Most Popular Social Entrepreneurship Posts
Learning How To Fail
Published October 27, 2009 @ 08:41AM PT
One of the most important aspects of being a successful entrepreneur is learning how to fail. Whether it's a messed up grant proposal, shifting team dynamics, or dealing with different stakeholder expectations, perhaps the most vital skill of a successful entrepreneur is adaptation. Today in San Francisco, the SNAP Summit is convening to ask how leading tech entrepreneurs have failed, and then put the lessons they learned back into practice.
The tech industry is an interesting one to learn from. In many ways, it's more structured to deal with failure than any other field. Venture capital expects that most of it's investments just simply won't pan out. Founders who have a failure or two under their belt often times have a much better ability to get people to support them, because the learning from failure is respected.
Of course, the stakes of failure are somewhat lower in the web 2.0 world then they can be in the international development space. When an organization begins to create an expectation of a certain resource, and people start to plan their work and world's around that resource, the results of failure can be extremely damaging.
My Favorite Content from Pop!Tech 2009
Published October 27, 2009 @ 08:24AM PT
After a couple days of letting it settle, I wanted to share my favorite content from Pop!Tech 2009.
The Talk That Could Most Impact My Personal Behaviors: Michael Pollan
As author of "In Defense of Food," Michael Pollan has become arguably the leading advocate for a reevaluation of our food system. The evidence that he provides to demonstrate how broken our system is - for example, the fact that it takes 26 ounces of oil to get us our McDonald's Big Macs - is extraordinarily compelling. Yet at the same time, he's neither a pessimist nor a critic unwilling to over an alternative. The alternative that he offers is his common sense mantra: "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants." It is prescriptive but not preachy, and allows for people to integrate their own values to how they shift their habits.
The Most Unexpectedly Inspirational Project: Naif Al-Mutawa - The 99
Having grown up in Kuwait and been educated in the US, Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa was dismayed about the stories of his faith - both from those who would tear it down and those who would use it to justify violence. He was frustrated by the lack of Islamic heroes for his children, and noticed how all of the most popular Western comic book heroes were rooted in the Judeo-Christian myth. Determined to do something big, he created The 99, a comic book series rooted in Islamic values and the 99 attributes of God and designed to give kids of all faith and national backgrounds a new type of hero. Determined not to make the book appeal to a niche audience, he got major backing and investment and the series has exploded. It's now being made into a TV show, and even has a theme park.
Kiva is Turning Four - Come Celebrate!
Published October 26, 2009 @ 01:41PM PT
Social change is about community. For Bay Area social entrepreneurs, the place to be on November 3rd is at Kiva's fourth birthday celebration.
Co-hosted by The Hub, GOOD Magazine, and the David Brower Center, the event is a chance for the larger social enterprise community to come together and celebrate 4 years and almost $100 million in loans to developing world entrepreneurs.
Despite the ongoing conversation about Kiva's marketing, it remains one of the most spectacularly successful organizations in our space. It has created an incredible number of opportunities both for average citizens here and entrepreneurs there to work together to create a more just future.
It's also fun to see these groups working together to put on the event. It's an example of collaboration in action. After having just spent a couple weeks at conferences, I feel the need to invest in local community more than ever, so I'll be there.
Check out all the details here.
2009 Purpose Prize Honors "Encore Career" Innovators
Published October 26, 2009 @ 07:11AM PT
One of the most powerful forces for change in America today is the skills and experience laden Baby Boomers who, instead of retiring, are directing their efforts towards serious social problems. As a leading advocate and supporter of this group of change makers, Civic Ventures has announced the results of their 2009 Purpose Prize, an award for "encore career" innovation.
The annual prize, which is supported by the Atlantic Philanthropies and the John Templeton Foundation, awards five encore innovators $100,000 to support their work, and another five with $50,000. The outputs of the winners are very diverse, and include:
Tim Will (61), Foothills Connect Business & Technology Center, Rutherfordton, NC
Will used his telecommunications background to connect his Appalachian county's agrarian past to a digital economy. Bringing broadband to the rural area helped link local farmers to chefs in Charlotte through an online ordering system, bringing laid-off factory workers back to farming.
Marcy Adelman (63), openhouse, San Francisco, CA
As a psychologist, Adelman knew that many LGBT seniors looking for housing and care late in life face discrimination and loneliness. She set out to provide affordable, LGBT-friendly housing and training for service providers to better support LGBT elderly.
One of the exciting things I'm seeing in the social enterprise space is an increasingly fluent conversation between this demographic (and even folks a little bit younger) and the 20-somethings who I write about so often. There is powerful potential for partnership there.
To read more about the winners, go to Encore.org. Congrats to all the winners and find the full press release after the jump.
(Photo: Encore.org)
Meanwhile, In The Rest of the World...
Published October 25, 2009 @ 03:33PM PT
My coverage has been pretty nonstop conference-related for the past week and a half or so. I've been going back through the Reader to see what I've missed. The Web 2.0 conference has generated a huge amount of conversation in the tech space. On the nonprofit side of things, there were a lot of great posts this past week. Here are some of my favorites:
Are Markets Moral?: Social Earth contributor Mike Shoemaker writes a very thoughtful piece about the formation of collective narratives and the shifting conversation about business.
From The 3G Industry Summit In Kunshan, China: 16 Demos From Chinese Mobile Startups: If you're interested in the state of technology and startup culture in the land to the East, check out this nice recap post from TechCrunch.
In social enterprise, force yourself to be an entrepreneur first: My friend Peter Haas from the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group writes a great post about the fundamentals of being an "entrepreneur" that transcend whether it's socially motivated or not.
BART Checks In on Foursquare for Mass Transit Promotion: I'm pretty enamored of the potential of location-based application Foursquare, and was interested to see their partnership with the San Francisco BART transportation system. Web 3.0, baby.
Introducing the Social Impact Exchange: PhilanTopic writes up a new knowledge network designed to increase information sharing and collaboration.
Some Useful Articles on Net Neutrality: Net Neutrality was a big topic this week, and a lot of the venture capital community weighed in. VC Brad Feld wrote this post as a quick links crib notes and it's especially useful if you haven't spent much time with this issue.
Net Neutrality: VC Fred Wilson shares the letter signed by many investors and sent to the FCC.
(Photo: JasonWalton)
Moving Beyond Transaction Thinking
Published October 24, 2009 @ 09:47AM PT
One of the recurring themes of speakers at Pop!Tech, whether stated as such or not, is the notion that success in the future means re-learning to think beyond transactions.
First, a framework. In the commercial world, transactions are the way we do businesses. One party has one type of value that another wants, and that other person has an ability to trade a different type of value to the first party. Money becomes the proxy for this exchange. The value of the two items exchanged is determined immediately. This sort of transaction is the way that a huge number of our material, consumptive relationships progress.
Community is a bit different. Participants in communities of all kinds expect that the community is a source of strength, or value, for them. But to derive value from most communities, participants have to give in a way that is not transactional. You contribute to people within a community without knowing exactly how that value is going to come back to you. The currency is trust - or to use a more wonky term, social capital.
Two interesting places today where the notion of transaction has come up are YouTube and our Food System.
Kansas State University researcher Michael Wesch talked about how the community on YouTube responds to vulnerability and openness. But YouTube is fundamentally a-commercial for most content producers, at least in the sense that they're not being rewarded financially in a transaction based system. Of course, they are still deriving an immense amount of value - however they define it.
Michael Pollan, food researcher and author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," and "In Defense of Food," gave an amazing overview of the food system. Perhaps the most profound observation was his assessment that people view themselves in a zero-sum relationship with nature; that when we take, nature is deleteriously impacted. That's the transaction thinking, except that nature has no say in the value it derives. Instead, Pollan urged us to think of ourselves in an ongoing, complex, and give and take relationship with nature that extends over time.
Food for thought. Pun Intended.
(Photo: Muffet)
The Conference Is Dead (...Does Anyone Care?)
Published October 23, 2009 @ 01:29PM PT
I've spent a lot of time at conferences, from high end boutique brain candystore programs like Pop!Tech to student-led events around the world. At this point I'm ready to say that the conference model we have today - keynotes, plenary sessions, networking breaks, etc - is dead. And good riddance.
First, what I don't mean. Gatherings of people are going to do nothing but increase in importance. As more and more of our lives go online and particularly as our professional worlds cross more and more boundaries and connect us to people farther and farther away. In that world, the oasis of real human connection that gatherings provide will have an increasingly high emotional, psychological, and consequently professional value.
But the model of conferences - just like the model of everything else, it seems - is stuck in a 20th century. It's hierarchical, it's dominated by a class system that divides along lines of prestige, previous attendance, and a host of other factors, and more than anything else, it does stuff not because it's what people want but just because it's sort of how it's always been done.
I've been thinking for a while that the old style format is headed out, but two interesting things happened in the past couple weeks that have made me even more ready to dance on its grave.
First, the Opportunity Collaboration became one of (if not the) first high profile event to employ a far more "unconference-y" model and charge an expensive (as in, $5,000+) registration fee. No keynotes, no plenaries. People paid for the ability to stay in a setting where they could more easily find and connect with one another. The content was anchored by a group discussion and attendee created workshops. Everyone (and this means C-level executives at some of the world's best known nonprofits) was dressed in flip-flops and shorts, and the name tags didn't even have organizations and titles on them. And in case you couldn't tell from my posts, it kicked ass.
Second, I'm now at Pop!Tech, and one of the things that's immediately clear is that this is not a conference. This is theater. It's high-end, "Masterpiece Theatre" for the brain theater, but theater nonetheless. The entire format of the event is to parade brilliance in front of the audience and let them take in and observe things as they will. They have some structures for networking and community building, but mostly this is the performance that anchors and inspires the community: the action is manifest throughout the year in the form of labs, fellowship programs, and other things that actually get attendees working together. But that's not the job of this set of performances.
I've been thinking a lot, actually, about Clay Shirky's TED@State talk from the summer. In it he talks about how media is no longer just a broadcast to be consumed but a site of organizing. His point is that as people consume media, they then organize groups around that to take the ideas, inspiration, or dissent generated by that media and turn it into action.
Performances as we are used to them - concerts, theater, dance, etc - have always been delivered in a broadcast model. People interested in whatever the content is sit around and consume that performance, then go home to the rest of their world.
The weird thing about the model is that the filter of which performances you would chose actively to seek out may actually be a lens through which to find other people you would like talking to, or perhaps even working with it. With that in mind, thinking of Pop!Tech (or TED, I would imagine, although I haven't been there yet) as a 21st century mental performance, with the speakers providing the content and the attendees creating the "organizing site" around it, makes a lot of sense.
But the point is, that's not a conference. Or at least, not what we think of a conference right now. So the situation we have is one where you've got groups like the Opportunity Collaboration demonstrating that what people pay for at events is social capital - access to incredible networks, and at the same time events like Pop!Tech reinterpreting performance and using that performance as a platform for ongoing action.
In that situation, why do so many events cling to the older model? I've gotten nothing but positive response from my post a couple days ago about the extinction of plenaries, and in fact have never heard any one (with the exception of the occasional conference organizer themselves) really defend the structure. So what gives?
I think in part it's economics. The assumption is that people participate in conferences largely because of the quality of the speakers they bring in. Being able to put together interesting and provocative panel discussion quadruples the number of speakers an event can have at any one time, and so shouldn't that bring in more registrations? That's a tough argument for me to accept though; the economics of conferences tend to stink anyway, so why not experiment with different formats? What's more, the high price-tage of "all social capital" events like Opportunity Collaboration or "all keynote" performances like Pop!Tech and TED would seem to undermine it.
I think the inevitable thrust is that more and more, what we now call an "unconference" will increasingly just be what we think of as a conference. Sure there will be experiments with different formats that involve various levels of participation, but at the end of the day, I think that models that aren't rooted in the obliteration of conference hierarchy and the recognition that people go to events to find other people are living on borrowed time.
(Photo: Banana Donuts)
