Interview with Scott Moody
13/ 01/ 14
Skype Naiorbi – New York
Scott could you
expand on your interest and work with technology?
My primary interest with technology has always revolved
around community. My first starts up projects were community based; one was a
sort of pre cursor to Facebook, the other using email to create community. It’s
always been my interest; at the time it was an untapped market. I started out
as a software engineer and worked my way up to founding companies, eventually
moving on to advising companies and investing in companies, which is where I am
now.
Why did you find
yourself being drawn to the idea of creating community?
At the time I could see there was space for a lot of
potential and I could see it radically changing the way that people keep in
touch. My father was in the military and he moved a lot of the time. When you
move from some place everyone you knew disappears, so its always been very
important to me to use technology to create a sense of community which can be
on going where people are located and during whatever they might be going
through.
Are you inspired by
the developments you see coming up?
People being inherently lazy, (well some) I think it got off
to a rocky start when community building became about pokes and likes and
really low effort ways to engage with other people. As means of communication
have become richer and people have found more ways to express themselves, I
feel we are on the cusp of a lot of change. I think it is becoming more
substantial and more meaningful. But also anything you are exposed to in mass
quantity becomes a little less meaningful, so it’s a positive thing but also
kind of numbing us a little too; a double edged sword.
Where do you feel you
are being drawn to at the moment?
My interests at the moment revolve around creating a sense
of trust; a lot of aspects of how people use the Internet are based around
creating a sense of trust. Everything right now is being built on trust, how to
define trust and who decides what’s trustworthy. As that takes hold people are
coming up with more clever ways to break existing trust models, that’s what
interests me right now. After I went to the fundraiser in New York and listened
to you and Khadija speak it was inspiring to me and contagious. I began to
think about how community, communication and trust can be used to help an
organisation like yours thrive.
You’re coming our
very soon to join the collaborative arts project at Tumaini. What are things
you are most excited about in terms of you using technology and being a part of
the project?
In terms of the project, one of the things I have been
thinking about is the relationship between trust and transparency. I think
going forward absolute transparency might be the only way to gain trust. There
are a number of technologies available now that can make documenting more
passive rather than active, as recording everything we do would take a lot of
work. I won’t be able to bring this out with me unfortunately but there is a
new camera out that you can attach to your shirt and it takes a picture every
30 seconds. There are I phone apps too that record where you are on GPS and
what you are doing giving an automatic diary of your day as a bi product just
by you carrying it with you. A lot of these things are going to come together
over the next couple of years and I believe organisations like yours will be
able to increase trust while dealing with people at a distance, who are hearing
about you for the first time. Through what’s being referred to as a process of
life blogging everything you and your organization does there will be no room
for people to doubt the effectiveness of the organisation and how the money
gets filtered. Digitizing this project will provide some interesting content to
be able to play around with some of these concepts. If we can present it in a
way that makes people believe in it and not have to wonder about it, I think
it’s a positive thing.
Do you see any link
between these two ides of trust and transparency and artistic expression?
There is a museum in Barcelona, and there is one room
dedicated to all the variations he did for one of his famous works. You can
step in this room and see his thought process that took him all the way to the
final product and in a way that is a form of transparency. You are o the inside
looking out rather than on the outside looking in and I feel like there is an
opportunity for that to happen here. It’s the process that gets you through to
the performance. The end product is interesting but the thought process that
got you there might be even more fascinating.
Are there any other
social issues that you feel are very current at the moment for us?
I still have so much to learn about you guys and the work
that goes on at the school, but I think a challenge might be how to create
empathy and I think the arts is one way to help with that. The arts have the
power to make you feel something. It can be very difficult trying to reach
someone in the United States who’s never been to Kenya before, never heard of
Isiolo and you’re trying to get them to feel a connection with some of your
students and some of their struggles. It can be a real problem with so many
people being pulled in different directions towards charitable giving.
Charitable giving is like a pneumatic tube, you stick something in a capsule
and it disappears. It’s tough. Technology can’t magically create long distance
empathy but my instinct is that it might be possible with technology to create
a closer connection to someone on the other side of the world with a completely
different set of problems.
Are they any changes
that you hope for yourself that might come out of this experience?
I’m hoping to make a difference but also to find ways to
spread that enthusiasm to other people. I also hope that by sitting with the
other artists, I can get some ideas of things I can work on to take things
forward, to the following year even that would make the process even better. I
see it as an ideas lab. I’m looking forward to being inspired and coming away
with some great ideas that I can bring back and work on.
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