On 28-29 October 2010 Digital Pioneers organized the international conference on social innovation on the Internet in Trouw Amsterdam. From an international perspective we looked at the impact of small-scale civil society media initiatives on society and the media landscape. Together with national and international pioneers, the Digital Pioneers network and anyone who believes in the power of the Internet as a catalyst of social innovation, we identified the challenges and set the agenda for the next decade. The first day was focussed on the question what can we learn from successful digital pioneers projects. Read our report…

Kick off!

Thursday morning the 28th. of October. The TROUW building in Amsterdam starts to get crowded although it’s quite early. During this summit, initiated by the organizers of the Digital Pionieers program, social entrepreneurs active in the field of new media meet to exchange concrete ideas and visions for the near future.

Photo: participants Summit.

Chair Linda Vermaat, herself a Digital Pioneer (Digitale Koelkast) invites project leader Nikki Timmermans to the stage to open the summit for a full room. She explains how the successful Digital Pioneers program will come to an end after eight years and this summit is organized for the community of pioneers to meet up and figure out how to empower each other in the future. Timmermans: “The digital revolution has just begun, we hope to support your further plans with this summit!”

View Nikki Timmermans’ presentation slides

Watch the video of Nikki Timmermans’ presentation

Before the first keynote speaker, Juliana Rotich, enters the stage Marcel van der Drift explains the concept of ‘Don’t do it yourself’, which is an approach to match people actively for to help each other. Marcel and his colleagues will be doing just that during the two days of the summit. Their tagline: ‘A shared problem is a solved problem’.

Photo: Linda Vermaat, Marcel van der Drift and Arnoud van den Heuvel (left).

Lessons learned from an African open source program (Juliana Rotich, Ushahidi)

Juliana Rotich, originally from Kenia and schooled as IT-professional in the US, presents her successful initiative Ushahidi. Ushahidi is a tool and platform to crowdsource and visualize data in crisis situations and as such it is an alternative to traditional centralized media. The idea emerged after the violence in the aftermath of the elections in Kenia. Not surpsingly the name ‘Ushahidi’ means ‘testimony’ in Swahili.

Apart from the relevance of Ushahidi as a concept Juliana shares an inspiring story about pioneering entrepreneurship of people with a vision who just start doing something and figure it out along the way. Being shocked by the conflicts and the related media coverage she teamed up with some enthusiastic bloggers and experts in Kenia to invent what became Ushahidi. The organization was ad hoc and leaderless and all participants had full time jobs. They were forced to make quick and kind of brutal decisions since they lacked the luxury of time or money. However, based upon her experience Juliana states that inviting the community to help results in solutions. What is more, they came to the conclusion that the software is important, but more important is the knowledge and the commitment from the crowds. Along that line of thought offline meeting of people is essential. The three golden rules: stop/collaborate/listen.

Photo: Juliana Rotich.

Business opportunism instead of a plan (Adam Hyde, FLOSS Manuals)

Adam Hyde stopped by the Summit on his way from Berlin to Barcelona in a driving publishing house (more on that below). Adam initiated FLOSS Manuals a site that provides free manuals for free. What is more, a main goal was to present the manuals attractively. Check here whether or not he succeeded.

Working on FLOSS Manuals led him to new opportunities. Since the manuals had to be written he started to think on ways to write publications in collaboration. And today Adam is busy to promote a spin-off of his FLOSS manuals adventure: Book Sprint, a concept to write books very fast (a few days) in collaboration, and Book Mobile, a mobile book binding machine in a VW-Van, hence his tour with the driving publishing house.

Altogether, the story of Adam, in his own words, is one of business opportunism instead of business planning. Starting with his manual site he ended up being an accidental innovator in the publishing field. His Key ingredients: Don’t plan, learn to tell stories, know your audience and make friends! “We don’t have a core business”.

Watch the video of Adam Hydes keynote

Photo: Adam Hyde.

Clinics: role up your sleeves and work it!

After the first keynote speakers it is time to get into some practical issues. Participants of the summit leave the main stage for the cellars of the TROUW building to share their experiences on topics such as business models, community building, Creative Commons & copyright, crowdsourcing, fundraising, mobile and open source.

At the table for business models expert Machiel Emmering actively confronts people with the necessity of a viable business model. He invites them to present their ideas in a schematic form that consists of the elements: proposition, the market, the organization and the financials.

Anna Chojnacka of the crowd source platform 1%club hosts the table on community building. She explains that you have to set the standard immediately when you go online, which means that it is best to have a community on forehand and online it can grow. On top of that she emphasizes the importance of a personal tone, transparency and participation.

Photo: Anna Chojnacka leading the round table on communities.

At the copyright table legal experts of the Rechtswinkel state that too often social media start-ups are ignorant with regard to legal issues. They should investigate this thoroughly while designing their concept or business model otherwise it might be too late.

The conversation on mobile, hosted by James Burke and Juha van Hetzelfde (Urbanode), discussed among others to what extent apps can make a difference in public space. What could be the extra value of influencing elements around you with an app? What if everybody wants to influence particular things at the same time? It seems as if the search on these issues has just begun.

The clinic that dealt with Crowdsourcing was quite crowded and hosted by keynote speaker Juliana Rotisch and Jesse Limmen (magneetfestival). It was decided that crowd sourcing is an excellent way to organize volunteers. However, to keep a particular platform viable a relatively small committed group is essential (as with Wikipedia). To organize crowd souring it is of main importance to think about the incentives to attract participants.

Keynotespeker Alan Crabbe and Roy Cremers of the Amsterdam city art fund (AFK) hosted the clinic about the closely related issue of Crowdfunding. According to their experience There are a few golden rules: be sure there is a clear end result, make an interesting small film, take an existing fan base or network as point of departure, provide your ‘crowd’ with a specific incentive to participate.

Crowdfunding in Australia (Alan Crabbe, Fundbreak)

It might be the future of funding: an online platform that enables professional creatives to sell their projects and ideas to the public. Fundbreak in Australia exists to do exactly that.

Co-founder Alan Crabbe explains how their platform integrates several forms of social media such as networking, bookmarking, video, slideshows and blogging to provide the professionals with the possibility to exhibit their projects. As such Fundbreak not only generates funding but might function as a marketing tool as well.

At Fundbreak they learned that projects that are able to present themselves in an attractive way (such as a dancer that wanted to have a flight ticket financed) have a good chance to succeed in collecting the necessary funds. It also helps if there is an existing fanbase and if goals seem realistic and achievable. An interesting finding is that a system of investments does not work and supporters need some sort of tangible or intangible incentive.

For the near future Alan sees a variety of opportunities for crowdfunding to grow as self-evident way of funding in society with concepts such as group buying and sharing, the emergence of niche networks, but also as a way to organize corporate responsibility and provide solutions for all kinds of social issues in communities.

Watch the video of Alan Crabbe’s keynote

Photo: Alan Crabbe.

Panel discussion on funding in the future

The first day of the summit ends with a panel discussion on funding. Participants are Roy Cremers (AFK, Amsterdam arts fund), KLaas Kuitenbrouwer (Virtueel Platform), Anna Chojnaka (1% club) and Alan Crabbe (Fundbreak).

The initiative of the Amsterdam arts fund voordekunst.nl illustrates that crowd funding is considered a serious option to support artistic activity in the near future, even according to traditional funding institutions. The concept is that the fund executes a quality check en provides the first 30% of the finances; the rest is up to the crowds.

The emergence of these forms of crowdfunding seems very welcome in the contemporary financial and political reality. However it confronts us with questions as well. For example, as Klaas Kuitenbrouwer brought up, in the case of the Amsterdam fund, if only ‘popular’ projects will be realized, how can one legitimize that public resources are spent?

And what does it mean for the quality of arts if, as with Fundbreak, there is not necessarily a particular artistic norm to be successful? Will art become entirely dependent on populism?

Alan states that the innovativeness is precisely in the fact that the ‘taste’ of government is circumvented; artistic work is democratized. Roy adds to that that he believes ‘niche’-projects are just as able to sell themselves online as more popular ones. Anna concludes on this issue that running a crowd funding platform does not mean that you leave everything to the crowd. At her organization, the 1%club (a platform for development projects), they work with gatekeepers who preselect viable projects (just as the Amsterdam fund does).

Altogether, the concept of crowd funding promises a change in the mentality about funding. Micro patronage becomes possible and networks can emerge around particular cultural production or social issues. The discussion was concluded with the question whether or not crowd funding will be a local or more global phenomenon in the sense of what kind of projects people will support. Most members of the panel thought that local initiatives remain very important because this is the level that people can identify with.

Find the video of the panel discussion on funding here (27′51)

Photo: panel discussion with Roy Cremers and Klaas Kuitenbrouwer.

Wrap up and winner Open Car data

Before Pioneers and other guests of the summit go for a drink, dinner or prepare for the party later in the evening there is one important announcement to make: the winner of the Open Car Data experiment, Casper! During the day an exciting competition took place around the Trouw-building. One of the Pioneers built an Emission Profiles application and launched a competition. For this competition summit visitors were invited to drive one lap in a VW polo equipped with Opencardata Technology and competed who can emit the least amount of CO2 during the lap. The results were spectacular, read them here.

Photo: Stef Kolman (middle), Casper and Linda Vermaat.

And we call it a day. But not before a little dancing with local heroes ‘Jungle by Night’ and DJ crew ‘De Poolhonden’.

Photo: Jungle by Night.

Report written by Kimon Moerbeek (Kennisland), photos by Kennisland.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 15th, 2010 at 21:03 and is filed under General.