Pierre Omidyar has done some very good things with the money he made founding eBay, not the least of which is starting the Omidyar Network. Business Week -- fast becoming the favorite economics magazine around WorldChanging -- interviews Omidyar this week, talking with him about the "power of community" and the need for greater attention to the social good.
We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people. It used to be, your connected group was really your immediate community, your neighborhood, your village, your tribe. The more we connect people, the more people know one another, the better the world will be.
Everywhere, people are getting together and connecting. And using the Internet, they're disrupting whatever activities they're involved in. It's because it's a fundamental shift in power toward the bottom, toward the people as they organize themselves, and away from a small group of people who want to impose a policy top-down. That's really the promise of the technology, and we're seeing it in all these fields.