Mitra Ardron

Mitra Ardron

Technology, Scale, International Development

San Francisco, USA

mitra@mitra.biz

+1(510)423-1767

skype: mitra_earth

This site is still under construction, my old site is here, and see www.naturalinnovation.org.



Technology for International Development

I'm passionate about developing and using technology to sustainably and scalably solve the problems of poverty and international development at scale. In particular I'm interested in the type of problems where solutions exist in the West, but are not affordable to much of the world. I've started several Social Ventures and NGO's in this theme, and since the sale of Lumeter am consulting to a number of interesting technology based projects.

Lumeter Networks - PAYG Technology leader Founder 2012 - 2017 ...
CEO, CTO and Founder 2012 - June 2017

We developed the leading PAYG technology, including hardware solutions embedded in the products of multiple manufacturers; and a full-stack dashboard enabling solar companies to deliver solutions to 40,000+ people. We had sales in 69 countries by the time we sold the company to Mobisol in 2017. www.lumeter.net


Ecosystem for technology and development

I believe there are many challenges in development that are amenable to solutions that are at least in part technical, but that for systemic reasons we aren't tackling. In particular there are very few sources of funding for technical solutions, which fall between the cracks: Too big for Angels; not enough return for VC's, too risky for Philanthropists; and too early for Impact funds.

Conversations with technology support ecosystem

I believe the best approach may be too work with foundations to align some portion of their funding to higher risk developments that have a chance of solving a problem they, or their grantees, care about. I'm starting conversations with foundations, and others in the development ecosystem and I'm also interested in talking with people who may have other approaches to this problem.

Mentoring

I'm active as a mentor, through a number of organizations including: Mentor Capital Network where I've been a board member, judge, and entrant in their competition; I've also been a judge on ASME & Engineering for Change (E4C)'s iShow competition & for CleanTech Open Global. I'm always interested in how we can improve the support that can be brought to technology based social entrepreneurs.


Decentralizing the Web

I'm working with the Internet Archive and some of the other internet pioneers, to advance a vision of decentralized internet, where power lies with the users - both writers and readers, rather than with the owners of infrastructure.

Library

We are building a set of libraries to make it as easy to build for a decentralized web as for the existing centralized one. Its still at the early stages but will support multiple transport layers (such as IPFS) and simplify application building. Get our working draft and code at Google Doc ...


Support

We are developing approaches to allow the Internet Archive to better support a decentralized web and to make some of the Archives collections accessible via distributed tools. More later ...