Victor Barnes, Director of the Corporate Council HIV/AIDS Initiative was one of the 254 invited participants in the Fortune /Aspen Institute Brainstorm 2004 in July. Brainstorm is the product of Fortune Magazine Senior Editor, David Kirkpatrick’s effort to pull together a variety of “smart people, put them in rooms, assign them topics and watch what happens."

This year’s three day event combined a range of participants from Queen Noor, General Wesley Clark, Michael Eisner, Ralph Reed, Imaam Feisal Abdul Rauf, to the CEO’s of HP, Motorola, General Motors, and Coca-Cola as well as young entrepreneurs from China, Sweden and the U.S. 

Mr. Barnes was asked to speak on the role of the private sector in addressing the global HIV/AIDS pandemic.  Several sessions were spent articulating the private sector response to HIV/AIDS in a variety of industries and in discussion of lessons learned from Africa to be applied to Asia.  The opportunity for diverse and often divergent perspectives, political as well as professional, to be applied across an array of topics was both stimulating and rewarding. 

Partially as a result of ideas discussed at Brainstorm, the HIV/AIDS Initiative will be organizing a meeting with CCA members in the information technology and communications fields to define and develop potential roles and markets for applied technologies in addressing infrastructure requirements for HIV/AIDS treatment in Africa.