I went for a brief walk in Clifton on Saturday afternoon. You can view the slideshow on Flickr.

You can’t fake genuine emotion. Barack Obama connects and inspires. Did you see the tear-streaked faces of those gathered in Grants Park in downtown Chicago on Tuesday night? They were not mere spectators, but active participants as Obama called for a shared vision of the future - using We, not You or I as a subject.

Photo: David Katz/Obama for America. Licensed under Creative Commons on Flickr

Very seasonable, I thought! Also, my most ‘interesting’ photo on Flickr, according to Flickreenos, with just shy of 10,000 views.

I first met Don José in 1993, which is when I took the photo on the left. And this is his chair. Not just any chair; he made this one himself.

Don José is one hundred years old, or thereabouts. Nobody knows, not even Don José. His birth certificate, along with countless other documents, was destroyed by fire during the Cristero War in 1920s Mexico. 

All of his adult life he’s lived in the small town of Tolimán, in the state of Querétaro. It used to be so green here that every year they held a festival to celebrate the advocado. This has since been re-named the “semi-desert festival” as the land has become arid and the top-soil has turned to dust. On a small plot of land half way up the hill they call “Calvary”, Don José built a tiny house of adobe and surrounded it with a prickly-pear cacti fence.

From that spot Don José has seen it all. Like the day the first motor car pulled into town causing one poor old soul to drop dead with the shock of it all. He is fond of telling how around the time of the Mexican Revolution (which cost a million lives) people used to hack the silver coins clean in half for want of small change. 

When he was a young man he built spectacular ‘castillos’ - firework-towers. He lost half of one of the fingers on his left hand, a hazard of the job if you were a ‘cohetero’. He then worked for my wife’s grandfather, and long afterwards continued to look after the house, tend the garden, and harvest the nuts when my in-laws were away for long periods. 

Don José is honest to the bone and fiercely loyal. He has very few material possessions, but is hugely generous of spirit. In his own words he is a “a good servant”.

He attributes his longevity to the occasional sip of rough tequila and a smoke - one cigarette in the morning, another just before bed - “for the soul”.

During a call ‘home’ over the weekend, my wife learned that Don José had passed away on Wednesday. According to tradition, he was buried the following day. So we lit a candle for him, and remembered.

I hope this doesn’t sound trite or patronising. I wanted to write something about him, so you can understand why I feel so lucky to have known Don José. 

Que en paz descanse, Don Josécito.

This neat little video is part of Colalife’s submission to Google’s Project 10 to the 100th - a call for ideas to change the world.

Kudos to Simon Berry and the distributed Colalife team, for this one, and their intelligent and relentless campaign.

Just this morning, Mark Charmer of Akvo alerted me to a United Nations University study, which says providing sanitation and safe water is the top route to reducing world poverty.

Please join the Colalife group on Facebook; 6,391 members… and counting.

Imagine… a humungous aggregator of all the positive good that millions of people have done today. The tiny, but not so insignificant acts of kindness and philanthropy, which if joined together would add up to one heck of a powerful narrative for a more just world.

Bad news happens fast and travels fast, while a good story can take much longer to blossom and bear fruit.

Where are the stories of the courageous people who through their own efforts, or with a little leg up such as a Kiva loan, overcome their material poverty to create a brighter tomorrow for themselves and their communities, one person at a time. 

There’s a lot of doom and gloom around at the moment. Even the last item on the late evening news - the one that is intended to make us forget the previous 25 minutes of bad news - well, even that has recently dropped off the end of the bulletin. It seems it’s all bad news.

Bloody hell, why can’t those news people get some perspective. Can’t they find just one, simple but remarkable thing that someone, or some group has done today with real and lasting social impact? Did they bother to look? 

If you’re reading this and work for a charity - this is an invitation to demonstrate the positive impact of your work, more than you do today. Don’t tell me what £50 will buy for ’someone like’; show me what £50 has achieved. Better still, let me watch a video of Fatima (a real person) that will bring me to within a heartbeat of your work. I’ll even donate towards buying a new computer, if you show me that the old one was used to empower a network of activists to make a positive difference.

I do not want to feel remote, guilty and helpless. I want to feel inspired and involved in making good stuff happen, right now. 

We all want to be part of a good news story. Good news begets more good news. 

And remember, today something good did happen. For a start, thousands and thousands of people participated in Blog Action Day.

Maybe it’s because I’m a glass-is-half-full kinda guy, but please tell me some good news, and I’ll gladly pass it on.

What are your ideas for making the good news more visible? 

I was going to write about something else for Blog Action Day. I was going to write about Save the Children’s Kroo Bay and DfID’s bloggers. I’ll mention them, because they’re worth your attention.

I’m shortly going to be doing some work with Global Giving UK, to embed some more good news around the social web.

I know this is simplistic, and I’d never have dreamt making this sort of comparison when I studied Development Economics two decades ago.

But wait a minute, when other, less powerful nations needed bailouts in the past, weren’t these accompanied by stringent conditions? At the same time the rich nations exalted the “invisible hand” of market capitalism, they also attached “conditionalities” to the loans called “structural adjustment programmes“. The poorest suffered the most. The bankers and government ministers did OK.

Of course, I’m not surprised by these double standards. It just leaves a bitter taste in the mouth when at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Gordon Brown advocates a “new global order, founded on transparency, not opacity”.

We do need a new global order. One based on fairness, equality, and justice for all. Not this.

Top row, left to right Porthcurno beach, Mousehole harbour, Rockpool play at Sennen Cove,
Middle row Sennen Cove surf, Logan Rock from Pednvounder, Looking towards the Minack Theatre,
Bottom row Pednvounder beach, Atlantic shower, Window onto the Atlantic

The Burma Campaign UK

Thanks to Joanna Juber - the charity’s Digital Engagement Manager - for inviting me to speak on a range of topics I will be blogging about over the coming months. Fundamentally, how technological innovation has always necessitated institutional innovation and how charities need to learn to be agile (the technology won’t slow to their pace).

Here’s the link to the presentation on slideshare for those of you picking this up in your feed reader, with the caveat that one or two slides make less sense without the narrative.

On my way back to Somerset on the train, I read that E. L. Doctorow once said writing a novel is like “driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

It struck me that this is much like the journey we’re all making with social media. Charities need to learn to be agile enough to get into driver’s seat, and brave enough to take the wheel and move out of second gear. It’s going to be an interesting ride. Baggsy be the co-driver.

I’m particularly looking forward to introducing Hoop MD, Sean O’Halloran who will talk about the Malaria Atlas Project (MAP). Sean has a close family link with the project.

MAP is funded by the Wellcome Trust, and is led by Professor Bob Snow at Oxford University. Malaria is one of the world’s biggest killers – but it is preventable if the right steps are taken. MAP charts the prevalence of malaria throughout the globe, and Bob’s team eventually want to make real time data available online.

Sean is as excited as I am about the creative potential of social technologies to mash up and interpret the data (through mapping, visualisations, etc.) and will be joining us at 2gether on Wednesday morning to frame the enormous challenge of eradicating malaria and perhaps bring some new energy to MAP with a big dose of collaborative thinking.

That’s just what 2gether is all about.