Thanksto.com Social Enterprise Challenge

I'm taking a brief break from the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series to tell you about a fantastic opportunity to win an entrepreneurial internship! But you'll have to be quick, deadline for entries is this Monday!

Do you have an interest in business and enterprise, helping your community and developing your entrepreneurial skills? The Thanksto.com Social Enterprise Challenge provides a fantastic opportunity to empower young individuals (18+)  in the London region - and best of all, the winners have the chance to win exclusive internship opportunities with some of London's most successful entrepreneurs (as well as £5000 of sports equipment and £500 cash!). The deadline to sign up is this Monday January 25th so hurry and send an email with your details to a.dundas(at)thanksto.com or click here

Good luck if you're entering and we'll be back with the "12 lessons" next week.

SICamp Scotland ... Blogpost 1/?

I spent the last 48 hours completely immersed in Social Innovation Camp-ness .. no wait, that didn't come out quite right ;) Still, the sentiment holds if not the expression. Unless it was Twittered to #sicamp I have no idea what happened outside of The Saltire Centre for the last 2 days.

Like the most convoluted of film plots I am going to start with the end, skip to the beginning and see if the middle sorts itself out in the interim, so bearing that in mind ... let me introduce FlockLocal.

FlockLocal was born in the spirit of the SICamp pseudo-mantra "using the online world to change the offline world." Using this idea we elected to create ClusterFlock...,. FlockYourCommunity... FlockLocal, which is a website and collection of associated apps & plugins to allow people to flash mob for social good. That is, to allow people who identify a social need to quickly mobilise volunteers to fill it.

Let me illustrate. We started to think about this idea in the pub on Friday night. By Saturday morning we had a fairly good idea of the user scenario. By 11am we decided we'd like to aim to actually hold a flash mob (henceforth to be known as 'organising a flock') 2 hours later (now 1pm) we had found the wonderful Glasgow Wood Recycling who were due to be reclaiming wood from a theatre set at Gilmorehill which needed loading into a van, driving across town and unloading into their community garden (which itself needed some painting and weeding). By 12noon the next day we'd assembled 15 people, done the job, and headed off for the afternoon.

Hence our tagline FlockLocal "Do Good. Fast"

But it wasn't just us!
The 5 other fabulous teams created the following:


Wee Day Out - A mapping tool for locating & rating disabled toilet facilities.

Fix the Freakin Buses (a.k.a "Hitch 'n' Bitch !!) – A SMS text platform for accessing live bus data.

AngelFish - Hyperlocal Micro-finace for community startups and business growth.

MyPolice.org – Allowing the public to give positive and negative feedback on the police.

Citipedia-An online public town planning tool.


.....and we'll hear more about them shortly.. in part 2 ... after I get some sleep!

but just before the zzZ 's hit, let me say a massive thanks to all at SICamp for working so hard to support all our hard work. We all really appreciate it!

Stay tuned for part 2.

Footnote: Glasgow Wood Recycling is an amazing organisation run by Peter Levelle to whom FlockLocal are very grateful and I will be blogging more about Glasgow Wood Recycling very shortly!

Shine 09 & Web 2.0

Well I have just about come down from the high of "Shine", the Unconference for Social Entrepreneurs, which ran Friday & Saturday last week. As I briefly blogged on the Friday, Shine represented a thoroughly enjoyable, inspiring, buzz of ideas, enthusiasm and (critically) caffeine.

According to The School for Social Entrepreneurs:
"The four partners started the event because they felt there was a need for an accessible, affordable, practical, well-networked, dynamic event that was less about long powerpoints and plenary speeches, and more about one-to-one support and moving your business on."
And I have to say I agree with both the premise and the execution of the idea.

I was particularly interested in how well this event translated itself to Twitter. You only need to browse through the Hashtag #shine09 to see how actively the event was reported by UnConference delegates and followed by those unable to attend. Increasingly I am coming to the conclusion that a good Twitter following can make or break an (un)conference and I had similar discussions at the highly Twittered Engage Invest Exploit Conference in Edinburgh last month (Hashtag #eie09).

For example, on the Saturday of Shine I hosted a scheduled, round table, discussion bearing the rather grand title "'Real & Perceived Barriers to UK Investment for Global Projects". I was asked to do so after a conversation which sprung up around my Tweet "Fed up of the misguided & labored notion that a social enterprise worth UK funding has to have beneficiaries within the UK"

It was advertised (optimistically in my nervous opinion!) as being an opportunity for 'provocative conversation' though I need not have worried. A brilliant hour or so was spent exploring common problems and barriers to investment, not only by the 15 or so people present in the room but, as some of us were Twittering, we had followers and contributors from the global Twittersphere! Most notably @cliffprior and @jameselliot chatting with me and @davedawes.

Furthermore it looks as if the roundtable discussion produced an idea that is going to translate to a longer, larger discussion on Ning and result in a sort of democratic, crowd sourced, crowd funded, international, endowment investment fund (!) inspired by the likes of Kiva, Zopa and MyFootballClub

....Oh I feel a web 2.0 / Social Entrepreneurship Blog post coming on! :)

It'll have to wait though, I'm off to the NLS Awards tonight. Wish me luck!

Snowed Under!

Opportunities to become all to busy have presented themselves in droves at RBD-HQ this month.
James and I are wading our way through some re-brand and CAD work, scores of exhibitions, funding applications, posh events, investment proposals and meetings.

James had a photo shoot*, I had an interview and then, like the rest of the UK, we got snowed under literally, as well as figuratively!
Add to this James' full-time Masters Degree and my growing side business attending speaking engagements and doing consultancy work (which, incidentally, is causing me to be in London so often, at the moment, that I consider myself to be a London based worker with the world's longest commute!) and quite clearly. I haven't been blogging.

But worry not!

The rest of the planet have. And in the absence of the time or coherency to construct an interesting post myself, here are my top 5 blog posts of the week!

Foreign Aid, Bad Governments: Why helping entrepreneurs is the right approach. - Acumen Fund

Co-preneurs & Power Couples - Social Edge

Oooh Lots of Lovely Government Money! - Catalyst

Meet The Other 360! (Number of intelligent civilisations can be quantified) - BBC

Made to be a Hand-Me-Down - Springwise


*more to come on this later!

Earth Awards Round Up

Monday night's Gala Award Ceremony for The Earth Awards was a star studded affair to be sure, NY Socialites and Press were out in force mingling with the judges, us finalists and a series of distinguished guests ranging from Celebrities through to Politicians & Royalty.

Despite not winning the coveted top spot, we spoke with several interested parties regarding potential investment, faired well under the charm of Charlie Rose and made some amazing new business contacts and friends (and in a pleasing number of cases, both)

The winner was announced as MIT fellow Neri Oxman.

Images of the event can be found on gettyimages.

There'll be more to follow, but for now here's what's being said about the event here in NYC:

Vanity Fair: Getting Green
“The real prize here, though, is the opportunity for bringing these ideas to the marketplace and in front of venture capitalists,”

Existing Visual
"As master of ceremonies, Charlie Rose made his rounds in the famed pool room of Philip Johnson’s iconic Four Seasons Restaurant to briefly interview all ten finalists before the winner was named."

Eco Chic Honours
"The theme was green, but the attire was black tie at the Earth Awards Gala at the Four Seasons last night."

Go Green or Go Home
"The Earth Awards Gala was held Monday night at the Four Seasons in New York City recognizing those who think green with “future-crucial designs” in the worlds of architecture, fashion, food, alternative energy, and product design."

Cityfile New York: The Tuesday Party Report
"The Earth Awards, honoring innovations in sustainable design, held a gala at the Four Seasons last night"

New York Observer: Lean and Green
"This is a nice event," Mr. Niccolini concluded, surveying the room. "Lots of attractive people."

"Good Deals" Conference a Great Deal for Red Button

Last month James and I attended and spoke at the ‘Good Deals’, social investment conference held by the Office of the Third Sector in partnership with NESTA. It was held at St Lukes Church in Islington which is a lovely venue on an absolutely gorgeous summers day.

I had been meaning to review the event myself but in the interim a number of interesting articles have come to my attention so i shall refer to the 3 links below. The first of which is affiliated with www.socialinvestments.com and I am pleased to say features us rather favourably! The second is the 'offical' review and the third an interesting article from social enterprise magazine, mainly about Sir Tom (but also mentioning our good selves). Between them these three links present a better balance of the day than I could. I will say however that it was a very productive and interesting day and meeting Sir Tom Hunter was a pleasure indeed (pictures below)

The Social Business Blog

Hunter Inspires Social Investment Through Example

Cabinet Office Debrief

Keeping Busy

Seems like we haven't stopped in a while, sometimes literally unpacking suitcases only to re-pack them a day later and clocking up a few too many all-nighters! You'll forgive us then for not yet posting a full-debrief of the HSBC event (it is coming! video and pictures included) but meanwhile here are the links to the other Unipreneurs finalists as promised:

The fabulous boys of Rate My Placement
The gorgeous girlies Leona & Zoe of ZoLo Designs
Mr 118 Taxi himself

and the winners Luke & Luke of Scratchface

In the News...

BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7204568.stm

Evening Times:
http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/display.var.1987144.0.clean_water_device_is_best_idea.php

The Word on the Wire..

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/other/display.var.1907118.0.Trio_aim_to_make_a_splash_on_TV_show.php

http://www.lammo.net/dragons-den/104/dragons-den-series-5-episode-9

http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/display.var.1912327.0.city_trio_tame_dragons.php

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.1911293.0.Dragons_unanimous_in_backing_Glasgow_students.php

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7147893.stm

http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/display.var.1908537.0.students_take_water_idea_to_den.php

http://money.uk.msn.com/business/dragons-den/article.aspx?cp-documentid=7023363


forum gossips! (these are my favourite!)

http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=50841

http://www.motorhomefun.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2867

http://www.theenvironmentsite.org/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=11338

http://www.ukparentslounge.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=653574


if you see us anywhere else, let me know!