I recently had the opportunity to connect with Ricard Espelt to learn more about the various projects he’s working on in Spain leveraging new technologies for public engagement, government transparency and community building. Learn more in the interview below.
“I am a lucky man, and basically because I do not dare make mistakes, so correct. Even drafting of this writing, is manipulated to criticism and change. Perhaps one of the things that is m’incomoda not suffer the discomfort of change. The experimentalist spirit and desire to meet new experiences and new friends I can always enjoy. The only problem is the inability to catch everything.
Now I’m a councilman in Copons, where I live for seven years, a very pretty village of Alta Anoia. Councilman and Economic Development of New Technologies and Communication. I
also vice president of the Consortium for the Economic Development of
the Alta Anoia, we are working on the issue of new technologies,
especially GPS routes.
I have a study of communication & web design, called Redall. With two friends Gemma Urgell and Jordi Mas.”
What are the various projects you’re working on now?
Copons 2.0:
When I became a councillor I put into motion a project of digital
inclusion and citizen participation using free web tools: Copons 2.0.
It was one year before we could see benefits, problems, results… We’ve
progressed by trial & error and now we are engaged in more projects
like ours in villages near Copons. copòns.net
La Teva Alta Anoia: The
main objective is to create a new web portal of Alta Anoia, through
which an innovative way to serve as a benchmark for tourism promotion
as a tool of identity and cohesion of a country and a brand: Alta Anoia.
How did your work getting the local council online get started? What’s been the reaction of your community?
Copons 2.0: approach to consensus decision making
What’s the idea?
Really, it’s easy. We proposed a new path to take decisions. Until
now, when a citizen had a problem they went to the Council to explain
it or filled out a form. Only sometimes the citizen received an answer
and a lot of times it was difficult to solve the problem. Now when
somebody wants to solve a problem, they have a new way: publish their
problem on Facebook. More citizens can get involved to give their
opinion, and of course, the council too.
What are benefits?
Not just seven people at the council give solutions. Everybody can
participate in solving a problem. Sometimes, citizens who have had the
same problem in the past give their opinion and this is fantastic!
Another benefit for the councilis to have a space to propose projects
for the future, and see the opinion of the citizens.
The premises of the project:
- Everybody can participate with their digital profile -anonymity is
not allowed – Everybody can start a discousion to solve a problem – The
Council must alwaysgive an answer – Work to involve maximum of citizens
in a digital space – Offer training sessions to avoid the digital
divide – Share the project with other villages to increase open
government
Results & lessons learned
- More digital profiles in the vilage – More ICT in the village –
More dialog – More knowledge about the limits of local administration –
More who is who wants to help and who is who wants to put obstacles –
More analogic dabate – More knowledge about the real problems of
citizens – More long tail of problems – More people involved in a
specific search for solving problems – More accountability – More
transparency – More proximity – More co-creative
(administration-citizens) solutions – More feedback & demands.
Who or what topics have been more interesting in the TalkingAbout series?
A mosaic of experiences, stories and projects with Web 2.0 as a backdrop.
People follow people on Twitter, we have dozens of friends in
Facebook, read many blogs, we take an idea about the people we admire,
that surprises us, which enriches knowledge. Why not go one step further and stay with them? Why
not talk face to face with people who pass through the network to be
part of our day without having shared a conversation out loud.
This is why Gemma Urgell and I started talkingabout. Now,
after a year interviewing different people and creating the platform,
you can share your talkingabout topic and create, together, a mosaic of
experiences, stories and projects with Web 2.0 as a backdrop.
Culture, politics, education, business, economy, cooperation,
youth, journalism, the new values on different facets of Web 2.0
(share, distribute, create value, co-create, disseminate) are present
thanks to people that extend and amplify this new way of understanding life and the relationships between people. You
also have much to tell us about this paradigm shift and how to apply it
in your day, and obviously also like to know or know someone who read a
blog, or following on Twitter … therefore propose to you a #
talkingabout here and share it with us. Passes from 2.0 to-face conversation and, through a short video that summarizes the meeting and share.
To learn more about Ricard’s work with government transparency and community building, connect with him directly at:
What
follows is a highly selective and personal list of my top talks from
TED2010. There are more that moved, inspired, delighted and amazed me
than I’ll recount here. Eventually, they will all be posted at
ted.com, and it’s well worth your visit there to watch them.
Wonderfully, the TED formula constrains people to 18 minutes. Watching
these talks, you realize it’s more than enough time to say something
incredibly meaningful (Corporate Powerpoint presenters PLEASE take
note.)
When I was a child, I used to think about the amazing year in the
future when the millenium would turn, the magical year 2000. I would
be 47, an unimaginable age. And the forty years until then, an
unfathomable duration of time beyond my comprehension.
In what was I think the most important talk at TED2010, Bill Gates
talks about a roadmap to 2050 — 40 years into our collective future —
by which we need to reduce CO2 emissions to Zero. The issue of climate
change is at heart an issue of energy consumption and production. And
we need to make as wholesale a shift in how we obtain our energy, as
the shift brought about by the industrial revolution from burning wood
to burning coal and oil. Bill’s talk is concise, pragmatic and
unmistakably clear. And the roadmap he lays out is simple, even if
fulfilling its wish is challenging and requires the miraculous: 20
years to innovate the technologies to produce electricity in ways that
don’t emit CO2, and 20 years to deploy them. It’s that simple; it’s
that daunting.
If reducing CO2 emissions to Zero is the most important task to
ensuring the future quality of life for everyone on our planet, Sam
Harris talks about what he believes is the greatest threat to life as
we know it — religion. Sam is a prominent neuroscientist, defender of
secular values, and best-selling author of two books — The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.
This was the talk which struck the loudest personal chord for me.
On my Facebook profile, in the field labelled “Religious beliefs,” I
wrote “are dangerous to have.” I am deeply and profoundly (and
apparently redundantly) anti-religious, believing that more evil is
done in the name of religious beliefs than from anything else on
earth. And that evil far outweighs any good that is done — good
that the natural impulse for human kindness, generosity and empathy
brings about anyway, without the trappings of religion.
For me, his most compelling (and perhaps most controversial) stance
is this: we have arrived at a point in the development of our
globalized civilization that we can and should make moral judgements on
even an entire culture, if its beliefs contribute to an increase in
human suffering or repression. There’s a very powerful moment when he
ask the audience to let a thought “detonate in your head for just a
moment” about a particularly egregious belief — that the rape of your
daughter brings so much shame on your family that you should kill her.
He lets that thought detonate in his own head, the head of man who
clearly has a daughter whom he deeply loves. It’s a very poignant
moment.
The talk is not yet posted on ted.com, but will be. I encourage you
to return to the site to catch it. And in the meantime, you might want
to read Letter to a Christian Nation which will lay out Sam’s arguments in a little over an hour’s read.
One of the most moving talks was given by Kevin Bales, who is an
anti-slavery activist. He states there are 27 million slaves in the
world today, mostly in Southeast Asia and Africa, who are forced to
work without pay under threat of violence and unable to walk
away. There are more people in slavery now than at any time in our
history; yet the smallest percentage of the world’s population is
enslaved today, compared to any other time in history. There is no
country in the world where slavery is legal, and the “cost” to free all
the world’s slaves (not purchasing people from their slaveholders, but
helping them escape and funding their re-introduction into normal life)
is less than the cost of the Big Dig, a major urban highway project, in
Boston.
One of the goals of Kevin’s efforts to free the world’s slaves is
“No Botched Emancipations.” As these words hung on the screen behind
him, he pointed out that today in the United States,we are still paying
the price for one of the largest botched emancipations in history, the
freeing of 4 million plus slaves in 1866 with no support for their
entry into normal society. It was perhaps the most striking moment of
clarity of the entire conference. I will link to the talk when it’s
posted. In the meantime, a link to Kevin’s organization.
Elizabeth Pisani is another activist, an epidemiologist combating the spread of HIV. She’s written a book, The Wisdom of Whores,
that points out the flaws in public health policies and
programs, stemming from a refusal to understand and accept the
emotional logic of the groups of people those policies and programs are
trying to influence. Example: some policies suggest the best way to
stop the spread of HIV among sex workers in Malaysia is to get them
jobs in the many textile factories there, so they don’t have to engage
in sex work for their income. Reality: definition of poverty = living
on <$1/day; average salary of a Malaysian textile factory worker =
$2/day; average income of a Malaysian sex worker = $10/day. Clearly,
fucking for pay trumps sewing any day.
One of my favorite moments in this talk is right before Elizabeth
shows a video clip of a conversation with a transgendered Malaysian sex
worker, and she says “that’s a chick with a dick.” I will add the
video of the talk as soon as it’s posted.
Elizabeth was a delightful presenter. Several other talks make my list for pure delight.
Temple Grandin talks about the autistic mind (hers being one of
them) and how we need to develop minds based on an understanding of the
different ways that different minds work. (Her life is the subject of
an HBO film Temple Grandin starring Claire Danes.) Temple
describes how she sees the world in pictures. And how that orientation
helped her understand how animals view the world, which enabled her to
design more humane systems for cattle-handling facilities.
She is brilliant, outspoken, a total character, and utterly
delightful. And wins my award hands-down for best TED presenter’s
outfit.
Raghava KK is an Indian artist whose talk describes the different
phases of his artistic output as his “avatars.” His delight in life is
infectious; his caring is moving; and his creativity the sum and whole
of how he lives his life.
Mark Roth is a biochemist and cell biologist, who gives a
surprisingly delightful and entertaining talk about something that
seems to belong in the realm of science fiction — suspended animation —
the temporary suspension of life in a human being who is subsequently
revived with no adverse effects. His inquiry into suspended animation
was inspired by cases of people found exposed to extreme cold, who
appeared to be dead, but who were revived with no apparent negative
effect. He describes the biochemistry that produces the miracle, his
successful experiments with it on mice, and the potential application
for treating patients with severely traumatic injuries. Talk to be
posted.
Mark Roth (Photo credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson)
For charm, I recommend Dan Barber’s talk on his love affair with two
fishes. He’s a celebrity chef, who discovers a fish farm in Spain that
creates its own self-sustaining ecosystem.
For amazement, LXD, the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers. No words can describe their fantastic movement.
And Jake Shimabukuro, who’s first set playing the ukulele included flamenco, Ave Maria and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.
When once in London for work, I was taken to see The Ukulele Orchestra
of Great Britain, whose most memorable song was their cover of The Theme Song from Shaft. Jake is a match for them in terms of musicianship and inventiveness.
Jake Shimabukuro (Photo credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson)
Lastly, Andrew Bird performed several times. He creates sounds and
loops them as backdrop to his performance, sings, whistles, plays
violin and basically sounds like an angel descended to Earth.
Original, unusual, haunting, and adorable.
Here’s a taste of Andrew from a live concert until his TED performance is posted.
Since I’ve posted my best of TED2010, I probably should mention my “Worst” and spare you viewing them.
People loved Jane McGonigal, a video game designer, who talked about
an entire generation of young people, growing up playing hours of video
games, who as a consequence have developed very specific skills. She
painted a fascinating picture of a gamer and gave me some insight into
them I’d never had before. She lost me completely, however, when she
claimed that we could take people who played 20 hours a week of World
of Warcraft online and transfer that passion to a video game that
teaches about climate change. Somehow, I don’t think they’d get quite
the same payoff, Jane.
Denis Dutton had some really interesting stuff to say about beauty,
one of my favorite obsessions. Specifically, despite its renowned “in
the eye of the beholder” quality, there are concepts of beauty that are
universal to the human species. He mentions one of my favorite facts:
that human beings, when asked to describe their ideal landscape, will
inevitably (despite where they live or what they have or have not seen)
describe a landscape that closely resembles the African savannah from
which as a species we supposedly emerged and spread out into the
world. That he could discuss beauty with not one single visual to
support his talk, and that he read it word for word from a document,
even stopping once and re-reading a paragraph that he’d stumbled over,
as he said, ”for the editing of the video,” as if we in the audience
were not even there, was a bit beyond the pale.
And lastly, Natalie Merchant sang some songs she’d written to
poetry, an endeavor she’d spent the last six years on. I’ve
always found her to be self-indulgent. And her TED performance was
more of the same in my opinion. But she jumped the shark on egotism,
when she sang her last song, a rousing number entitled something like
“I Just Want to Thank You.” At one point, the audience, inspired by
the song, begins to clap in time to the music. But Natalie stops them,
tells them to curb their enthusiasm, that it’s her 18 minutes, and
later instructs them how to clap the right way to her song.
Self-indulgence is a really boring quality in a person, but
self-indulgence coupled with a controlling nature is just fucking
deadly. As a TED buddy said to me as we were getting on a bus to one
of the evening parties after I expressed my opinion about Natalie’s
performance, “I enjoyed it. But now that you point that out, I realize
you’re absolutely right, and you’ve ruined it for me.”
As a footnote to my TED2010 experience, my application to TED2011
has been approved, but this time to the main conference in Long Beach,
not the simulcast in Palm Springs. As my TED girlfriend Danielle said,
who was accepted to the main conference next year as well, “We’ll go,
and if we don’t like it, at least we’ll have each other. And we can go
back to TEDActive in 2012.”
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Sylvie Auteau says her customers prefer paying in francs
Shopkeeper Sylvie Auteau counts out a pile of French franc notes on the counter of her clothes shop.
"Most people prefer francs," says Ms Auteau. "They are French, after all."
Eight
years after the euro was introduced, the franc is still in use in Le
Blanc - a small market town of 7,000 people in the agricultural
heartland of central France.
'Prices went up'
Ms
Auteau says the decision by shopkeepers to accept payment in francs is
not a protest against the euro - and not all retailers accept them. The
main aim was to give business a boost.
But many people here harbour increasing anti-European feelings as unemployment rises and farm subsidies fall.
"They feel cheated by the euro and they think prices went up when it came in, even if that's not really true," Ms Auteau says.
"And with the expansion of the EU to the east, we feel we're being over-taxed, that we're feeding the others."
There is nostalgia for the old French currency
The French have until 2012 to exchange franc notes for euros at the bank.
Ms Auteau's shop is among some 30 businesses here which still accept francs as well as euros.
She says many people had found francs at the bottom of a drawer after their parents or grandparents died.
There is little industry in this area, so almost everyone in Le Blanc depends on farming, directly or indirectly.
Farmers' incomes declined by 30% last year, and 20% the year before.
That
has had a huge impact. In Le Blanc, it is easy to understand why
President Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to fight to preserve European Union
aid to French farmers.
That was one of the main points he made
on Wednesday in his first public comments since his party suffered a
resounding defeat in regional elections.
Making ends meet
French farmers used to reap generous EU subsidies but these have been scaled down.
Last
year Brussels ruled that some of the aid farmers have been receiving
from the French government in recent years was illegal. Many have been
told they will have to pay it back.
Local farmers' incomes have been dropping rapidly
"We're facing a very big reduction in the aid we get because of the
current reform of the Common Agricultural Policy at a time when market
prices are low," says Robert Chaze, who owns a farm 10km (six miles)
outside Le Blanc, and is chairman of the local chamber of agriculture.
Mr Chaze says that farmers in this region are facing a further fall in their income this year of 10-20%.
Until
recently, the French tended to be passionate supporters of the EU, but
Mr Chaze says farmers now feel "crushed" by what they see as an
oppressive European bureaucracy.
No-one is suggesting that
France should leave the EU. But another local farmer, Philippe Demiot,
who runs a farm just outside Le Blanc, says it is getting ever harder
to make ends meet. He believes Brussels does not seem to have a
coherent plan for the future of French or European agriculture.
"Today
the plans of Europe aren't very good for us," he says. "It's hard for
us to understand where the European bureaucrats want to take us. What
do they want to do with us?"
Many people in this area feel that with the enlargement of the EU, France lost a lot of influence in Brussels.
Unemployment in France is the highest it has been in a decade - more than 10% - and there is growing anxiety about the future.
'Francs felt good'
Walking
around Le Blanc, the proportion of old people seems remarkably high.
Residents say many of the younger generation have left because they
could not find jobs.
People can still "pay here in Francs"
It is hardly surprising that there is nostalgia for the old days - and for the old currency.
In
the past three years, shops and restaurants in Le Blanc have collected
well over 1m francs - more than 150,000 euros (£135,100).
That
is hardly a fortune, but it is a significant amount for a small town in
these troubled times - and francs are also still being used in a few
other towns and villages.
"I had a few francs left in a drawer," says Christiane Brunet, who is out doing her shopping.
"I was keeping them to show my grandchildren, but I haven't got any left now, only a few coins."
Ms
Brunet says she prefers francs. "I felt good with francs but not with
euros. I think we were all cheated because prices doubled. Everything's
so expensive now."
She thinks the EU is a good thing, but adds:
"It's not easy. All [the members] should have the same standards but
that's not the case."
The Greek crisis has raised fears about
the future of the euro - perhaps another reason why so many people in
Le Blanc take comfort from dusting off their old francs and retreating
into the past.
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Charles Arthur investigates how the ways in which we watch sport, read magazines and do business with each other could change for ever.
Augmented reality on the iPhone
Don't act too surprised if, some time in the next year, you meet someone who explains that their business card isn't just a card; it's an augmented reality business card. You can see a collection and, at visualcard.me, you can even design your own, by adding a special marker to your card, which, once put in front of a webcam linked to the internet, will show not only your contact details but also a video or sound clip. Or pretty much anything you want.
It's not just business cards. London Fashion Week has tried them out too: little symbols that look like barcodes printed onto shirts, which, when viewed through a webcam, come to life. Benetton is using augmented reality for a campaign that kicked off last month, in which it is trying to find models from among the general population.
Augmented reality – AR, as it has quickly become known – has only recently become a phrase that trips easily off technologists' lips; yet we've been seeing versions of it for quite some time. The idea is straightforward enough: take a real-life scene, or (better) a video of a scene, and add some sort of explanatory data to it so that you can better understand what's going on, or who the people in the scene are, or how to get to where you want to go.
Sports coverage on TV has been doing it for years: slow-motion could be described as a form of augmented reality, since it gives you the chance to examine what happened in a situation more carefully. More recently cricket, tennis, rugby, football and golf have all started to overlay analytic information on top of standard-speed replays – would that ball have hit the stumps, the progress of a rally, the movement of the backs or wingers, the relative flights of shots – to tell you more about what's going on. Probably the most common use is in American football where the "first down" line – the distance the team has to cover to continue its offence – is superimposed on the picture for viewers.
But those required huge systems. AR took its first lumbering steps into the public arena eight years ago: all that you needed to do was strap on 10kg of computing power – laptop, camera, vision processor – and you could get an idea of what was feasible. The American Popular Sciencemagazine wrote about the idea in 2002 – but the idea of being permanently connected to the internet hadn't quite jelled at that point.
Tesla Motors, Cisco Networking Academy, Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Women initiative and eBay's Green Team were among the organizations and initiatives taking home awards from last night'sJustmeans.com/Financial Times 2010 Social Innovation Awards dinner in Manhattan.
A nonprofit organization, the San Francisco-based TechSoup Global, received the event's Citizen's Choice Award. TechSoup Global -- which convenes weekly nonprofit strategy meetings in Second Life -- has provided technology assistance to more than 100,000 nonprofits and libraries in North America and globally. Its more than 30 corporate partners include Cisco and Microsoft. TechSoup Global was voted the most worthy of the citizen's choice award by a majority of some 12,000 citizens voting online during the past two months.
Martin Smith, founder and CEO of Justmeans, said: "We wanted to showcase companies that are innovating us out of the challenges that face us today." Award-winners "are not those (companies and organizations) trying to mitigate their social and environmental impact," Smith said, "but more are creating the processes, systems, programs, and initiatives that we hope will be replicated across their industries and across business over the coming years."
Other award-winners included:
Most Innovative Nonprofit: LIFE/LanX Local Investment Project, a social venture to establish a local stock exchange for U.S. companies too small for national listing. The goal: to make more equity finance available to local communities across America and help them build out of the current recession.
Most Innovative Small For-Profit: Vestergaard Frandsen, a Danish company that, for 40 years, made uniforms for hotel workers and retailers. Now it makes textile-based, life-saving products, including ZeroFly, a durable plastic sheeting for sheltering refugees that also kills disease-spreading insects, and LifeStraw, a water filtration tool the size of paper-towel cylinder that helps thousands who are deprived of clean drinking water, helping them to turn polluted water into drinkable supplies.
A high number of common best practices have naturally emerged. Here are 10 of them :
1) Manage risks from the early stages of the project
Fabrice Poireaud-Lambert showed a very interesting 4 axis graphs (Organization and HR / Competencies / Methods and Tools / Culture and Behaviors) that LdE used to evaluate the change factor of such a project on the enterprise scale. They reached a 12/16 value which is pretty high.
In addition, these are cross-functional projects with a high cultural impact. Therefore, it is critical to address subsequent risks as of the very early stages of the project.
This comes with an advantage, though. When such risky and game-changing projects succeed, they benefit from large recognition : both CSC and Lyonnaise des Eaux projects are running for most innovative project of the year in their respective organisation.
2) Seek Executive supports
Both Claire Flanagan and Anu Elmer insisted on how critical it was to have unconditional Executives support for project involving change of such magnitude. Big changes project need legitimation. The reason : without strong leadership and executive support, the project is a lost cause against managers who have day to day budget and objectives.
So first thing first : use the elevator pitch and then Heavy Mental Enterprise 2.0 presentation(or even better : ask me to do it) to show your executives how collaboration platforms can foster knowledge, innovation and productivity in the organisation.
3) Know your business needs and address them
Danone really wanted some tools to perpetuate their strong networking culture born at the beginning of the century and put the people right in the center of the solution.
Dassault needed to share sales best practices amongst their distributors (the Value Added Resellers) of their software solutions.
Schlumberger desired to save time to their workforce in critical environment (example : deep water drilling) when few minutes saving can turn into million of dollars.
Alcatel Lucent new management made it a strategic goal to have a greater transparency throughout the company.
The objectives can be marketing, HR’s, operational, leadership ones. The solution may be internal (i.e only amongst employees) or external as for Dassault between employees and partners. In any case, for any successful project, the objectives are clear so is the expected business value.
As part of a team made up of Arup (a global 6000 person engineering and planning firm), Sauerbruch Hutton (an acclaimed Berlin-based architecture studio) and Galley Eco Capital (green building finance specialists from San Francisco), Experientia won an international competition to develop a building block called Jätkäsaari, in the city of Helsinki, Finland, which will have low or no carbon emissions.
Based on the understanding that sustainable buildings require sustainable living practices, Experientia brings its unique perspective as an innovative experience design company to the project. While other team members concentrated on the architectural, engineering and financial strategies for the project, Experientia’s responsibility in the winning team is to address the delicate theme of how to initiate behavioural change to support a sustainable style of living in this completely new urban district.
Starting with the concept that people, their contexts, social networks, habits and beliefs are crucial tools for creating sustainable change in behaviour, Experientia is exploring ways to offer people control over their consumption and to see the effects of their actions on the environment.
Starting from 2010, and continuing over the next 6 years, the Jätkäsaari district will be designed, constructed and opened to inhabitants. From there, the sustainable ideals that govern its day-to-day life will act as a model and example for the rest of Helsinki, Finland and the world — thereby also supporting Helsinki’s commitments as 2012 World Design Capital.
Envisioning Experientia’s competition proposal, entitled “C-LIFE, the City as a Living Factory of Ecology,” began as a vision shared by a team made up of Arup (an engineering and planning firm), Sauerbruch Hutton (architecture), Galley Eco Capital (green building finance), and Experientia.
The team created a proposal to construct a city block in the new Jätkäsaari district in Helsinki with low-to-no carbon emissions, which soon evolved into C-LIFE: a vision of a centre of innovation and experimentation for reducing energy consumption; a vibrant and participative community, with sustainable planning and architecture; and a world-leader for low-to-no carbon projects.
The proposal was the winner of the Low2No design competition that over 70 planning groups participated in. (Download our winning proposal as a PDF or from the Low2No website.)
The project is run by Sitra, the Finnish innovation agency, and is currently in the design phase.
On Thursday 25 March 2010, people in hundreds of cities around the world will come together offline to rally around the important cause of Education by hosting local events to have fun and create awareness. Twestival™ (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good. All of the local events are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects. If you would like to get involved, please Register your City, Register your School, orVolunteer and we will get in touch. Organizers will be given a handbook and invitation to our collaboration workspace. Follow @twestival for updates.
The Impact of Twestival
On 12 February 2009, the first Twestival Global was held in 202 international cities to support@charitywater, who we saw doing incredible work to help the almost 1 billion or 1 in 6 people in the world that don’t have access to clean and safe drinking water. Over 1,000 volunteers and 10,000 donors fundraised $250k+, which resulted in more than 55 wells in Uganda, Ethiopia and India having a direct impact for over 17,000 people. Watch the videos of the first Twestival well drilled in the village of Mai Nabri, Ethiopia.
Then over a weekend in September last year, 130 cities participated in Twestival Local which invited organizers to host events and select local causes to support. Collectively, these cities raised over $450k for 135 charities, bringing the total fundraising effort in 2009 to over $750k. A remarkable achievement by volunteers working under short timescales and utilizing social media tools like Twitter to make it happen efficiently.
In 2010, we turn our focus to education and 72 million children in the world who don’t have the opportunity to go to school. @Concern Worldwide has been selected by the Twestival global team and local organizers to be the recipient because of their comprehensive and well respected approach to education. This is an issue that involves many different elements; hunger, water, teacher training, building of schools, etc. We hope to use the power of our global event fundraising and social media influence as a vehicle to give people insight into this cause on a deeper level.
About Concern Worldwide.
Concern Worldwide was founded in 1968 to meet the needs of people living in extreme poverty, for whom every day is a fight for survival. Concern is a non-governmental, international, humanitarian organization dedicated to the reduction of suffering and working towards the ultimate elimination of poverty. Their mission is to help people living in extreme poverty achieve major improvements in their lives - improvements they can sustain without ongoing support. Concern meets the needs of these people in a caring and personalized manner, respecting their human and cultural dignity. They are committed to reaching the most vulnerable, even in the most difficult of circumstances.
Concern’s work is informed by a vision for change and their education programs target the poorest people in the poorest countries in the world, with particular emphasis on reaching out-of-school children such as girls, orphans, street children, working children, children affected by conflict, children affected by HIV and AIDS, and children with disabilities. Concern’s education programs currently reach over 700,000 people in 25 countries across the regions of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Please follow @concern on Twitter to get a glimpse of their staff tweeting from around the world; including their efforts on the ground in Haiti.
Totally different from previous generations—or just younger?
THEY are variously known as the Net Generation, Millennials, Generation Y or Digital Natives. But whatever you call this group of young people—roughly, those born between 1980 and 2000—there is a widespread consensus among educators, marketers and policymakers that digital technologies have given rise to a new generation of students, consumers, and citizens who see the world in a different way. Growing up with the internet, it is argued, has transformed their approach to education, work and politics.
“Unlike those of us a shade older, this new generation didn’t have to relearn anything to live lives of digital immersion. They learned in digital the first time around,” declare John Palfrey and Urs Gasser of the Berkman Centre at Harvard Law School in their 2008 book, “Born Digital”, one of many recent tomes about digital natives. The authors argue that young people like to use new, digital ways to express themselves: shooting a YouTube video where their parents would have written an essay, for instance.
Anecdotes like this are used to back calls for education systems to be transformed in order to cater to these computer-savvy students, who differ fundamentally from earlier generations of students: professors should move their class discussions to Facebook, for example, where digital natives feel more comfortable. “Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach,” argues Marc Prensky in his book “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”, published in 2001. Management gurus, meanwhile, have weighed in to explain how employers should cope with this new generation’s preference for collaborative working rather than traditional command-and-control, and their need for constant feedback about themselves.
But does it really make sense to generalise about a whole generation in this way? Not everyone thinks it does. “This is essentially a wrong-headed argument that assumes that our kids have some special path to the witchcraft of ‘digital awareness’ and that they understand something that we, teachers, don’t—and we have to catch up with them,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, who teaches media studies at University of Virginia.
Michael Wesch, who pioneered the use of new media in his cultural anthropology classes at Kansas State University, is also sceptical, saying that many of his incoming students have only a superficial familiarity with the digital tools that they use regularly, especially when it comes to the tools’ social and political potential. Only a small fraction of students may count as true digital natives, in other words. The rest are no better or worse at using technology than the rest of the population.
But that didn't really tell you what scenarios actually look like. So I'm going to rectify that.
In 2008, the San Francisco-based user experience design firm Adaptive Path was asked to create some prototype designs of what the Firefox Web browser of the year 2020 might look like. Adaptive Path, in turn, asked me to help them think through what the Internet and the world of 2020 might look like, so that they would have a better sense of how a future Firefox might be used. This is exactly the kind of task that scenario work is well-suited for, so I suggested that rather than give them a single Vision of Tomorrow, I'd help them see a small set of alternatives. They agreed.
I brought together some folks from Adaptive Path and from my own network, and had a two-day brainstorming and scenario-design session. Three scenarios resulted from the workshop--that is, three overarching scenario concepts, supported by lots of bullet points and sticky notes, all in roughly chronological order, resulted. I then took these results and turned them into narrative scenarios. Adaptive Path used these narrative scenarios as inspiration and "future reality" checks for their own design scenarios, presented on video. (See the Adaptive Path "Aurora" videos here.)
But in creating my three scenarios, I took an unusual turn: I decided that I'd write each of the three scenarios in a different scenario style. That made it harder to compare the three, but it meant that each would speak to audiences in differing ways, so that readers who found one style unpalatable might find another style much more to their liking.
You can download a PDF of all three scenarios here; it's actually done as a Creative Commons licensed-work (Non-Commercial/Attribution/Share-Alike), so feel free to play with these scenarios if you so desire.
The three styles I used for these scenarios can be categorized as "Scenario-as-Story," "Scenario-as-Recollection," and "Scenario-as-History."
New insights from science and behaviour change could lead to significantly improved outcomes, and at a lower cost, than the way many conventional policy tools are used, argues the UK Government.
MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy was a joint commission by the UK Cabinet Office and the Institute for Government. It shows how the latest insights from the science of behaviour change can be used to generate new and cost-effective solutions to some of the current major policy challenges, such as reducing crime, tackling obesity and climate change.
In their joint foreword to the report, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, and the Executive Director of the Institute for Government, Sir Michael Bichard, said that behavioural theory has the potential to help policy makers deal with some of the difficult issues ahead and achieve more for less:
“Many of the biggest policy challenges we are now facing – such as the increase in people with chronic health conditions – will only be resolved if we are successful in persuading people to change their behaviour, their lifestyles or their existing habits. Fortunately, over the last decade, our understanding of influences on behaviour has increased significantly and this points the way to new approaches and new solutions.
“So whilst behavioural theory has already been deployed to good effect in some areas, it has much greater potential to help us. To realise that potential, we have to build our capacity and ensure that we have a sophisticated understanding of what does influence behaviour. This report is an important step in that direction because it shows how behavioural theory could help achieve better outcomes for citizens, either by complementing more established policy tools, or by suggesting more innovative interventions.”
Bendigo and Adelaide Bank is often lauded for its "social responsibility" because of our work with communities – almost as if we have tacked a social conscience on to our business strategy. In fact, working for the benefit of our customers and their communities is our business strategy.
It makes sense: you cannot run a successful business in an unsuccessful community. Therefore, if we can help them prosper, then we will have strengthened our markets. And if Bendigo and Adelaide Bank is an essential part of the community fabric, then we are more likely to be supported and to build a sustainable business.
Our approach begins with listening. How do local leaders see their community growing? What are their problems? Can Bendigo and Adelaide Bank help them address these threats and opportunities?
Often we can do so by finding ways to secure banking access. But increasingly we are finding other ways to help, too.
We have been able to build a number of successful business models built on simple methods - encourage local people to commit to buying their services through a company committed to retaining at least some of its earnings in their community.
For example, all people buy telephony, but probably from a number of different suppliers. But if enough people choose to buy from a locally owned telephone company, a Community Telco, then the dynamics change. That company employs locals and retains local earnings. Competitors have to improve services or reduce prices to compete. Both ways, the community wins. And Bendigo and Adelaide Bank wins, too, because there is more money - and therefore more available banking - in the local community.
Telephony is but one example: other communities will have other priorities.
At first I was going to state the title in the form of a question, but this is not Jeopardy, and I wanted to make a point. The point is simple really, the path to success in Social Business is through Social CRM, said with conviction, not hesitation. This is not going to be a blog about definitions, though some may show up later or in the embedded presentation. While I have decided to move past the definitions, others may not be ready – fair enough, catch-up when you can. My approach is to put forth a convincing argument by using the characteristics and attributes that make up the Social Customer, Social CRM and a Social Business; not trying to redefine them.
My own struggle has been to place these concepts in the proper context, individually. To try to talk about any of these topics, without bringing up the other two is just hard and many times it just does not make sense. My operating theory is, ‘if I am having trouble a whole lot of other people are as well’. If you are an IT purist, it is like trying to talk about just Cost, just Schedule or or just Scope (not to mention Quality) without talking about the others – they are related, strongly – interdependent.
While technology certainly plays a role here, maybe it is even to blame, this is not about technology, rather what has started because of it. While the conversation would not be happening if it where not for the rapid change in behaviors caused by technology, it is about the change in culture and the change in behaviors of the customer (iPhone, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, YouTube, Blogs). Because they are ALL talking to eachother! By the way, whether you are Business to Business or Business to Consumer, it does not really matter. Yes, there are some differences, but there are more similarities than differences. We are all humans, and emotions play a big part in business too, sorry, it just is!
What is the point?
I have stated on many occasions that I use blogging to formulate my own thoughts on a particular topic. In this case, it was the creation of a presentation – or the template for a set of presentations which I need to deliver, beginning next week. I wanted to share the presentation, so that I am able to get feedback and begin a conversation on how I can refine the delivery. What would a presentation be in this space, if it is not actually Social and Interactive. The presentation will not remain static, nor should it. It is also anyone’s to use, if you think it can help. The presentation is not an attempt to be a strategy either, that is yours to create.
My thought process was to break it down into small pieces, then attempt to put it all back together. The baseline of understanding is not a definition of a system, but the characteristics of the system. The end of the presentation is not yet complete, but I wanted to put this out there so people were able to review. Please let me know your thoughts – Selecting the “Wide Screen” option on the lower right worked best for me. If the embed feature did not work, there is a link below.
Thanks to The Pirates Dilemma, I saw this great video of Jesse Schell (Schell Games, Carnegie Mellon prof) using numbers to impress us on the impact of Facebook games and more in the gaming industry. It will make you think of the scale and impact of recent gaming innovations. He unlocks a lot of the clever psychological drivers in the games and how they are connecting with...reality. Oh, and he's pretty entertaining.
