Entries from September 2007 ↓

Last week I caught the last afternoon of the Serious Virtual Worlds conference in Coventry.

Here’s a short piece I wrote on the conference for 4Talent.

Last Wednesday I attended a presentation by Ashoka in the Société Générale.

Ashoka are the oldest association for social entrepreneurs in the world and support over 1800 fellows world-wide . I’ve been working with the Ashoka Support Network to put together some very early stage ideas on how the organisation could apply Web 2.0, and specifically social networking approaches to its work.

If the people I heard about (and met) on Wednesday are anything to go by, the Ashoka fellows are an interesting bunch of people.

I specifically found Lesley Ann Van Selm’s talk hugely inspiring.  She is a South African who founded Khulisa, a restorative justice programme:

"Khulisa is an initiative that tackles crime holistically, working at all levels of the crime cycle – preventing crime, diverting youth from the criminal justice system, providing alternatives to imprisonment, fostering personal transformation for those who are in prison, and assisting with their transition back to society."

According to Van Selm, 80 percent of participants do not revert back to crime, and it costs about a third as much to run this programme as it does to keep someone in jail for one year.

Ashoka seem to really push their entrepreneurs towards taking a world-wide, and world-changing approach.  Khulisa is now coming to the UK; it’ll be fascinating to see how well a South African developed methodology would work in this country.

I think what I like most about the social enterprise sector is the intelligence, resilience and openness of the people I meet. Over the next few years I’m keen to help as many of these people as possible to use the web to tell more people about who they are, what they doing and why more people should be doing the same.

After posting about the Personal MBA last February, we started up a Birmingham group in March and have spent 2007 reading some great (and some not so great) books about business in all its forms. We’ve just had a summer break and will be re-starting in October.

Two highlights for me have been:

• The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun. A really great guide to management and leadership; well worth it as a complement to highly structured methodologies such as Prince.
• Getting Things Done by David Allen. If you’ve seen me in person at any point in 2007 I’ve proabably chewed your ear off about this one. It has genuinely transformed my working life.

I recommend giving the Personal MBA a go if you want to learn more about business but don’t have the time or the money to pay for a real MBA course (or if like me you think they’re over-rated and expensive).

Our group is pretty varied: we have amongst us an assistant head-teacher; three people involved in entrepreneurship education; an IT business owner; two digital consultants and a photographer.

The debates following each book’s discussion have been most interesting for me. It’s fascinating how people from such different disciplines can talk about a single subject from different, but empathetic and complementary perspectives. There’s a big gap between photography and IT but it works really well.

People are coming and going all the time so if you’re interested in getting involved let me know.

I KNOW this is really late, but hey, it’s been summer.

I went to New York in August for a wedding party and stopped in at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn to do a talk. If you don’t know it, Etsy is a site for people who want to sell hand-made items. The labs are a physical co-working space where people can congregate, use equipment and learn stuff. The whole thing’s just brilliant. After two years of opening they now have over 50,000 shops set up.

The talk was based on Hugh McLeod’s Global Microbrand concept and, being the techies and artists they are, they recorded the whole thing and put it up online (complete with bluegrass soundtrack – that’s got to be a first).

If anyone’s an artist or indy creative you might find it useful. It’s all about social media and how to use it to build a worldwide customer-base whilst staying small.

One great thing was having 50 or so people watching from all over the world using Etsy’s amazing broadcasting system. We did a live, interactive web makeover at the end of the session and it was lovely to see that Xiane (our online guinea pig) actually went ahead and changed her site based on our suggestions.

It was a great evening and good fun meeting all the guys. They have some very interesting plans afoot and it’ll be interesting to see what they get up to over the next year.