The Ashoka Changemakers are running  "Citizen Media: A Global Innovation Competition", in partnership with Global Voices and with the support of Google. The goal of the competition is to identify and amplify new ideas for media that catalyze participatory citizenship.

From February 11-13, Ashoka and The Lemelson Foundation, with support from Microsoft, brought together pioneers and thought leaders in the field of technology and invention for systemic social change.

Last month, I was lucky enough to attend Ashoka's Tech4Society conference in Hyderabad, India, as a writer for the AshokaTech blog. Since then, I've continued to write at AshokaTech about technological innovations in the nonprofit and social enterprise sectors. This post originally appeared there.

Ashoka hosts a monthly, Twitter-based chat called SocEntChat, in which anyone can participate and discuss issues surrounding social enterprise. It's a great place to share ideas. This month's chat was all about technological innovations, hosted by Ashoka's Tom Dawkins. Along with the usual crowd, Tech4Society organizer (and Twitter newcomer) Rosa Wang was there to share reflections from the conference. You can read the full transcript here.

Tom's first question was, "What breakthrough invention do you think will reshape the lives of the poor?" There were a lot of good answers - mobile phones, solar power, clean water - but I wondered if perhaps the question was too broad for there to be any one good answer. In a Tech4Society panel on mobile phones, for example, Ashoka-Lemelson fellow Madan Mohan Rao said that the increase in mobile phone use in rural India has the unintended consequence of limiting women's ability to communicate, as over 90% of family mobiles are carried by men. According to Rao, social equity still requires landline phones. In this way, what's more important than a specific technological solution is a willingness to pay attention to the needs you're meeting. The high-tech solution isn't always the better one, even if the low-tech one is more difficult.

Originally published on AshokaTech.

One of the many sessions in Hyderabad that I'm really excited about is a discussion on intellectual property with Richard Jefferson of Cambia, John Wilbanks of Science Commons, Phil Weilerstein of the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, and Ashoka fellow Bright Simons of mPedigree.

Here's a great interview with Richard Jefferson that ABC TV Australia ran a few months ago. Jefferson explains how Cambia is enabling biotech innovation by rethinking how scientists deal with IP issues. He makes the alluring point that open source - something we often think of as a recent development - has actually existed for millennia, much longer than proprietary technologies.

Ashoka and the Lemelson Foundation invite bloggers covering the intersection of technology, invention and social change to be the official blogger at the upcoming Tech 4 Society conference in Hyderabad, India where 100 Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows will be attending, in addition to other changemakers, to share ideas and projects that are changing the world through technology and invention.

One of the themes discussed at the beginning of the Sao Paolo gathering (after we dried off the Sao Paolo rain, which took us by surprise on the way and drenched us, literally, and which allowed us to skip the ice-breaking  dynamic) was about the main barriers that impede social technologies in reaching the people for whom they were invented. Social technologies are products and services that seek to improve the quality of life of the people who today are exclused from the system because of their economic situation, location, culture, physical disability, etc.

Every social entrepreneur seeks financial sustainability regardless of their mission. In looking to create a bigger demand for green products, Ashoka Fellow S. Rajagopalan figured out how to generate almost half of his organization's annual budget from entrepreneur-commissioned sales. Here's how he did it.

Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Howard Weinstein is on a mission.  “250 million people in the world need a hearing aid, yet only 6 million are sold each year, mainly to people who can afford $1,000 - $15,000 US.  This is a huge shortfall, and Howard is trying to do something about it.  His organization, Solar Ear, is making desperately needed hearing aid technology affordable to the world’s poor.

How can social entrepreneurs drive the adoption of their mobile activism tools? Participants in Ashoka’s Social Entrepreneurship Twitter chat identified several key themes. Broadly speaking, the key drivers of adoption fall into three categories: design, distribution and context.

I can think of no better introduction to the topic of sanitation than the words of a former professor of mine: "I know its seems mundane and a little gross," she said to our class, "but what a society chooses to do with its poop and pee is one of the most important public health decisions it can make."  Despite the importance of sanitation reform in the developing world, it has to be one of the least glamorous fields out there.  Until recently, that is.