Part 2/4: A Social Business Plan for Serving the #socent Community: Co-creating how we present ourselves

A key cornerstone to developing the unique consultancy practice I've written about will be the quality of our database of social entrepreneurs who are vetted, willing and available to be deployed on short term consultancy assignments related to their skills and sectoral/issue based knowledge.

When it comes to initially recruiting potential consultants, the prestigious "labeling" networks such as Ashoka, Skoll Foundation and Schwab Foundation offer existing vetting processes and profiles that we can hopefully build upon.  Asking those agencies' input on identifying their Fellows who fit the "post-late-stage" description comes to mind as a great place to start approaching those important standard-setting organizations with value we can help them to add to their Fellow's experience. 

However, we will need a scalable framework for effectively tapping into an even broader range of dynamic social entrepreneur talent pools than the "big" labeling networks alone can offer.  To that end, I am proposing a database development process that includes at least 6 months of gathering direct potential stakeholder input as described below.

Engaging our potential consultants in designing how we present their experience to potential clients will enable us to explore a variety of ways we can plan to leverage the value of the database we build, for maximum impact on the growth of all of our consultants' primary activities. It will also give us the knowledge of our consultants capacities we'll need to begin developing differentiated pricing models and quality control systems for the kinds of value added services we can confidently claim to offer.  

The inspiration to serve

After a presentation I recently gave at a #140confBrussels gathering, another of the speakers persuaded me of the "black hole of information" that he told me futurists are saying will exist around the recorded history from our time. As I understood his argument, too much valuable new information is being created in digital age real time that we are not yet capturing and sorting for historical knowledge sharing purposes.  Even powerful tools like the amazing wayback machine are having trouble keeping up with the pace of new online content growth in a self-sustaining way.

So here's how I see it: If we want today's stories of social change to matter in the world, it is incumbent upon us to start building our history, and keeping a clear record of what we are gaining experience in and collectively achieving in the global changemaker space. I have been feeling a need to redefine how we profile ourselves for many years, and am thrilled to see that new online mapping tools like OpenAction.org are finally making it easier to imagine creating profiles for social entrepreneurs that, I believe, can add considerable value to our unique professional potential.

The big idea

Building a successful commercial consulting practice will involve developing an up-to-date database of the relevant experience that our workforce of consultants has to offer, which reflects the variety of current operational expertise we have to draw from in designing and deploying consulting teams to meet our clients' needs.  The internet offers us increasing shapes and forms of content to link to in evidence of that operational experience. Mapping technologies like what OpenAction.org is able to render make it possible now (finally) for individuals within a community to seamlessly and effectively consolidate a broad range of online content activity from different platforms, into a single profile and archive building interface.

If we begin to use that kind of technology to deliberately build upon the value of an individual changemaker's big and small cutting edge activities and achievements - historically and in real time - we will have also created something more. Our database of consultants, which is also in effect a trust based network with a high propensity of face-to-face connections, becomes a unique platform for showcasing what our experts' endeavors are achieving, have achieved, and even need help with right now.  Our database of links to the full range of a Social Entrepreneurs activities that are visible online becomes an "online superstore" of social change-related activities that can serve to invite repeated stakeholder and fan engagement.

In the consulting database of social entrepreneurs I am imagining, we would be encouraged to configure our profiles to automatically keep our resumes up to date with active links that offers a full picture of our operational experience, expertise and output. For example:

• video media about our projects
• business & community services our projects offer
• books we have written that are for sale
• socent competitions we participate in
• awards & distinctions we have received
• physical products our projects are selling 
• crowdsourcing campaigns we are spearheading
• other funding models we are experimenting with
• financing campaigns we have recently contributed to
• reports we have submitted from completed assignments 
• social media channels we are using to tell our ongoing stories
• feedback from our clients and teammates about our work on completed assignments

A collective digital space that pulls together links to this kind of content from a collection of the world's leading social entrepreneurs would not only give us a powerful platform through which to find, deploy and share about operational expertise, but would effectively serve to increase the visibility of every campaign, product for good and other kind of fundraising initiative listed in it.

Who benefits, how?

Our consulting practice will benefit from using technology that can tap into a wide range of evolving activities that our consultants are engaged in to create & demonstrate their impact;

Our partners and clients will benefit from the ability to see, find and personally invest in the ever changing landscape of social change that's emerging around people they personally know and trust;

The current and past Social Enterprise projects our community of senior experts has launched would all benefit from visibility within an online superstore of social change-related initiatives that invites engagement with each individual experts' current, past and future endeavors.

Most importantly, participating Social Entrepreneurs will benefit. 

In fact, an evolving profile is one of the things many Ashoka Fellows I know have wished for the most loudly during the 10 years since I was named a Fellow. Unfortunately, our Ashoka profiles are (by Ashoka's design) a static snapshot in time of where we were with our plans at the moment when Ashoka chose to invest in us. One could argue that what really matters is what happened after that investment, but our continued evolution as social entrepreneurs is not well reflected in how Ashoka (and other competitive award networks) have tended to present the work of social entrepreneurs to their stakeholders. 

The face-to-face client and teamwork relationships Social Entrepreneurs can build through occasional consulting assignments can fuel new levels of viral engagement with each of our ongoing and past activities. Pointing my client in the Corporate Social Responsibility department where I am deployed to an easily sharable professional profile that always offers them automatically updated ways to consider supporting or engaging with my other work in the world could be a very, very good thing. 

A one stop page that gets automatically fed with fresh content as we continue to blog, upload videos to youtube and participate in social media platforms and competitions as usual can also help to streamline the use of a social entrepreneur's promotional time. Instead of breaking our time up around promoting specific links to new opportunities as they arise, our consultants' profiles will offer a full picture of what each is actively engaged in right now to make the world a better place.

The consultant's profile should be designed to be equally useful to the potential consultancy client who is considering expertise proposed for a job, to the former client or teammate who is looking to support or engage with the work of a changemaker they now trust after completing a job together, and to the online contact or family member who sees it in our email signature.  Our evolutionized profiles will become the one place where everything we Social Entrepreneurs do in the world can be seen, in a coherent, evolving, career-history documenting picture. 

A community co-created plan for supporting social entrepreneur careers

To begin transitioning Social Entrepreneurs' skills from our own projects to transferable skills that can be deployed in a social change consulting workforce, we need to first take stock of what we are currently doing and learning to do with new and old tools that we all have available. Technology will enable us to let what we are doing speak in the present and create a historical marker, so that what we have done can eventually start speak for itself. The question now is, which tools and systems are Social Entrepreneurs using to achieve what they are doing in the world, that our database should be sure to capture?

I am currently talking with a number of partners about what's emerging as a +/-6 month plan toward the development of a professional changemaker database with high impact value. The plan includes 3 basic activities:

1. Prototype an online collaborative process for developing a useful, trust-based community designed platform which serves senior social entrepreneurs in a specialized sector with new kinds of career-building support, visibility and potential to connect with new opportunities. 
2. Develop and test an offline series of seminar events for guiding Social Entrepreneurs at various stages in their careers through a process of building a reframed and expanded vision of their professional value. The process methods will be tested with small groups. 
3. Work with partners and potential consultants to co-create the consultancy vetting, training & certification process (and related database needs) that will provide a backbone in the quality control systems we put into place for pricing our consultants' services, coordinating teams, and guaranteeing the delivery of value.  

Existing groups of Social Entrepreneurs within easy reach for engagement in this exploratory process through existing partnerships over the next 6 months include: 

• Groups of regionally connected, self-identified social entrepreneurs who are members of the HUB Network in the Benelux region (Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam) and possibly the UK;
• Groups of actively connected changemakers and Social Enterprise support networks who gather at open space industry gatherings such as OxfordJam and SHINE UK. 
• Groups of senior late stage changemakers (Ashoka Europe, WomenChangeMakers Foundation)

Where to now?


I am in active conversation with a Social Entrepreneur support partner on developing a trust-based web community that offers high value to their soon to be appointed first round of Fellows later this year, and see clearly how that experience could serve as a prototype for building a broader database that taps into other kinds of specialized, issue-oriented operational expertise. 


As a Board member of the HUB in Brussels, I have recently been stepping up my engagement in helping to initiate a stakeholder engagement strategy in 2011 that - among other objectives - will aim to strengthen the HUB's community identity as a global and local network of self-identified social entrepreneurs. I will be looking seriously this week at the feasibility of incorporating the Social Start up Labs model in what I hope to develop with and for HUB members, and will continue to pursue discussions with OpenAction.org on how to use their mapping technology to build on the currently evolving HUB member information systems. 


I was thrilled to learn in detail last week about Ashoka Europe's plans to hold a Europe-wide collaborative gathering of Fellows and key stakeholders in the social change space in late June of this year. The most exciting new thing I learned in the presentation was that one of the main themes in the programme agenda is building social entrepreneurs' professional competencies. You can be sure I'll be exploring potential synergies with those developments in more detail with some of my Ashoka contacts this week. 


What can YOU do? 


Inspired by some of the very practical new technologies for changemakers recently launched by people I've worked with and been watching for a while in the social change space, such as OpenAction.org, StartSomeGood.org and wonderful initiatives like Amy Sample Ward's #commbuild chats, I am currently collecting guest-written articles about the latest developments online that support the social change space. These articles will feature prominently in a plan to bring the Internet4Change.com blog back to life this spring. If you are a Social webpreneur developing online tools for the social change space, you are invited to introduce your tool, tell us your story, and tell us specifically how you see it building project and career level value for today's Social Entrepreneurs. 


Please let me know @ChristinasWorld or in the comments below if you would like to contribute a blog post about a tool for #socent mapping, project financing, product sales or career building that you'd like professionals in the social entrepreneurship space to know is now launched, launching or growing. I will look forward to finding ways to connect further around your ideas for Internet4Change article submissions, and will be seeking an initial 12-20 articles to fill a pilot content schedule in the Spring.

Collaborator backgrounds in the shaping of ideas

As I set out to build the evolutionize it core business models, my thinking is influenced quite a lot by the collaborative relationships I am currently engaged in. As I'd hoped, investing in an unsalaried year of gathering social enterprise collaboration experience first hand is sparking a lot of focused thought on how to build a business that contributes meaningfully to the development of collaborative systems in the social change sector.

I have been talking with a lot of folks lately about facilitating collaboration through different kinds of "webbed events": from 100% virtual events, to face-to-face conference events and dinner parties that "web" themselves into a living interactive virtual state, to kickstart viral collaborative action.

The people I'm talking to about that are bringing several layers of depth into the product development process. I am acutely aware that right now I am not a social entrepreneur with an idea that sports the Ashoka label, but in start-up mode once again, with untried ideas. In that reflection on transition in my own career, one of the things that is fascinating me recently is the variety of career paths behind some of the fellow social entrepreneurs I'm interacting with regularly right now.

I have been tempted on more than one occasion to post the skype chat and/or voice notes from the conversations I've been having with the people I've listed below, and may still do that with their permission. I' feel it's important to document who they are and what they bring to this process.

- Ben Metz is a social enterprise strategy consultant and former director of Ashoka UK who is spearheading the OxfordJam event, that's scheduled to run parallel to the Skoll World Forum next month. Ben shares my zeal for encouraging changemakers to develop stakeholder collaboration strategies, and has worked with me to set the parameters for some practical labs that will experiment with collaboration strategy building approaches. I am equally excited about Friday morning's FREE Social Media and Collaboration session: transforming the value of your networks, and Thursday evening's Big Collaboration Dinner we're cooking up (£25) to evolutionize collaboration through team-play. The push is on, so book your tickets to both events now!

- Suresh Fernando brings a background in investment banking, tech financing and philosophy into my professional sphere. He is currently having some high level email conversations about financing models for collaborative systems building that I would love to see taking place more publicly, with more players who have an interest in that particular field. In the true spirit of collaborative integrity, Suresh agrees but refrains from calling that conversation himself. I have volunteered to think about convening a fishbowl discussion that includes Suresh's group as well as collaborators on a couple of related projects I am aware of. I am chewing over the best tools to use to create that online conversation event, and kind of excited about it.

- Mark Grimes has been a close collaborator and friend of mine for the past 6-7 years, both during my time in Africa and more recently. Prior to embarking on building the ned model, Mark created some of the web's earliest viral marketing successes. He currently operates 2 co-working spaces for tech startups and changemakers in Portland, and owns the online wiki/discussion space for better world builders at http://ned.com. Mark shares my will to take risks and "just do it" when it comes to simple, good ideas. There's a lot of trust and loyalty between us. He and I are having some exciting conversations about tweaking and replicating the unconference event we co-hosted in Portland in February. I'm also talking to him about maybe putting the collaborative systems building discussion with Suresh and others at ned.com.

- David Ewaku helps me connect the pieces of new and old concepts. David and I imagineered ideas together in Uganda as far back as 2002. He worked with me while he was in law school in Uganda, and his current UK course of study as a CPA specializing in network security makes him a really great thinking ally. David has been a party to the evolution of these concepts longer than anyone else, so I am able to talk to him about how the pieces fit together in ways that I can't with anyone else.

- Tom Dawkins is the social media coordinator in the Ashoka Washington office. It is ironic (but pleasant) to have an active working relationship with the inner Ashoka now that I'm no longer officially a fellow. Tom and I co-hosted the recent #4change chat, which gave me a nice opportunity to experience a fast-paced conversation event. I really appreciated his willingness to let me take the reigns, and forgiveness for my mistakes. We've also talked some about ways to engage more fellows in shaping Ashoka's social media presence. Tom doesn't know it yet, but I have some ideas for helping him to do that brewing, that I plan to share with him soon.

Product Development: Hosting a collaboration dinner event

I am currently exploring the value of "webbed" collaboration event design as an economically viable product to build the Evolutionize It core business model on. This involves creating contexts for collaboration to take place that integrate participation at online and offline venues for change.

The social impact objective is to develop easily replicable event models plugged into social media tools that can create a momentum of full-sensory participatory collaboration experiences which continue to live online.

So I was recently invited to host a dinner event at the upcoming OxfordJam, whose working title is "The Big Collaboration Dinner." My basic idea was that we design a team-based game that would involve creating some concrete collaborative action plans around the dinner table. My first game idea was too intricate, but then I had a wild thought:

What if the purpose of the collaboration game was to work together to enable the whole room to make a social impact; a practical exercise in building a stakeholder collaboration strategy.

Ben Metz liked it. We connected by voice, and had an exciting chat at which I took the following notes.

private room
[1:54:39 PM] C: 7-8 square tables
[1:54:45 PM] C: 5 people on each
[1:54:56 PM] C: 40 tickets
[1:55:38 PM] C: plan over-engineered
[1:55:48 PM] C: elitism in culling of winners
[1:55:55 PM] C: find a way to keep everyone playing
[1:56:19 PM] C: let people bring their own issues to the table
[1:57:09 PM] C: each table agrees to focus on an issue
[1:57:24 PM] C: table agrees to brainstorm interventions it can create
[1:57:44 PM] C: hearts/minds - technology - legal structures - financing (crowdsourcing)
[1:58:20 PM] C: rather than winner - we have 8 actions to take
[1:58:25 PM] C: central circle: idea
[1:58:31 PM] C: 2nd: people around the table
[1:59:12 PM] Ben Metz: 3rd = the whole room
[1:59:17 PM] Ben Metz: 4th = everyoines networks
[1:59:40 PM] C: use hashtags to map out impact
[1:59:50 PM] C: and other ways of keeping track
[2:00:06 PM] C: keeps building - waves of inclusion & collasboration
[2:01:46 PM] C: gift economy
[2:01:53 PM] C: food price 25
[2:04:00 PM] C: 7 pounds of dinner for everyone - contributes to breaking even
[2:12:33 PM] C: draft text about concentric circles
[2:14:09 PM] *** Call ended ***
[2:14:44 PM] Ben Metz: great chat

Yowza! I'm so excited to have the blank canvas of a dinner event upon which to design a flash collaboration game.

Here's what's tentatively on the evening's menu:

Connect-It Cocktails

Identify people working on issues you can agree to put your passion behind. Align yourselves into 5 man teams; 1 team per table.

Decide-It Dinner

Explore the assets at the table that can be combined to create a social impact your team defines. Sketch out a collaborative plan and a 1 month timeframe for measurable action that includes opt-in ways for everyone on the other 7 teams (and their networks) to participate.

Do-It Dessert

Announce your team's call to action to the other teams. Describe your action, and tell others how they can help.

Drink-It Uplift!

Toast to each other's great work, and pledge to act in support of your favorites. Let the games begin as the room starts tweeting their networks to do the same!

One month later, we'll compile an impact oriented roundup of what each of the 8 teams has achieved.

So what do you think. Could it be fun? What would you change?

Want to come? Click here!

http://Evolutionize.it springing into action

I'm having a ball developing Evolutionize It.

Today is the first day of spring, and the foundations of an organization are emerging... like the budding leaves on the Japanese Cherry trees lining the streets in my lovely neighborhood, which will bloom in powerful pink glory about a month from now. Lots is going on with Evolutionize It that's still only barely visible to naked to the eye.

Our registration was finalized here in Belgium in January, just before I travelled for a month to the US. Last week we had our first general meeting of the Board, I've just bought the domain http://evolutionize.it, and ordered some mini MOO cards. Tomorrow I'm opening an Evolutionize It online banking account with Triodos Bank.

I have yet to write up the Board meeting notes. It's on my list for this coming week. Following the Boards agreement to use this public blogspace as our primary mode of communication, I will be posting those notes here. I will also be sending each of the founding board members an invitation to post here, with their thoughts about social enterprise, collaboration, and Evolutionize It's strategic development. In addition to falling behind on the Board meeting notes, I have also fallen behind on my participation in the World Bank's Urgent Evoke game. (If by chance you're also playing, please connect with me there!)

But while I haven't managed to achieve everything I'd hoped to have done by now, collaborative activity over the past week and a half has been quite busy:

• I am engaged in a couple of ongoing early discussions with potential partners (including Ned.com, HubBrussels, and w1sd0m), in developing a replicable series of financially viable, co-branded unconference events, that facilitate concrete offline and continued online collaboration between the changemakers who attend.
  
  
• I also reached out to some really smart people I know to get their impressions on some plans that Jean Russell of Thrivable.org and I are getting ready to embark upon, in the context of creating a proposed guide to collaboration in the social change space online. We are currently working on developing structures through which stakeholders of the guide can participate in it's development. My old ally Thomas Kriese and my new ally Allen Gunn both offered some very useful feedback. Jean has sent requests for feedback to her friends Kevin and Greg. We're both looking forward to their input as well, in finalizing the next steps in our stakeholder engagement strategy.
  
  
• Amy Sample Ward was kind enough to invite me to host a session on Social Media and Stakeholder Collaboration at the upcoming OxfordJam event. This past week, I've been working with the event's initiator Ben Metz (who served as Ashoka's UK director for 3 years) on possibly co-facilitating a dinner event as well, and am having some good fun imagineering participant experiences.
  
  
• Last week was also when I hosted my first #4change chat on Twitter, learning by doing at another kind of collaboration event. Tom Dawkins of Ashoka, and the collaborators he has assembled in the #4change crew, have developed a system for managing the monthly chats that I am excited to be learning from. The chat itself was also lots of fun (though I will admit to being a tiny bit nervous behind the scenes!)
  
  
• Earlier in the day of the #4change chat, I delivered a practical seminar for the @HubBrussels host team on developing a team approach to using twitter, in a way that builds their personal profiles and promotes a dynamic twitter presence that serves the #HubBxl community. I am thrilled to have recently joined the Board of Hub Brussels, and look forward to playing a continued active role in Hub community development.

The upcoming week's highlights include a discovery call scheduled with Suresh Fernando of OpenKollab, a Micro-Success offline start-up support group meeting, my first scheduled meeting with the Radical Inclusion virtual unconference planning team, and a weekend with Ashoka's Francophone Europe region Fellows and Investor Support Network members in Lille, France, where I get to invite folks to a 1.5 hour Evolutionize It strategy development session.

All in all, I am tremendously grateful to the universe right now for all the social enterprise collaboration work I've had the opportunity to embrace in recent weeks and months. Nearing the end of Q1 in our first year of existence, I am delighted with how Evolutionize It's structure and portfolio of experience is shaping up.

Happy Spring!

#4change Twitter Chat: How Social Media Can Enhance Events

I've recently joined the collaborative crew behind #4change, a monthly global chat on Twitter that discusses a variety of issues related to social media and social change. The #4change chat has been happening every month since early 2009, and was originally initiated by Tom Dawkins, the Social Media Strategist at Ashoka. I have participated actively in the past, but this week will be my first opportunity to co-host a #4change chat. I'm looking forward to it!

The following is cross-posted from the #4change blog:

In the wake of South by Southwest in Austin, and in anticipation of some exciting social media and social change gatherings coming up on the 2010 events calendar, we thought it could be useful to explore How Social Media Can Enhance Events as the topic for the March #4change chat.

I’m excited! Not only is this a topic that I personally want to learn more about, but it’s going to be my first time as part of the #4change collective to co-host a chat, together with Tom Dawkins (@tomjd). #Gratitude in advance for your patience, as I find the right groove!

Some pre-chat food for thought:

My new Mac’s thesaurus offers several alternative terms we could use instead of enhance:

enhance (verb) increase, add to, intensify, heighten, magnify, amplify, inflate, strengthen, build up, supplement, augment, boost, raise, lift, elevate, exalt; improve, enrich, complement.

Most of us would probably agree that social media indeed can enhance offline events, but does it always? For whom? The thesaurus also tells me the antonym to enhance is diminish. Can social media also diminish offline events?

There are so many tools we can use to try and enhance offline events. What we hope to explore in Thursday’s chat is how.

#4Change March Chat Questions:

1. What’s the potential benefit of using social media to cover events? For whom?
2. What makes a good events coverage strategy?
3. Are there examples of specific events that really did the social media piece well?
4. Which Social Media tools are best suited for covering live events?
5. How does online reporting affect the experience of participants at an event.
6. Is it possible to imagine online participants actually engaging in offline events remotely through social media, or will there always be a disconnect?
7. How can the continuation of conversations held at live events best be continued online? Is it realistic or unrealistic to expect that they will?

Join the Twitter chat:

If you want to contribute to the conversation, you’ll need to have a twitter account (it’s free).

• To follow the conversation (whether you are planning to contribute or not), use http://search.twitter.com or another application to search on Twitter for #4Change
• Jump in to the conversation by adding #4Change to your Twitter message
• Feeling brave? Check out TweetChat – it’s a great application that integrates with your Twitter account and makes chats more fun! You can turn it off after the chat.
• Please introduce yourself in 1 tweet at the start or when you join in

Details

Date: March, 18th 2010

When: 2 – 4 pm US Pacific Time, 5 – 7 pm US Eastern Time, 9pm – 11pm London, UK (NOTE: check your local time carefully, as the US changed to daylight savings time earlier this week)

Where: Twitter (search for #4Change)

Topic: How Social Media Can Enhance Events