Creating a Network to Nurture Social Entrepreneurs and 3BL Businesses: Notes from 2009 Net Impact Conference session

This past Friday I had the great pleasure of participating in a panel discussion at the 2009 Net Impact Conference:

Creating a Network to Nurture Social Entrepreneurs and Triple Bottom Line Businesses

What would happen if ordinary people could seamlessly contribute to the work of social entrepreneurs? Silicon Valley has a sophisticated structure designed to identify and develop young creative people with innovative ideas. In the social sector, this structure is in its infancy. Join a panel of leaders from Ashoka, Social Actions, StartingBloc, AllDayBuffet, and PURE as they explore connections and next steps in the evolution of a similarly sophisticated structure for social entrepreneurialism.


Jane Hexter moderated the panel, which included Jerri Chou, Ryan Fix, Lennon Flowers, and Adriana Pentz. It was a fantastically rich presentation. Unfortunately, technical glitches precluded us from recording or videotaping the session, so I thought it might be helpful to post the notes I prepared in advance of the session.

There's a wonderfully informative wiki page, developed in advance of the session, that contains a wealth of suggested resources. It's been viewed several hundred times already, and everyone is invited to add content. You'll find contact information for all of the panelists there, as well as hyperlinks for anything mentioned below that's hyperlink-able.

Notes

Introduce yourself, your motivation for this work, and your intentions for this session

My name is Christine Egger. I work with a group called Social Actions. We create the kinds of online infrastructure we’ll be talking about today.

One of our projects is especially relevant: the Social Entrepreneur API

-- First open cross-organizational database of information about social entrepreneurs who have won fellowships and awards from various funders.

-- Right now, pulling from the Skoll Foundation, Draper Richards, PopTech, Civic Ventures, the Schwab Foundation, and ideablob.

-- The API (shorthand for “open, aggregated dataset”) allows you to search across all of these programs by funder, keyword, location, cause area, population served, and a variety of other factors.

-- We launched during September’s Social Capital Markets conference in San Francisco, and look forward to adding Ashoka, TED, Echoing Green and other funders over time.

Social Actions has also built an API for philanthropic actions – volunteering, donating, etc. – collecting them from online platforms like Change.org and GlobalGiving, GiveIndia, Greater Good South Africa, idealist. Anyone can build a search engine, iPhone app or other kind of app to sort, filter, and distribute these actions across the web.

Over time, these projects will weave together, and we’ll see common datasets for people, actions, organizations, entire movements that will make it easier to find and connect to what’s going on around us.

My personal motivation for this work: Life is short. It is WAY too short to not be doing what feels incredibly important to you., whether or not it comes easily to you. And I remember as a kid wondering why every single grown-up wasn’t working to make the world better than they found it, and I want to be able to look any child in the eyes and tell them that’s what I’m working on, every day.

My intention for today’s session is to introduce you to the projects we’re working on, participate in describing the context of resources it resides in and contributes to, and help you come away more informed, empowered, and prepared to co-create and benefit from that system.


What does success look like? What would be possible if a support structure for social and triple bottom line entrepreneurs existed?

-- People of all kinds are seamlessly finding and contributing to the work of social entrepreneurs.

-- The entrepreneurs themselves are easily finding peers and connecting, creating, collaborating around their shared missions

-- The entire context within which you operate is aligned towards your success.

-- YOUR organization is equally aligned to maximize on all that this support structure is making available to you.

-- You’re open, collaborative, and engaged, and you are seeing a net gain across the board for actively plugging into the infrastructure we’ll be describing

-- The infrastructure reflects distinctions across a range of characteristics: age, stage of organization, issue area, regions, theory of change, intended impact, industry, etc.

-- It contains funders, media, education programs, open data, and applications (see Jill Finlayson’s illustration).

What currently exists both virtually and physically to link them to resources that they need to develop their organizations?

Virtually:

-- See the ton of links on the wiki – competitions, funders, etc. etc. -- Including of the organizations participating in the Social Entrepreneur API

-- Social Edge – phenomenal wealth of blogs, discussions, links to educational programs all on, for, by social entrepreneurs. This is where, as a social entrepreneur, you can find peers grappling with all angles of the work you’re doing.

-- Twitter lists and handles and hashtag conversations -- #socent alone is a really great stream

-- Increasing amounts of open and linked data – NY Times recently made their archives available in linked data.

Want to also add “culturally”: There is a movement underway driving resources towards sustainable and triple bottom line businesses. The power of this shouldn’t be underestimated or under-appreciated.

What's missing that if it were to exist would make the vision outlined come to fruition?

-- We need more people deciding to do what they can right now, even if it feels small, working with what they have from where they are.

-- We need to make it easier to find out what everyone in this sector is doing. Not more firehoses of information, not more huge spotlights, but devices that filter and make sense of what’s going on.

-- We need to keep making progress on the culture of openness, transparency, information-sharing, and collaboration that’s building.

-- We need more entrepreneurs to design a consistent thread from their vision to their mission to the methods they’re using.

-- And of course a lot of what we do at Social Actions is about moving information into an open-to-the-public data cloud where it can be filtered, sorted, and seen by as many people as possible. We need more open data, more organizations willing to share what they’re building and learning and creating. We need more applications that mash-up and combine that data – so the work each of you are doing is visually and tangibly embedded in that context.

What is working well from each of these directions?

What I see working well is in the middle ground, with an iterative process that draws from both bottom up and top down directions. This works well when there’s time and an inclination toward it.

Described process for governing the Social Entrepreneur API, where the project and dataset are truly generated in that “middle space.”

-- Gathering inspiration and a starting point from a discussion on Social Edge – very bottom up. It came out of a discussion on Social Edge entitled The Case for Online Support for Social Entrepreneurs that our founder Peter Deitz hosted. Last December, a huge discussion like this one – what’s being built? What does the sector still need? And this idea was born. (bottom up)

-- Middle-ground build-out of the initial partners, contents, and governing process

-- The raw materials were:
o Modeling off of another open cross-platform dataset we’d already built, one that collects opportunities to take action from over 60 online giving platforms
o Already publicly-available information about vetted social entrepreneurs from a number of award and fellowship programs
o Some light facilitation on our part -- Sufficient organization while allowing the diversity of actors and voices to remain intact.
o Seed funding (top down)
o and some authentic buy-in from the groups participating – Skoll, Draper Richards, PopTech, and the others – to build start small and work together to create something that was more than the sum of its parts.

I want to emphasize that more than these raw materials, it’s the collaborative process that makes this project so powerful and an important model.

Also, “what works well” includes getting really clear about what you can remain unclear about. For projects like ours that involves not getting caught up in definitions that would alienate and cause friction (i.e. defining social entrepreneur)

Ways to organize an exploration of "what's yet to be built"

-- Think in terms of identifying the negative space – who’s not here around the table with me? In our board room, in our conference room, on this online network? Why are they missing? What do I lose by not including them?

-- Thinking about this from a chaos theory or complexity science perspective – there is a lot of uncertainty and finding-our-way that cannot be designed out of this work. Very little in social entrepreneurial work is lined up in a cause-and-effect way. Would encourage us not to think of building this system as engineers, or fixing problems, but creating conditions that encourage the most positive possible side effects.

-- The take-away here is to find a metaphor or perspective that works for you, figure out what a ladder of engagement for your own participation would look like, and then get going.

:cde