With this post, I am also now inviting changemaker start-ups from around the world to participate in a similar online-only experimental collaborative support group for start-ups that I will create space for in early 2010 at Ned.com.

Both in Brussels offline and virtually online, the purpose of the group is to

• share our successes and challenges,
• hold each other accountable to our monthly business development goals,
• encourage each other toward further progress,
• identify opportunities for fruitful collaboration, and
• help each other get our projects up & running at full steam.

The Micro-Success group at ned.com will be a local + global members only group space, where participants can communicate to collaborate with each other  in a publicly viewable environment for an experimental period of 6 months.

1- 3 members of each participating project team can become Micro-Success group members at ned.com.  All members of the MicroSuccess group will be invited to contribute to the Micro-Success blog channel at Internet4Change.com, where I hope we can capture some promising new practices and practical lessons that result from this effort in modelling local and global #socent collaboration.

If you or a Social Enterprise you know are interested in participating in the Micro-Success group online, please contact me through a private message via my profile at ned.com.  Tell me a bit about your initiative – what you hope to achieve, and where you’re at in that process now.

If there are more than 12  start-up initiatives interested in participating online only, I will create a public poll to select participants for the 6 month pilot.

At tomorrow’s meeting @HubBrussels (14:00 – 17:00 37 Rue du Prince Royal, 1050 Brussels), we will be introducing ourselves, making some group decisions about how to operate, and setting an agenda for our expectations as a group.  A wrap up of that meeting will set the tone for developing the Micro-Success group infrastructure at Ned.com.

Stay tuned, and please share this invitation with the Social Enterprise start-ups you know online.

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!

• weed out non f2f contacts
• decide on exceptions & inform why
• make list of tools/applications to explore
• create i4c fanpage

christinaswwworld blog -> my facebook, other bloggers

• finetune theme
• make list of posts to write
• write & schedule 5 entries
• re-start participation at entrecard community

internet4change blog-> social change sector

• develop theme
• reviewing 10 delicious bookmarks
• compile a list of experts to ask for guest posts
• list at technorati, mybloglog, blogcatalog, etc.

Ned.com -> social change sector collaborators

• build a ned.com twitter bridge
• post to user priorities thread
• create internet4change group
• seed 5 i4c discussions
• further develop profile