Darian Hickman
I love warm weather, soccer, social entrepreneurs, and Jesus. I'm obsessed about the future and want to design it via a video game called Village the Game: http://www.villagethegame.com. To get the updates about my adventures join my newsletter at:
http://groups.google.com/group/Darian-Hickman
Here's an old about me post; I really should update this - Wednesday, September 28, 2005
July 2004
I'm living in Northern Virginia at the moment. I go to a really cool church called CrossCurrent . Also I'm working at a company called TMA . The coolest organization I worked for during college and to this day my favorite job is Students Sharing Coalition . They are a very cool nonprofit organization based in Baltimore MD where I went to school at Johns Hopkins University . I got a BS degree from the Computer Science Department . Originally I went in with the intention to build education/learning software that was so advanced that it would come to dominate the way education was performed. That hasn't happened yet. Instead I discovered a more urgent cause, the Labor Rights Movement. I went to a bunch of different seminars where activists spoke. I even formed a group under the auspices of Students Sharing Coalition to recruit high school students to raise awareness of these issues in schools and beyond. We did some work to support the Workers Rights Consortium . After working on that cause I grew a little disenchanted with what I had to offer to the movement. Although raising awareness was fun, I wanted to do something more tangible to help the poor and the oppressed as we are called to do in various parts of the Bible. Also I was tired of struggling with how to balance my pursuit of such a demanding degree from Hopkins with this extracurricular that was so blatantly unrelated to computer science. (For the most part I was the only engineer outside of the Environmental Engineers that took interest in the movement). I also had to balance with my social life in Hopkins Christian Fellowship . Most of my Christian friends were not involved in such a blatantly liberal dominated movement. It made me sad and angry that my Christian friends neglected this effort that was so blatantly in line with the heart of God. Then again, most of my friends weren't willing to sacrifice their study time or their GPAs like I was. I had no intention of prolonging my agony into grad school. Quite frankly I had already learned way more about computers than I ever wanted to know. The only thing that kept me going was enormous opportunities to support these social justice causes with my technological wizardry. I got to help the cause a little bit. But again, maintaining my B- average took a lot of time from these ideas that I had. Also, most of the stuff that I thought about building already existed. I'm not a big fan of reinventing the wheel. Everything from online donation services , to employee-owned cooperatives was already out there. I started learning more about what already existed to help people overcome the poverty and oppression they endure. I realized that bridging the gap between the technology tools and the people that needed was mostly a marketing task. That's when I read Diffusion of Innovations . Bam! All the big picture problems and solutions running through my head for 4 excruciating years at Hopkins were all summarized in this one freaking book, already at its 4th Edition. I didn't discover this book until after I graduated. Largely the issues I was facing were marketing and business model issues. Business was already an interest of mine, because I was always trying to come up with ideas for self-sustaining organizations to help the poor help themselves. I discovered that there was already a name for this concept too, social-entrepreneurship . People start for-profit businesses for the sake of alleviating poverty. The first time I had ever heard of the concept was back in high school when I read about the Grameen Bank in Parade magazine. Simple concept: give small loans to poor entrepreneurs so they can start businesses to support their families. It took off like wildfire and now there's all kinds of microenterprise organizations. Now I'm figuring out how to segway my technical career into a business oriented career. My main hope is a Christian organization called World Hope . They are actually just 4 miles from the Object Sciences office. They do several microenterprise projects along withall kinds of community development projects. They provide solutions to real problems in a Christ-based fashion.
I'm living in Northern Virginia at the moment. I go to a really cool church called CrossCurrent . Also I'm working at a company called TMA . The coolest organization I worked for during college and to this day my favorite job is Students Sharing Coalition . They are a very cool nonprofit organization based in Baltimore MD where I went to school at Johns Hopkins University . I got a BS degree from the Computer Science Department . Originally I went in with the intention to build education/learning software that was so advanced that it would come to dominate the way education was performed. That hasn't happened yet. Instead I discovered a more urgent cause, the Labor Rights Movement. I went to a bunch of different seminars where activists spoke. I even formed a group under the auspices of Students Sharing Coalition to recruit high school students to raise awareness of these issues in schools and beyond. We did some work to support the Workers Rights Consortium . After working on that cause I grew a little disenchanted with what I had to offer to the movement. Although raising awareness was fun, I wanted to do something more tangible to help the poor and the oppressed as we are called to do in various parts of the Bible. Also I was tired of struggling with how to balance my pursuit of such a demanding degree from Hopkins with this extracurricular that was so blatantly unrelated to computer science. (For the most part I was the only engineer outside of the Environmental Engineers that took interest in the movement). I also had to balance with my social life in Hopkins Christian Fellowship . Most of my Christian friends were not involved in such a blatantly liberal dominated movement. It made me sad and angry that my Christian friends neglected this effort that was so blatantly in line with the heart of God. Then again, most of my friends weren't willing to sacrifice their study time or their GPAs like I was. I had no intention of prolonging my agony into grad school. Quite frankly I had already learned way more about computers than I ever wanted to know. The only thing that kept me going was enormous opportunities to support these social justice causes with my technological wizardry. I got to help the cause a little bit. But again, maintaining my B- average took a lot of time from these ideas that I had. Also, most of the stuff that I thought about building already existed. I'm not a big fan of reinventing the wheel. Everything from online donation services , to employee-owned cooperatives was already out there. I started learning more about what already existed to help people overcome the poverty and oppression they endure. I realized that bridging the gap between the technology tools and the people that needed was mostly a marketing task. That's when I read Diffusion of Innovations . Bam! All the big picture problems and solutions running through my head for 4 excruciating years at Hopkins were all summarized in this one freaking book, already at its 4th Edition. I didn't discover this book until after I graduated. Largely the issues I was facing were marketing and business model issues. Business was already an interest of mine, because I was always trying to come up with ideas for self-sustaining organizations to help the poor help themselves. I discovered that there was already a name for this concept too, social-entrepreneurship . People start for-profit businesses for the sake of alleviating poverty. The first time I had ever heard of the concept was back in high school when I read about the Grameen Bank in Parade magazine. Simple concept: give small loans to poor entrepreneurs so they can start businesses to support their families. It took off like wildfire and now there's all kinds of microenterprise organizations. Now I'm figuring out how to segway my technical career into a business oriented career. My main hope is a Christian organization called World Hope . They are actually just 4 miles from the Object Sciences office. They do several microenterprise projects along withall kinds of community development projects. They provide solutions to real problems in a Christ-based fashion.
