> [K]eeping the community together and allowing it to grow and diversify is something we need to think hard about. My instincts are to do this is a way that is participative in keeping with the 2gether vibe. George Por and David Wilcox have already submitted ideas about how this could be achieved and have suggested I look at some of the emerging open franchise models that being experimented with.

Thank you David for calling our attention to the Open Franchise model! I looked into it; it inspired some ideas, to which I will come back in another post.

Steve, thanx 4 the plug. In what I referred to in my email as “augmenting and mobilizing the collective intelligence of people and organisations engaged in social innovation projects and events,” I see a critical condition of “Solving bigger problems.” (Btw, kudos for the courage and creativity to whoever came up with that line!)

> I want to explore how we can share the brand with others, share the various social tools that we used at the event so that others can pick up on and experiment them with them and share their learning and do all this is a way that doesn’t compromise the values, ethos and vibe that the brand has already generated.

We can explore that by a co-branding model of the Open Franchise idea. What if we, at CommunityIntelligence, developed the “Led2Innovate4Change” event that is on our drawing board, under the following double label:

Lead2Innovate4Change

a 2gether event

> How can we cede control and gain influence?

Well, the control issue may get taken care of if we establish and cultivate an “Open Franchise” relationship based on partnering rather than domination that frequently characterizes classic franchise.

Regarding influence, it will most likely  grow when we put a new attractor in the field, by presencing a shared future of the two memes: 2gether and

Lead2Innovate4Change

Part of that increased influence (increased share of hearts and minds) will  come from the new event’s capacity to augment and mobilize  collective intelligence that I wrote about in Potential revisited .

How does that sound to y’all?

At one of yesterday’s sessions Cliff Prior, chief executive of Unltd, and Nick Temple, from the School for Social Entrepreneurs, invited people to help develop a map of the social entrepreneur landscape, and then consider what impact and opportunities the arrival of digital services may bring. Here they offer a guided tour of the map, and summary of the session.

With the Social Innovation Camp we decided to dive right in, get our hands dirty and build some prototypes for web-enabled social innovations - tools that use social technologies to help people create change for themselves, from the grassroots up. At the moment, however, we see a disconnect between what the technology supplies and what society needs.

Technology, but not just for geeks

Those who could benefit from the use of social technology don’t necessarily see there’s a technological solution to the challenges they face. Whilst Amazon and eBay have changed the way we buy stuff, the expectation a similar tool might be an aspect of healthcare choices or a child’s education isn’t yet a reality. You can build the flashiest software in the world, but if your users can’t see the point, it’s not going to make a blind bit of difference.

On the supply-side, the vibrancy of the UK web start-up scene demonstrates that there is a wealth of technical talent out there, but software developers and designers are not necessarily social change experts. Energy currently being driven into creating the ‘next Facebook’ – yet another tool for already technologically-savvy users – needs to be given an alternative, social outlet.

The geeks with the know-how need to be matched with the people with the need. So the Social Innovation Camp started out back in 2007 scratching our heads, trying to work out how to link up tools and need to find new ways to make technology useful, but not just for geeks.

A new model for social innovation

No matter how effective online interaction can be, there’s nothing quite like getting people together in a room, to talk to one another, face to face – the old-fashioned way. This was the premise behind our first Social Innovation Camp weekend in April where participants including software designers and developers together with social needs experts came to accelerate six ideas for web tools that could change the world, from concept to early-stage social enterprise in under forty-eight hours. Based on a thorough understanding of a specific social need, participants had to hack together a prototype tool, as well as come up with a way of creating and sustaining a user base - all in just two days. At the end of the weekend, everyone had to ‘show and tell’ what they’d built and we awarded some prizes.

This year’s winners, Enabled by Design, developed a resource for anyone looking to make adjustments to their lives - be it as a result of disability, injury or impairment - to share their design problems and solutions. The runners-up, Visiting Prisons, came up with a tool to support prisoners’ families who are coping with being separated from a loved one and feed their experiences into making the criminal justice system better.

Play, experimentation and risk

Despite the severity of the social problems we were tackling, Social Innovation Camp was really designed to be a game. The weekend was fun and fast, and it incorporated elements of play and experimentation. We were researching, building and testing all at once, making imperfect products in an iterative development process where the end user and the social need were central to design. We set participants a common goal and provided a loose structure, but the rest was for them to self-organise. Most importantly, the event embraced risk; we encouraged participants to do their own thing, so we didn’t really know what would happen or what would emerge at the end. The weekend buzzed with energy, creativity and exciting new ideas.

The digital world is only just at the beginning of becoming socially relevant to ordinary people. Social Innovation Camp is a practical learning experiment in prototyping the tools that will become increasingly important to society. The web and related technologies could be a platform for hugely disruptive innovations - changing beyond recognition what was there before. We don’t know what we’re going to find. Combine this environment with the ease with which digital tools themselves can be designed and built, adapted, re-worked and re-made – often by users themselves - and it becomes clear that innovation in the digital world is well suited to high risk, playful experimentation of the kind that Social Innovation Camp is pioneering.

Come along to our 2gether session to find out how we ran our Camp, what we learnt and what we’re up to next.

More information about Social Innovation Camp is on our website; find out about our projects or even watch the film.

UnLtd will be hosting a pitching session at the festival, where people can pitch for UnLtd seed funding for their project. To pitch for an UnLtd Award at 2gether08, you must be over 16, a UK resident, and not a previous UnLtd Award Winner. If you are attending the event and interested in pitching, please send an email to Ulrika Hogberg, ulrikahogberg@unltd.org.uk ,with your name, contact information and a short paragraph describing your project and the social impact it will have.

Secondly, UnLtd is providing 12 free tickets to give out to the festival. This ticket only covers the cost of your admission to the festival; unfortunately UnLtd cannot cover any travel, food or accommodation costs you may incur.

If you are interested in applying for 1 of the tickets please email your contact details and explain in no more than 100 words the project you are working on and how you think attending 2gether08 will benefit you and your project, to Ulrika Hogberg , ulrikahogberg@unltd.org.uk , by 5pm on 19th June 2008. Those who win a ticket will be informed by 23rd June 08 and also receive more information about the outline of the day etc.

The UK Catalyst Awards are a bold experiment to answer these questions. Announced at the same time as the Prime Minister’s Council on Social Action, the bet is that social activists across the UK are using technology to benefit communities in lots of different ways. We want to shine a spotlight on these projects, big or small, as a way to boost those projects and also to spread the inspiration.

The closing date is June 16th so there’s still time to enter! You can enter yourself or nominate someone you know, either as individuals or as part of a business, charity or community group. We’re looking for examples of people creating new social technologies as well as using existing channels in a different way. More details on the UK Catalyst Entry Form.

You can watch Minister for the Third Sector Phil Hope on Youtube explaining why the Government are excited to be backing the awards (followed by organizer Dan McQuillan talking at high speed about scale & social impact )

The exciting part about Catalyst is that we don’t really know what we’re going to find. The web is a place where unexpected social experiments can have far reaching consequences - who could have predicted Wikipedia? So what new forms of community action will emerge when strange internet memes like Crowdsourcing and The Long Tail are applied to social impact?

Projects like Liftshare and Patient Opinion tell us that the web can pack a social punch, and Social Innovation Camp proved that there are loads more great ideas ready for that dash of tech magic to bring them to life. And it’s not just the web; mobile and gaming technologies are also being turned to socially positive ends.

There are nine Catalyst awards - Community Awards for Social Technology - up for grabs. The entrants can have created their own social technology or used existing channels innovatively. Our categories expect the unexpected - they include:

• The Shock for Good Award: for something that shocked people into doing something good
• The Revolutionary Award: for something that makes people in power more aware of the need for change
• The Self-Help Award: For something that helps the creator to help themselves
• The Chalk & Cheese Award: for something that brings two different groups of people together
• The David and Goliath Award: for something little that made a difference to a something big and powerful

The Catalyst Awards are proud to be partners of the 2gether Festival and we’ll be presenting the shortlisted projects at a special preview session. We’ll also be opening a discussion about Catalyst Phase 2; how to incubate and grow digital social projects to a scale where they can have significant social impact. See you there!

“Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done”

So begins Yochai Benkler’s “The Wealth of Networks”.

Most moments of change come with both a challenge and an opportunity, but above all change often comes with inevitable consequences. Change is not linear, it’s chaotic and the new finally becomes stable well after the old is obsolete.

Pollsters in the States embarissingly discovered this when they failed to listen to an earthquake rumbling underground because they were too busy salivating over the Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors, and discussing racial divides as if it were 1968.

Debating the online against the offline is naive. Discussing the validity of Wikipedia entries is boring. William Gibson confuses us. Cyberspace is not a parallel universe, the online complements and often augmentates real world dynamics.
Clay Shirky brilliantly summarizes this: to a four-year old a television without a mouse is broken.

Change is systemic.

Leveraging and embracing this opportunity, and understanding its applicability for societal development is what should excite us. The inevitable consequence could then become a better world.

The point, in a nutshell, is how information is exchanged is crucial and we have an unprecedented opportunity in enabling and empowering this exchange.

The challenge of course is that data is dispersed and unevenly distributed across multiple platforms and formats, both online and offline: across social networks, in Government departments, in universities, research agencies, the imagination of a reporter etc. etc. etc…

Between the opportunities and the challenges though lies one question that begs for an answer: why is data (especially that relevant to public and societal interest) so often not free?
And more importantly, why do so many hold their little patches of data hidden away in ivory towers, instead of enabling talented people to use it for good?

This is less about data portability and interoperability, and the need for “users” to be able to control and take their personal information and “social graph” with them. That too is an important debate, yet this is not about portability of privacy settings, registration information, contacts and profile fields, it’s about setting free the critical relevancy of data within information flows on a far grander scale.

In a planet haunted by pressing issues we need to think bigger, and much, much more radically.

Perception of reality is shaped by the insights at our disposal: data is the medium.

Insights into “reality” drive and influence research, reform, decisions and ultimately the effectivness of action that can hopefully make the world a better place.

The implications are therefore practical, and range from costs being constantly duplicated (the same survey or focus group repeated again and again), waste of resources that further pave the road of good intentions, market inefficiencies abund, but above all the consequences are societal: any intended postive outcome dependent on information and on data (i.e. possibly 99% of all human action and interaction) generates less positive impact that it could.

This is important, at times it can even mean finding loved ones after a humanitarian crisis.

The relevance of this paradigm is vast, and there are some great, and quite diverse, examples of data which is leveraged or which if set free could be valuably used:

In health;
In real estate
To fight crime in Brazil ; in Chicago ; in Oakland ; and in Manchester
To enable information to reach the Burmese people in their native Sahana
To profile and understand a city
To improve traffic conditions
In multiple contexts
In music.

Some of these examples enable their data to be used, others mash-up openly accessible data while some are more or less eye-candy (the data is not accessible).

At UnLtdWorld we’re profoundly committed to contributing to the realization of this potential, which is why we developed the UnLtdWorld Research Lab the world’s first mapping of social entrepreneurship to integrate deeply into a social network. The aim of the research Lab is to provide critical social insight to anyone, no matter their size.
We will soon release all the data in the Lab and make it openly accessible for comparative and historical analysis, and dynamically usable with other datasets and within mashups and applications anywhere on the web.

2gether08 is a great opportunity to act as a call for data and information flows to be more open and widely used, and to foster a systemic shift that is creative and imaginative - to showcase good practices that are making a difference in many markets and fields, and to bring together key players at all levels: not only the creative talent and passionate do-ers, but also those organisations and groups that (at times unknowingly) typically gatekeep data that could be valuably used, and together lower the noise-level around the trivial, and in its place foster an open exchange towards cooperation that aims to create real value, and lasting impact on real issues.

On Tuesday, at The Innovation Edge event, I bumped into Robin Murray at the end of Sir Bob Geldof’s tour de force. Robin is one of the founders of Twin Trading, which for two decades has been instrumental in developing the leading Fairtrade brands in the UK, like Cafedirect and Divine Chocolate.

At the end of last year, I had a couple of wonderful rangy conversations with Robin, about how the social web could bring growers & producers ‘closer’ to consumers through, for example, digital storytelling.

Anyway, Robin really ‘gets it’, and we’re thinking about kicking something off next month when two-dozen representatives from grower co-ops in Africa and Latin America gather in the UK.

I hope Robin will join us at 2gether, where together we might all come up with some innovative solutions for connecting the dots along the global supply chain.