Personal Heroes: Mary Lou Jepson, David Jay, and Ran Prieur.

OK, so I know that this post is supposed to be about who I'm going to follow. And I'm supposed to choose 1 innovator. Well, I'm going to do that, but implicit in this is exercise is exposing our fellow Evokers to people I think they might want to follow. So I'm adding two other people to my post who I already follow and who I have the priviledge of calling friend. But first, the actual mission.

My Innovator to follow Mary Lou Jepson. She was one of the cofounders of OLPC, which produced the famous "Hundred Dollar Laptop" that is the ancestor of all netbooks. Her specific innovation is the one thing that other laptops have yet to duplicate from the project, the screen. I own an XO laptop, made by OLPC. I was part of the first "Give one, get one" program, and I describe myself as a "Beta tester." I use this as my only laptop, it's not a toy. I'm proud of my XO, having customized the linux OS, contributed a hack to the open source community around it, and modded my case. But whenever people ask me about my laptop, the feature I show off is the screen. It's a color LCD, but when you turn off the backlight you are left with a black and white screen that can be read in direct sunlight. The power use on the screen is low enough that I get somewhere between 4 and 8 hours of use, depending on if I turn off the wifi. Mary Lou Jepson invented this screen specifically to address the issues of the OLPC: Low power use and the ability to be read outside in places with a lot of sunlight. Currently she has left OLPC to form PixelQi, which is working on commercializing this technology. If she has her way, every computer will feature one of these screens.

Here is her Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lou_Jepsen
And I am Following her here: http://www.pixelqi.com/blog1/

Our Next Innovator is David Jay. David is a student at the presidio graduate school studying "green business." But if any of you have heard the name before, it's probably to do with his work with AVEN. David has become the media face of the Asexuality Movement, which he brought together by creating an online forum called the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network. He felt that people like himself, who aren't interested in sex, were marginalized in our culture. And he decided to solve that problem by creating a community and reaching out to educate people. And AVEN was successful enough that he and others from the group were invited to help the new CDM (the manual for psychological disorders) Reclassify low libido. These days David has turned his attention towards saving the wh*** world through sustainable business. I know David from high school, and we keep in touch. I recently worked with him on a business proposal for recyclable furniture that doubles as moving boxes. We bounce our ideas off each other constantly, and I always enjoy hearing his latest project or latest theory of community organizing. No one I know personally is more committed to make the world a better place.

You can follow his sustainable business thinking here: http://schooledgreen.wordpress.com/
And you can check out AVEN at http://www.asexuality.org/home/

My final person to follow is Ran Prieur. He is a Zine writer and Blogger. Ran is less an innovator than a philosopher, but reading his work never fails to inspire me and help me see a "big picture." He classifies himself as being on the fringe, which just means he's a Fortean. He looks for the strange stuff that doesn't fit the accepted cultural narrative, and any alternate narrative he provides is meant to provoke questioning, not be taken as truth. His Zines, "Superweed" and "Civilization will eat itself", describe the problems we face now and in the future not as isolated disasters but the natural results of how we form civilizations. But unlike most primitivists, he proposes that we can probably figure out ways to make better societies if we want to. Where innovators may be inventing the future now, Ran shows me a future worth inventing. If I just followed the innovators, I'd figure they had it handled and I could sit back. But Ran inspires me to be an innovator myself.

There's only one place to find Ran, and that's http://www.ranprieur.com/