Things are busy starting a start-up!

After much consultation with social enterprise folks where I live in Belgium, I’m starting a Belgian based non-profit association for the purpose of developing and launching initiatives that support social entrepreneurship – among them Internet4Change.  My aim in doing so is to be able to justify my own working life while I get things off the ground, while at the same time leaving room for autonomous project ownership structures to develop.

The association I’m starting – with the participation of another Ashoka fellow and a good friend who is an international investment consultant specializing in 3rd world projects (both Belgian) will likely be called Uplift Innovations. Thanks to the favorable sale of some property 2 years ago I still have enough money in the bank to live on for at least a year, so I will invest some of that in the association and become an employee.  That will make it easier to deal with start-up costs, health insurance (required by law in Belgium) and some of the other logistical issues involved in being based here. The statutes are being written to allow that Uplift Innovations may facilitate projects with cooperative and/or other kinds of autonomous ownership and management structures.

I’m also working on the application for Ashoka’s new Globalizer program http://www.ashokaglobalizer.org/, which is an initiative by Ashoka to assist Fellows in reaching global scale with their innovations. Whether or not I succeed at qualifying for what they are aiming at, it’s been a very good exercise to consider the questions the application asks, and I can’t see the harm in trying.

Meanwhile, I’ve been very pleased with the Defining “Collaboration” in the Social Change sector discussion at Ned.com. I’ve used Twitter to bring in 20 different voices so far, and the discussion has been rich.  It’s been a great venue for identifying allies and potential collaborators like Jean Russel @nurturegirl, Rosalind Chu @rosalindchu and Fabio Barone @faboolous who I’ve connected with beyond that discussion in recent weeks.  The discussion has also helped me confirm the 4 main directions that I hope to lead this work in the coming years:

1. I’d like to develop Internet4Change.com into a portal for a range of practical resources that are online to assist social entrepreneurs. The list of collaboration_resources we’ve started developing is just a start;
2. I’m hoping to identify the right technology for enabling personal pages at My.Internet4Change.com that can aggregate an individual’s online presence in the social change space – ie, consolidating not only static links but also dynamically creating an easily accessible current and historical record of conversations (where you are discussing/working on what).
3. Within the context of being able to see who is working on what, where, the economic model I have in mind would make it more financially feasible for change agents around the world to justify (and pay for) their time spent online, and provide financial incentive especially for works/initiatives created transparently in collaboration with others.
4. The final big piece of the Internet4Change vision (2-4 years down the line!) involves targeted training for Internet4Change agents in under-connected parts of the world, enabling not only more north/south collaboration but south/south collaboration as well. In other words, once a system that encompasses a collection of online resources, the ability to find the right people using those resources, and financial fuel to pay for using those resources is in place, then proactively teaching people to use the system will hopefully help to kick global social change into overdrive.

Carving out the earliest part of the path that will take this project toward those objectives is where I’m at now ~ making progress, but oh so much to do!