Can Techonomy Teach Us Something New?

When the State Department held its Haiti Tech Meet-Up last month to talk about how technology is at the crux of Haiti's relief effort, I cried foul. The whole thing looked like a political stunt to me — a missed opportunity to actually move forward with techno-relief efforts in the aftermath of the country's devastating earthquake. Now, as three former Fortune Magazine editors prepare to launch a conference in August about how humanity (and technology) “can invent its way out of the messes it has helped create,” I challenge the organizers to tell us what we don’t already know.

Techonomy, as the conference is appropriately called, will be headlined by tech powerhouses like Bill Gates and Google CEO Eric Schmidt and feature topics about as deep as they are broad, like “How humans succeed as a species” and “The new five-year plan that could change the world.” These are just two of several topics under review during the conference that will steeped in talk of the convergence between technology and the developing world. Others on the table — like “Reinventing sustenance: Feeding a world of 9.4 billion people” and “The thirst for water: Is it diminishing beyond our control?” — are a clear nod to how tech has become entrenched in the front lines in the fight against global poverty. But I hope that this conference doesn’t suffer the same fate as the Haiti Tech Meet-up — all talk and no meat and potatoes.

Fortunately, if you watch the video embedded below from Fortune editors and tech writers such as David Kirkpatrick, you’ll understand why this time around, my hopes are high.

Technology has long been at the forefront of the fight to eliminate global poverty. Take, for example, the work of Muhammad Yunus. When Muhammad Yunus founded Grameen Phone and Grameen Telecom in 1997 to bring mobile phone technology to the villages of Bangladesh — vastly enhancing access among poor people to credit and the tools necessary to live sustainably — many onlookers thought he was crazy. But in less than a decade, he had many development professionals and the mainstream media wondering whether technology could eliminate poverty.

What we need to hear from the conference's star-studded cast of innovators is an answer to the question, What’s next? If Techonomy is really about solutions, then the ideas and conversations it inspires need to be forward-looking, not bent on simply re-hashing successes of the past.

When it comes to using technology to reverse the course of poverty in the developing world, what’s easy or most obvious is oftentimes the most ineffectual. The beauty of Yunus's work is how he saw opportunity in something as simple as a mobile phone and gave it life where few others thought to try — the result being that what started in Bangladesh in 1997 had spread throughout the world by 2010. Hopefully, what starts in August at Techonomy will inspire such change in a much shorter amount of time — for as the Techonomy organizers note, time is one thing we can't spare.

Photo Credit: Sammy0716