Al Gore Chicago Climate Leadership Training and Next Steps

Al Gore & Chicago Climate Leaders

Mary Vincent & Al Gore

I'm very grateful to have attended Al Gore's Chicago July 2013 Climate Reality Leadership Training. I highly recommend you try to apply for a future training, and the next one is in South Africa March 2014.

A video clip from his closing presentation is below. A few quotes include: "This is our home; it is in danger. You are the key to making that change! We have everything we need; we need to inspire political will and political will is a renewable resource".

As many of you know I've been applying my knowledge in tech to the climate challenge since May 2008 by starting out in Green IT/Data Center Energy Efficiency, co-creating a Facebook app called Green Facts, experimenting with a variety of online green stores, leveraging Blogs such as Smart Tech News and other digital media platforms to feature inspiring business, technology and entrepreneurial use cases, and creating Gratitude Gourmet to address Food, Climate and Health Issues.

Due to my global mobile health application work, I was recently asked to co-lecture at the Stanford School of Medicine to Global Health for Residents & Physicians For Social Responsibility classes, and in addition to talking about mobile health application development, I introduced 2 slides on Health & Climate Change, inspired by New Brunswick, Canada's Public Health Nurse, Marg Milburn's Health & Climate Change presentation at the Chicago Climate Reality Training. Examples include increased asthma, and heat, cold, and flood related mortality cases.

Here's the Closing Video Clip from Al Gore. How are you addressing climate change?

Video: Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook Product Development at Mobile Dev Day

Photo Credit: Mary Vincent

As a creator and co-creator of a variety of software products and services, I find great value in listening and learning from many people making creative, evolutionary and revolutionary products and services.

I attended Mobile Dev Day at Facebook this week, and Mark Zuckerberg gave us great insight on his Product Development Process in the video and steps below.

1. Listen to folks' qualitative and quantitative feedback and figure out what people want and want from us and what we're in a position to provide

2. Take that external and top-down perspective and try to couple that with bottom-up culture. Number one success criteria Mark predicts whether a project is going to work is whether there is someone at Facebook that's excited about doing it; I can't just decide we're going to do something and get feedback from the market that we should do something and pull a group of people together and alright now you're going to do that; without inspiration stuff just doesn't work very well.

3. Try to match up what people internally are very passionate about doing with what the market needs seem to be from whoever the segments of customers are, whether they're people using our services, developers, or advertisers

4. Prioritize what we think will have the biggest impact based on how well we think we can execute those things. It's a very fluid process.