Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

46 GILBERTO GIL Musician, Activist Bossa nova, tropicalia, samba, reggae, forró- even the names of the genres Gilberto Gil, 67, has shaped are musical. Yet his background in politics and activism is almost as long as his perfor- mance career, starting with his imprisonment by the Brazilian military regime in 1969 and continuing with his work as a passionate environmentalist. Less well known is his interest in the Internet, especially the free- culture movement led by Lawrence Lessig and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the U.S. In 2008, Gil left his position as as Brazil's minister of culture to re-record old classics with his band, Banda Larga Cordel (Portu- guese for "broadband"), and release the rights to their music under a Creative Commons license to be freely remixed and shared by the world. 47 CAROL TWIGG President, CEO National Center for Academic Transformation Carol Twigg, 66, founded the National Center for Academic Transformation in 1998 to use technology to improve the quality and reduce the cost of higher education. Today, some 200 state universities 94 FASTCOMPANY.COM June 2010 and community colleges participate in NCAT'S Program for Course Redesign, which runs workshops for profes- sors and provides social-media tools and software-based tutorials that enhance student learning outside the classroom -and allow teachers to take on more students. On average, the NCAT reports that it has trimmed academic- department expenses by 37%. Joe Benson, vice president for Brazil's for- mer culture minister Gilberto Gil performs at the 2008 Montreux Jazz Festival research at the Univer- sity of Alabama, who has worked closely with Twigg, says the school's precalculus program has seen a 75% improve ment in student success rates. "There is no other education organization that has had the same kind of impact in creating high-quality, cost-effective learning initiatives," he says. 48 PARK TODD CTO Department of Health and Human Services Todd Park, 37, is taking public health data- obesity rates, smoking rates, access to healthy food-and liberating them. Through the Community Health Data Initiative, the informa- tion is now available to everyone, including developers and busi- nesses. "It's insufficient to just put data out there," he says. "We want to market them to people who can turn them into supercool apps." One developer has suggested open-sourcing a social- networking game-and creating the FarmVille of community health"We can educate people," Park says, "and help them use the data to lead healthier lives." In his mind, his current job isn't much different from his