TED Newsmakers: Samantha Power to become ambassador to the UN, Jennifer Pahlka joins White House staff

News Samantha Power (left) and Jennifer Pahlka (right) speak at TED2008 and TED2012, respectively.

Today, Barack Obama will be naming a new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations – and sources say that it will be Samantha Power, outspoken anti-genocide official and TED2008 speaker. Power is expected to replace Susan Rice, who sources say will be named national security advisor.

Samantha Power on a complicated heroPower is a fascinating choice for this very important role. She’s been a longtime aide to Obama; when the president established an Atrocities Prevention Board in 2012, he named Power as its chair. Power also served as the National Security Staff’s Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights from the beginning of Obama’s term through February 2013, when she left to spend time with her husband and two small children. A statement at the time said she was “likely to return to the administration.”

Power’s TED Talk gives us the feeling that she will deeply embrace her role as UN ambassador. At TED2008, she spoke with intense passion about the rise of the anti-genocide movement in the United States in recent years. She also tells the story of Sergio Vieira de Mello of Brazil, a UN diplomat for 34 years who was killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq in 2003. Listen as she tells the story of how he tiptoed across difficult moral lines to save lives in the world’s most broken places, and the lessons she learned from his career.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Pahlka — founder and executive director of Code for America and a TED2012 speaker – announced big news of her own. She is joining the staff of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, serving as the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation for the a year.Jennifer Pahlka: Coding a better government In a blog post, she writes that she’s taking the role for two reasons –  to help the government embrace technological innovations, and to gain a deeper understanding of what it’s like to work inside government for when she returns to Code for America.

We’ll be closely watching what Pahlka does in this new role. In her TED Talk, she asks people who’ve given up on government to give their withdrawal a closer look. “Technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government in a way that can actually scale by strengthening civil society,” Pahlka says. “And there’s a generation out there that’s grown up on the Internet, and they know that it’s not that hard to do things together – you just have to architect the systems the right way.”

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Possum problems and building better government: Jennifer Pahlka at TED2012

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of Code for America, an organization she describes as being like Peace Corps for geeks, “only instead of sending people to the third world, we send them to the wilds of City Hall.”

The fellows’ mission, should they choose to accept it, is to show government what’s possible via technology. She shows a picture of a fire hydrant in Boston that was only rarely dug out when it snowed. One of the Code for America volunteers built an app to let people commit to digging out a fire hydrant. It’s only a small product, she acknowledges, yet its impact has been viral. Someone in Honolulu has adapted the app to care for tsunami sirens; Seattle has adopted it to get people to clear storm drains; Chicago is using it to get people to sign up to clear sidewalks when it snows. Nine cities have signed up: the app’s influence has spread organically and without friction. And that’s not normally how it goes in government. She mentions another project helping parents get their kids into the right public school. In the real world, she was told that would have taken two years and cost $2 million. The Code for America fellow cranked it out in 2.5 months.

Yet the main theme of Pahlka’s talk is not to talk about apps. Those are just the start. Instead, she implores the audience to engage with government, not give up on it. Sure, we can be frustrated, but we can’t give up. “Government is about doing together what we can’t do alone.” And government, too, is how we tackle people’s possum problems. What on earth does she mean? Simple. She means someone who calls a city helpline to report a possum in a trash can. In Boston, someone posted just that problem to the app Citizens Connect. A neighbor saw the post and responded: “Located trash can. Possum? Check. Living? Yep. Turned the trash can on its side. Walked home. Good night, sweet possum.” As Pahlka describes it, it’s a great example of digital meeting physical–and of government getting in on crowdsourcing. And that’s how we should think of government, as a platform to connect people and thereby strengthen communities.

“We have to make bureaucracy sexy,” she says to an admittedly lone whoop from the audience. Instead of despising bureaucracy and government, we should consider how we interact with an institution that, after all, acts on all our behalves. “We can’t do without government, but we do need it to be more effective.” Inspired by the way in which Code for America fellows have applied themselves, she sees the apps they are creating as “little digital reminders that we’re not just consumers of government. We’re more than that. We’re citizens.” And she closes with a provocative question: “When it comes to the big important things we need to do together, are we just going to be a crowd of voices or a crowd of hands?”

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Fellows Friday with Jennifer Indovina

With her boundless energy and playful spirit, Jen Indovina is making that most boring of environmental imperatives –- energy efficiency –- sexy and fun. Her invention, the PICOwatt, enables smartphone users to control the energy use in their home or office from anywhere in the world.

Interactive Fellows Friday Feature!

Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via Facebook. This week, Jen asks:

“Most people think energy efficiency is boring. Besides an iPhone or Facebook app, how else can we show the playful side of energy efficiency?”

Click here to respond!

As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A plumber. What can I say? I like to fix problems. I have a picture of me at the beach in a polka dot swimsuit holding a PEZ dispenser. Below it my teacher wrote, “My name is Jennifer. My favorite color is blue. I want to be a plumber when I grow up.”

I’ve unclogged a few sinks in my time.

What a metaphor — now you’re fixing the clogged drains of the energy system.

[Laughs] That’s right.

Tell us about your company, Tenrehte.

Tenrehte (pronounced TEN-rate) is “Ethernet” spelled backwards. We decided to call it that because the whole crux of the company is to rethink new applications for wireless technology and Internet connectivity.

When I graduated from college, I was working for a Chinese semiconductor company. It required me to travel to China and train salespeople in mobile Internet television.   To make a long story short, they eventually outsourced my job to China, so I decided to start Tenrehte.

I began brainstorming with some people I had been working with at that semiconductor company. We came up with three ideas for what we could be doing. One was patient-medical technology, where doctors could monitor patients from the Internet, from their cell phones. The other idea was Internet in everything. That was kind of my crazy, abstract idea. Let’s put Internet in your TV, your refrigerator, everything.  Maybe your TV is watching Food Network, and your TV tells your fridge, “Jen just watched Food Network, she’s going to want salmon tonight, so fridge, make sure the salmon’s thoroughly thawed and ready for Jen to cook it.

And the third idea was green technology: energy management, energy efficiency. So our team started making prototypes, and one of the prototypes was an outlet adapter that could communicate with the Internet. From your smartphone, you could tell the outlet to shut on and off devices from anywhere in the world. So if you’re traveling, and you can’t remember if you turned off your light, you could turn it off.

We called the product the PICOwattTM. It’s an outlet-based device, which means it’s retrofit, so you don’t have to rip open your whole house or whole office just to make your appliances smart. We thought it was a very fundamental, simple solution.

We need some simple solutions. I don’t know about you, but I am over stimulated.

Why do you call it “PICOwatt”?

PICO stands for Portable Intelligent Communicator – portraying a sense of a vision for the future of sensors. The “watt” part of the name reminds us that solutions need to be practical, with applications for affecting change now.

What made your product really take off?

I heard about a competition associated with the Consumer Electronics Show, called iStage — a showroom for prototype technologies. So we entered in our outlet adapter, the PICOwattTM Smart Plug.

We were selected as a finalist for iStage, and our product really resonated with people. When I held up my iPhone and pressed “On,” the light turned on. I pressed “Off” and the light turned off. That simple moment had a big impact.

We didn’t win the iStage competition, but they gave us a booth at the Consumer Electronics Show anyway. With my background in marketing, I lined up a ton of media interviews. That was great — we had C-NET, Fox Business News, and we had the BBC cover us … it was amazing. We were up against 5,000 incredible competitors — including the likes of Google — and we ended up winning Best of CES Green Product of the Year.

Jen with boyfriend and Tenrehte co-founder Carlos: proud winners of the Best of CES Green Product of the Year award.

I think we won because we were doing something revolutionary to Smart Grid and energy when nobody was really talking about it.

Our product simplifies control for energy consumers, as opposed to restricting them or trying to make them feel guilty. We are the only ones saying, “We’re human. We use power. We’re going to continue to use power.”

We can’t just assume that people care about managing their own energy. We have to give them tools that are really simple, and also fun and interesting for them.

What’s the company’s latest big news?

Right now we’re in the process of making sales to corporate customers, governments, and institutions. They are trying to understand the energy use of buildings, and understand how energy efficiency really is the catalyst for the green movement. Without saving energy, we will never get to the point of being 100% renewable. We just don’t have the infrastructure to support full solar, full wind, off-grid, without energy efficiency.

One of the big concerns are blackouts. In countries such as South Africa blackouts can be life threatening and more expensive to fix. Because PICOwattTM is Internet-enabled, it can give a real-time alert of an outage or peak power usage.

In the US, I get a lot of flack for doing retrofit because it’s “ugly.” But outside of the US, there isn’t such a tendency to throw out a new TV and buy a new one because it’s two inches bigger! And a quarter less power usage!  For countries where people don’t need the latest and greatest, retrofit is a desirable option.  If we can provide customers a way to make the things they already own save energy, to them, that’s the true definition of green.

Tell us about your ecotourism experiences in Kenya. How did you help improve energy efficiency there?

I took an ecotourism safari with my family in 2008, all around Kenya. It really was an eye-opener for me in terms of energy. Globally, everyone is talking about green energy generation: wind, solar, tidal, underwater tidal, space wind energy, space solar energy, biofuels, spent uranium rods, terra energy. But in Kenya, I found some interesting things that we can change, right now, with the technology we already have.

Jen shares her (less than stellar) singing talent during her visit to a Maasai village.

I do thoroughly believe that the change that happens in Africa is going to come from local solutions to local problems. For instance, we visited a Maasai village and they had solar platforms that they were using to generate power.

The problem was, the batteries they had for storage of their solar power were sitting on a slab of concrete in a hut. And it gets really hot in huts.  By suggesting that they dig a ditch and bury the batteries, to keep them at a moderate temperature, the batteries would not melt.

It sounds simple, but what it shows is that sometimes you don’t need a really expensive, fancy technology to make what you already have more efficient, just look around you. Sometimes a six-inch ditch means you don’t need to build another windmill.  I believe that idea is just as true in Mombasa as it is in Rochester.

I have seen villages in Kenya that are running off of solar thermal water heating for the whole village and solar power for their schools. They are far better than us here in the West on this. Our infrastructure in the West is maybe a bit over developed. It really isn’t friendly to off-grid integration, yet.

How have you shared your experiences from abroad back home?

Well, I was invited by some teachers to present in the inner city schools here in Rochester. I made a conservationist video and I brought it in to show the kids. I gave them a glimpse of a life that they never see or hear about.

I’m big into animal rights, so I showed them the conservation techniques that exist in Kenya and how they do so well to try to mitigate poaching, to see animals as natural resources, which are worth more alive than dead.

At the end, the kids had the opportunity to write notes. They wrote things like, “That woman is crazy.”

“I can’t believe she got so close to a lion.”

“Was she nuts?”

The kids saw something they wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and they were exposed to a new culture. Any real world experience that you can share, kids will metabolize it so much better.

What did the TED Fellowship mean to you?

People say I’m very positive. You know, “Jen’s a force of nature.” And that I have so much energy, it’s like you’re talking to caffeine. But, at the same time, I think we’re all vulnerable to our own vision. [Laughs] That sounded so cheesy!

We all have our own ideas. But when we put our ideas out there, we’re vulnerable to negative feedback that isn’t constructive.

Sometimes you need support from people who understand what you’re trying to do, you need to hear that you’re doing the right thing. And not from your mother.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation blog.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Have fun, you know? I think social entrepreneurs really carry a lot of weight and gravity around with them.

I do it sometimes. I catch myself going, “I’m changing the way the world consumes energy. Dun-dun-dunnnn!” And then I have to remind myself, “Jennifer, you’re ridiculous, get back to work. Relax.”

If you’re doing what you love, you’re going to be good at it, no matter what. If you’re a social entrepreneur and you’re doing your thing, you already know to follow your passion, you know you have to find meaningful partners, and you know you need to ignore naysayers.

So just remember not to take yourself too seriously.

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