Just watch Hans Rosling's fascinating presentation to the State Department last June (below), and you don't have to be a development economist or a public health statistician to see that the World Bank's new open data initiative has great potential. Today, the Bank gave the world unrestricted access to much of its global economic and development data, allowing brighter minds than this one—the Hans Roslings of the world—to peer in with an outside perspective and to mine it for new insight. Rosling himself sent a tweet today hailing the "liberation" of the Bank's statistics and calling for the IMF, OECD and UN agencies to follow suit.

Watch the video below and visit www.gapminder.org to check out the interactive tool you'll see in the presentation.

For the past few days, the erupting Icelandic volcano with the best name ever has shut down all air travel to and from northern Europe, stranding, among millions of others, the community of change agents who were gathered in London for the 2010 Skoll World Forum. Eyjafjallajökull gave them a blank whiteboard—they gave us TEDxVolcano.

I guess it's just what happens when hundreds of people from the leading edges of social change are plucked from their various paths and dropped into the same city for a few days of unplanned, tangential time. In thirty-six hours, an impromptu team of individuals and organizations assembled a TEDx event, which they hosted and live-streamed today, Sunday evening London time.

The event was intimate but featured rockstars of the social change community. Cara Mertes, Head of Documentaries for Sundance, described the volcano-related situation we are now facing as a fortunate, indeed a miraculous, "sneak preview" into the future, when the natural world becomes out-of-sync with human society due to climate change. This preview is fortunate, she said, in that it can help us learn, and miraculous in that it is peaceful—which may not be the case when we must deal with the real thing. Matthew Bishop, author of Philanthrocapitalism and U.S. Business Editor / New York Bureau Chief at The Economist, talked about how some have failed to see that the paradigm has changed since the financial meltdown of 2008, and how that prevents them from seeing that doors that had been closed are now open. He also argued for a focus on the "enabling problem"—one that will help us solve many others—by ensuring that the media plays its proper role in improving the quality of public debate, rather than polarizing issues and turning important discussions into simplistic shouting, as it often does. Nathaniel Whittemore, the catalyst for TEDxVolcano, described the event as an illustration of the power of "Why not?", pointing out that when enough people come together saying "Why not?" it becomes a "Hell yes!" He will surely write about the event, so be sure to check out reflections on his blog as well. TED's June Cohen did a wonderful job as host.

It is pretty awesome that this group of people planned, hosted and streamed this event in a weekend. Thank you!

View a recording of TEDxVolcano below:

I'm no Einstein. But it turns out we share something in common.

I remember spending long nights, back at school, struggling through practice cases with my business case competition team. In addressing those complex, hopelessly unstructured problems, it felt like we were fighting through tangled conceptual jungle, often aimlessly, just searching for something by which to be oriented. With the vines and branches in our faces, it was a real effort just to take the next step, let alone to understand if we were following the right path. Those nights, when we were trying to make sense of those cases, I remember it helping to stand up and move from where I was sitting, perhaps in front of the whiteboard in the empty classrooms in which we often worked, to sit away from the group at the other end of the room. It didn't matter where I went, really, but it mattered that I moved. The challenge was still the same and I had no new information, but placing myself in a different physical context helped me to arrive at a different conceptual vantage point in relation to our problem.

Now, I wasn't deriving the theory of relativity by any stretch of the imagination, but I recently heard an interesting argument using Albert Einstein as an example to explain the power of having a different perspective, and it helped me to understand why my quirky change of location helped in solving big problems. Author Jonas Lehrer, in a recent PopTech video, argues that, had Einstein not been kept outside of the core academic circles of his day (as a Jew, the argument goes, he was relegated to being a patent clerk instead of entering into a tenure track at a prestigious university), he may not have reached the revolutionary understandings of our universe that he did. Being an outsider, Lehrer says, let Einstein think outside of the box.

Interesting thought? Yep. Revolutionary idea itself? Not really. But the more it settles in, the more I begin to really appreciate it. And the more I begin to see that our future progress will rely on it (just as, apparently, our progress thus far has relied on it).

Indeed, some social profit organizations root their change efforts in this principle of new perspectives. I used to intern with a small outfit of amazing people who did this. This group shares with facilitators around the world a symposium that helps people examine the unexamined assumptions which underlie so much of what we do. The symposium helps people reflect on questions like when we say we throw something away, where is "away"? The experience is an awakening, they say, which helps people make more enlightened decisions through new perspectives on day-to-day assumptions.

I have been reading the book What the Dog Saw, written by Malcolm Gladwell (and delivered by Santa), and I notice the same principle at work. The book is a selection of pieces that Gladwell wrote for The New Yorker, all of which (at least through page 198) show that the genius in his storytelling lies in helping the reader look at something mundane from a new angle—from outside the framework of the day-to-day. Though "Million-Dollar Murray" is not my favorite piece (I like most, so far, the one after which the book is titled), it's another good example of this idea at work in a situation with social value implications. In this piece, Gladwell helps us look at homelessness and its societal cost from a vantage point much different from our daily encounters. Through the novel perspectives in this piece and others, Gladwell nudges us to reach for and take the mental freedom to explore possibilities.

It is this principle that also gives power to those inspiring quotes which we put below serene photos or on Facebook pages or on post-it notes stuck to computer monitors. These quotes give us the freedom to think big by elegantly showing us another way to look at the mundane. For example, to quote none other than Mr. Einstein: "The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing." This thought throws open a door to new horizons of possibilities if we were to, say, think beyond the idea of evil as pertaining to those who perpetrate it and instead to the idea of evil existing because of the failure of a collective response by the world to overwhelm it. Evil, from this perspective, pertains to all of us, rather than to certain individuals.

In writing this post, I realized that what I like about my favorite quote (below) is precisely that it challenges me to contemplate what may be on the other side of the walls of my own box.

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." – Friedrich Nietzsche

So this principle, I'm realizing, really is commonplace itself. But, like Einstein, I'm now viewing it from a different perspective—and I'm taking Gladwell's cue to look upward and embrace the mental freedom to explore.

Photo credit: tom.hensel