Just wanted to report back further on the Skoll World Social Entrepreneurship forum. I'm just going to pick out a few things of particular interest and relevance to the Global Ideas Bank and its work.
• First up, and early on, was a paper by Joel Podolny (from Harvard) about Social Networks (networks was the 'theme' of the conference). His basic argument was that we need to move away from the idea of networks as linear structures of connections, in which social entrepreneurs act as 'matchmakers' or 'event planners'. Rather, networks can be ends rather than means: the social entrepreneur should view themself as the 'guardian of a community', a community in which shared values give rise to a sense of identity....which can then be channelled to effect social change. Or, as my notes put it, "the community must shape the identity of the network....the community becomes the agent of change". Pretty interesting stuff, and with obvious relevance to the GIB, particularly as we want the site to become increasingly co-ordinated and run by its community....
• Mark Moore (of Creating public value fame) talked about "Mass mobilisation and systemic change", although it could, arguably, have been more accurately called "the political and economic aspects of the social sector". Which was more interesting than it sounds....particularly when he was discussing the ideas of being "spiritually and relationally better off" (evaluation of impact), of organising institutions "as though people were basically good", and in the working relations between the individual and collective. With regard to the latter, it was the key double mantra of 'I know how to work with others to accomplish what I want' and 'I know how to work with others to figure out what we want to accomplish'...which lingers in the memory.
• There was quite a bit of fairly high-brow academic papers on networks. Some snapshots of interest:
- "Networks as prisms of identity that support the community" (prisms refract and reflect...)
- the heterarchy: combining (or overlaying) networks with existing organisational structures
- measuring trust (!), and trust being embodied in a logo.....(fairtrade etc.)
- networks as the transference of information in various ways.....
• The next seminar was not so great (suffice to say that a running joke started up that there was a need for a social enterprise that specialised in concise presentations and powerpoint for beginners) although it did feature a Polish man singing....Much better and far more enlightening was the wonderfully-titled "From silos to ponds, maps and windows: the new knowledge ecologies". Mary Midgley talked about her 'many maps' and 'aquarium' models of thinking and viewing. Jake Chapman spoke brilliantly about "systemic thinking" (against reductionist, mechanistic thinking), and Jenny Knowles grounded it in the real world with a NHS community collaborative scheme. Interesting points to mention are "Governments and social entrepreneurs overestimate what can be achieved in 1-3 years, but underestimate what can be achieved in 5-15 years"; "applying the business model to the social sector is different from applying the entrepreneurial model to the social sector"; and "the need for people who can cope with ambiguity"...
• I then moved on to the 'social software' seminar featuring Headshift and iCAN. This was probably the most familiar ground for me, but of interest to see iCAN's figures (150,000 uniques per month, 14000 registered users) and for the odd neatly-phrased endorsement of our approach: "Generate connected conversations and online dialogue around the boundaries of your territory to draw people in"....
• The "Think Like A Funder" session was interesting, although less speaking and more Q&A (this could be applied to the whole conference: we have their biographies and their papers already!!!) would have been great. It hotted up when the guy from Venturesome about hoping that one day the power will be shifted in the social sector from the supply to the demand side, as has happened in the personal and corporate financial spheres.
• And that was that, aside from meeting lots of good people: Dennis Whittle of the marvellous Global Giving; Andrea Westall of the New Economics Foundation, the UnLtd crowd, the SSE crowd (big up the Fife massive), one of our patrons Charles Handy, Mr Monkey Mosaic (James Smith), and many more.
