Orange County helped him craft a self-employment plan that could help Matthew live independently.

While I’m annoyed by the default assumption that people with disabilities = tax burden, I’m delighted to read about another case of successful self-employment. This is the type of outcome we designed Active Gray Matter to support, because everyone deserves the opportunity for self reliance and independence.

Well done, Matthew!

Collective bargaining has a role in this world – to set standard contract terms or percentages for royalties and residuals – but individual negotiation is where the big money lies. Many technicians and writers are freelancers because it suits them: they get greater freedom to work across the industry and earn more.

Where collectivism could bring unadulterated rewards is outside the workplace – by providing health and pension benefits that freelance workers do not get. It is no coincidence that the MTV freelancers were angered by having their health benefits reduced. If you do not have health insurance in the US, you take a huge financial risk.

and asks -

Gapper is onto something here. The struggles that will define the creative age are just emerging. Right now we have a system rigged to benefit superstars and winners. In terms of historical analogies, the current creative class movement bears some resemblance to the early organizing struggles of old American Federation of Labor? But, later we say the rise of mass production unionism with the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations? Is a similar divide emerging between creative and service workers? What institutional solutions are needed to include and reward more and more of the growing ranks of creative workers – and what about the broader issue of the service class? What would a new movement and structure for building a workable creative economy look like?

Structurally, I think it looks like more individual agents collaborating through cooperatives, sole proprietorships and corporations. Miriam Cherry, writing about Decentering the Firm: The Limited Liability Company and Low Wage Immigrant Women Workers, 39 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 787 (2006) at Concurring Opinions said -

In the article, I look at the low-wage jobs held by many immigrant women workers and conclude that part of the reason why so many of these jobs – often in positions such as nannies and housecleaners – are paid so poorly and are so exploitative – is because of the intersection between several types of oppression: gender, ethnicity, race, and immigration status.

When one takes a job in the underground economy, many of the typical benefits that we think of as being associated with work simply don’t apply. Obviously, the situation is worse for undocumented workers who are hesitant to enforce their rights (for fear of being deported), and because they may not even be able to receive any remedies (the Hoffman Plastics precedent).

As a – partial – solution to this problem, I talk about re-organizing these types of work, eliminating the intermediary who normally sets up the work and takes a profit, and transforming the workers into owners who are members of an LLC. This allows for collective benefits – such as health insurance and workers’ compensation – and allows for the LLC to pay taxes, so that if a worker is able to regularize their immigration status, they will not have tax problems.

While creative and service class members are not illegal immigrants, they too could collectively benefit through creative uses of existing corporate structures and more in depth knowledge of the bargaining process.

They have natural allies in the buy local, buy handmade movement (via Fred Wilson); what is urgently needed, however, is better, more accessible access to expert help, advice and capital to execute.

More thoughts? I’ll be around all week to discuss these ideas so feel free to add your feedback via comments!

For those of you scratching your head going huh, AGM is:

Active Gray Matter (AGM) is a socially based learning community that uses the wisdom of the crowds to build, maintain and run a business incubator for people with chronic or disabling conditions. While there are several online communities for people with chronic or disabling conditions, they are based on a medical model of disability and largely focused on health issues. AGM offers an environment that presumes that people with chronic or disabling conditions are independent and critical thinkers capable of fulfilling the functional roles of traditional business incubation experts.

During the remainder of November I’ll be blogging both here and at AGM with more information about the startup process, finding backers, creating a sustainable business model, the joys and perils of bootstrapping, self-employment of launching a crowdsharing projects.

*For the record, I’ve already missed two days. I’ll improve as we go along.

Once I digested what I read, I started writing:

I had some awesome editors for the project, but it meant more revisions:

At the end of the day, though, it was well worth it:

Now that it’s done, I’ll be back more regularly to entertain the four or five of you still reading

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When Jen finally got around to showing me her newest blog, Sex, Mortality, Age, and Illness: I’m in my 30′s, I was captivated. It takes a lot of courage to share the intimate details of a chronic illness with the world at large, especially without coming across as pity poor me journalism.

I immediately volunteered to build her a new blog, and watched proudly as people discovered the stories waiting for them at the freshly launched and retitled A Life Less Convenient site. Right from the beginning, this was different than Jen’s other sites; her extensive use of photography from Flickr to illustrate each story made it both visually appealing and edgier.

The tremendous support from the community and readers growing up around A Life Less Convenient helped Jen make a major leap of faith – she agreed to release a limited edition book, complete with new, unpublished letters.

In the same spirit, the print edition of A Life Less Convenient, Letters to My Ex will also feature the original full color artwork and photography of seven amazing photographers (all Flickr regulars) whose work has previously graced the blog. The artists featured include:

Chris Koelbleitner (Bekon)
Camil Tulcan
Machine
Duncan Gold (Autowitch)
Hans Proppe (Shadowplay)
Sara Lando (Rent-a-Moose)
Fernando Montiel Klint (Ferklint)

A Life Less Convenient, Letters to My Ex goes on sale August 15, 2006 via all the usual places. Congratulations to everyone involved in making this project a reality – it’s always exciting to see dreams take form.

I’m often challenged to find innovative solutions for clients who, by desire, accident or illness, find themselves in need of self-employment. One of the largest barriers for these fledgling entrepreneurs to cross is what I’d like to call the fright line – they like the idea of starting their own business, but they are afraid of doing so because the mechanics of the process seem dauntingly high.

When challenged on their “fear factor”, I tend to hear some common objections – fear of failure, lack of funds, lack of time, lack of ideas, insufficient knowledge – basically, the fear of the unknown “awful event” lurking behind a dark corner. Technology has and hasn’t helped – while the Internet has increased awareness of self-employment tools and opportunities, it has come with a side helping of spam, scams and schemes that scare sensible folk.

At the same time, because these are sensible folk, they quickly see the potential of the internet, even if they’re still cautious about the actual mechanics of making it work for them.

Keen was a great idea, but when it launched way back in 1999, most of its ideal target market wasn’t ready for it, nor was there really a critical need for it, then – we were at the dawn of the knowledge economy. The convergence of wider broadband adoption, beefier equipment, outsourcing, downsizing and drop in technology costs led to the blogosphere and social networking sites so popular today. As people’s level of comfort online increased, participation has likewise increased, leading to the earliest phase of the knowledge economy.

Tristero made a recent post at Hullaballo aptly titled: On The Internet No One Knows You’re A (Singing) Dog (emphasis mine) that explains this more eloquently than I can:

For me, the most interesting aspect of blogging has nothing to do with anyone’s accomplishments but rather the present quality of their thought and the extent of their knowledge. While it is much less true now than it was in the olden days five years ago, it is still the case that prior reputation counts for much less in the blogosphere than it does Out There. You are read, or not read, based entirely on your ability to persuade from post to post. And in order to be persuasive, not only must you be a decent writer, but you damn well better know how to back up your assertions with convincing, relevant, links. Whether you’ve got a doctorate in political science from Stanford or are an 11 year old afraid to come out of your bedroom really is besides the point.

That is how it should be. If it does anything, blogging can make hash of the rhetorical fallacy of appealing to authority. One’s authority as a blogger, to the extent anyone has any, comes entirely from the merit of the posts. And that is wonderful. You don’t read Josh Marshall’s blog because he’s got a reputation as an ace reporter. You read his blog because with every post, he reports. He is actively making a reputation in a way that, say, a NY Times reporter doesn’t have to. The mere act of being hired by the Times confers (even now, of course) an authoritative reputation, whether or not it is deserved. To put it into big words: At its best, blogging transmutes reified power – authority – back into something contingent. Authority is no longer a noun, but a verb. You earn your reputation with every word. It’s never assumed.

Ether offers subject matter experts who happen to also be bloggers an additional option for monetizing their site. Just as low/no cost content management software and blog software led to an explosion of authors, so too could Ether lead to an explosion of new consultants. Why do I think this is so disruptive? Two reasons, really.

For one, it lowers the cost of entry, which means that it will fuel additional growth down the road. For the other, Ether has focused on providing the infrastructure and tool set, not a centralized directory. This means that a blogger with even a small core audience has an opportunity to use Ether’s tools – they’re not size or audience dependent as advertising is.

Still not sure? One last morsel of food for thought, then.

When eBay launched in 1995, they set off the first avalanche of casual online sellers. A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 17 percent of Internet users — 25 million people — sell goods and services online. At the end of 2005, they had over 68 million users buying and selling tangible goods from each other.

Creating a simplified way to sell knowledge was a logical and overdue step on the economic evolution of the net – tying that into the traffic and authority of blogs and websites will once again alter the face of online commerce.

Now, go disrupt something!

Update: I just heard from Ether and I am going to be part of the Beta test of their latest version, so stay tuned for more information. For those who have emailed me to ask, no, I am not being paid for my comments – I do not have a consulting relationship with either Ether or Ingenio.

Ether | Web 2.0 | Monetization