5 Social Capitalists Who Will Change the World in 2010

FOOD

Jeff Froikin Gordon and Giulia Stellari
AgSquared
Stonybrook, New York, and Washington, D.C.

After getting their biology PhDs at Cornell in May, Gordon and Stellari headed not for a research lab but a tech startup. Their product: the first-ever enterprise software system made for farmers. Yes, farmers, especially the small farmers who make up 90% of the nation's 2 million farms, and who are increasingly interested in going organic. "Record keeping has been an age old problem," says Gordon. "With sustainable practices, there's a lot more to think about. For a long time, if you had a problem, you could just spray better chemicals. Now you have to think about what you can do to make the soil stronger, or introducing beneficial insects." Beyond basic accounting of seeds in and fruits out, the computer system integrates U.S. soil data and weather mapping, and even makes analyses and recommendations based on best practices and eventually the collective wisdom of the community. Launched in beta this month (February 2010), AgSquared, which is free to farmers (paid for by sponsorships from fertilizer companies and the like) is getting rapturous reactions. "There's one guy out in Amherst who has these spreadsheets that he made himself that he'll send to other farmers for $25," says Gordon. "He told us, please make my system obsolete!"

MEDIA

Ravi Ghate
SMS ONE Media
Pune, India

Imagine the movie Newsies with a 21st century, subcontinent twist. SMS One Media is a microlocal news startup that hires undereducated street youths in rural India to edit their own SMS community newsletters. Each one is responsible for building an audience of 1000 mobile phone users and collecting local news updates--a water pump has been fixed, tomatoes are headed for market. The young mobile journalists also sell paid ads to finance the operation, collecting a living wage. Ghate himself is a high school dropout with a passion for empowering young people like himself, and using technology to transform the vast parts of India that are far from the IT boomtowns. "We want to make SMS (short messaging service) as a thread to integrate and interconnect local communities," he says. A recent project with U.S.-based nonprofit Seeds of Empowerment was a children's storytelling competition; the best writers got scholarships and their stories were published via iPhone and Kindle. The government of Bangalore is so excited that they've given the startup support to raise their readership to 5 million users in thousands of communities over the next few months.

TECHNOLOGY

Catherine Laine
AIDG
Cap Haiten, Haiti

AIDG, the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, is the type of locally headquartered, nimble organization that will be most important in Haiti's recovery process after the big troops have cleared away. They offer seed funding and other help to local entrepreneurs to start small businesses selling green tech solutions like biogas digesters that are affordable to people making less than $4 a day; along with a partner organization, SOIL, they built a pay compost toilet in one of Haiti's slums. After the earthquake, AIDG got busy coordinating volunteer engineers and distributing cookstoves, and initiated a longer-term collaboration with Architecture for Humanity to rebuild houses safely.

Laine, whose family is from Haiti, became deputy director of AIDG in 2008. With a background in both media consulting and public health, she's a widely read blogger and speaker on the connection between technology and the nonprofit sector. Her Skype interview with Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing just two days after the storm was a riveting example of how new media is changing the way the world understands and responds to disasters.