Published by Camilla on 01 Jul 2010 at 03:04 pm
Making history at the Social Innovation BarCamp
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Despite sweltering weather, nearly 100 people gathered in central Paris last Saturday for the first Social Innovation BarCamp in France! Everyone from social entrepreneurs to community managers came out to share their work and interest in social innovation. |
Breaking ground
Attendees also included researchers, technologists, bloggers, consultants, designers, NGO and social business representatives. It was the first social innovation barcamp ever in France.
After brief introductions, we each shared three tags to describe ourselves and then given pieces of chalk to fill up the traditional BarCamp gridboard with sessions for the day. It was rapidly put to good use, with 16 workshops outlined in a matter of minutes! A frenzy of activity followed as participants found their way to sessions in different parts of La Cantine.
Damien Roussat from InformEthic, Camilla Burg from WiserEarth, Michel Bernand-Mantel from Finance Solidaire who were among the co-organisers of the Social Innovation BarCamp
Popular sessions
- How to manage an international online community
- Research and development around social innovation
- Industrialization of social action
- Neuro-connections and creative intelligence
- A tour of Asia meeting innovative social entrepreneurs
- How global NGOs can get the most out of web 2.0
- Open money and microcredit
- Community management
- The use of media in conflict resolution
- Next steps after the BarCamp
Impressions and insights
Video: Pehr Martens from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden
See a longer discussion with Tommy, a student from Science Po at the BarCamp (in French).
Did we bring greater clarity to the topic of social innovation? I think so. While the sessions were varied, there were several underlying themes that were shared by many of the participants throughout the day…
- The value of creative and collective thinking
- The need for collaboration
- The importance of ecosystems
- Technology
- A desire to bring greater visibility to work already being done
- Other shared values, such as a belief that we need to create a more equitable society
However, we still didn’t come up with a short pithy sentence that gives us a precise definition of social innovation. If you have one, please let me know!
The Social Innovation BarCamp was hosted by WiserEarth.org and InformEthic, sponsored by La Poste and Bolloré and supported by a number of other organizations including NetSquared, FinanceSolidaire, Silicon Sentier, LIENS and Kiva.
You can listen to an interview (in French) about the new technology and the Social Innovation BarCamp with l’Atelier des Medias, a part of Radio France International tomorrow (Saturday) at 11h or online at any time.
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Tags: barcamp, France, paris, social innovation
5 Responses to “Making history at the Social Innovation BarCamp”
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