Drumbeat Festival, ICT for Rural Economic Development, SocialCamp 2010 - Attempt To Connect Three Communities

I had the good fortune to participate in three fascinating events this month, all with overlapping themes that matter to Kabissa but taking different approaches and targeting different communities. If you were at one of these events, I'd like to invite you to check out the other ones and look for collaboration opportunities. Please also join Kabissa, add your organizations working in Africa to the Kabissa directory and introduce yourself in the groups.

Drumbeat Festival: Mozilla, Going Beyond Firefox, Brings Together Innovative Educators And Web Technologists To Keep The Web Awesome

• When and where: November 3-5, 2010 in Barcelona
• Official Website: Drumbeat Festival (Program and Session Notes)
• Hashtag: #drumbeat

Drumbeat is a new initiative of the Mozilla foundation that created the ubiquitous Firefox web browser. According to Mark Surman on his blog, Drumbeat can be summed up in 3 bullets:

1. Mozilla exists to make sure the internet stays open and awesome.
2. With Drumbeat, we’re moving beyond Firefox to build more things that make the web better — not just software.
3. We’re doing this by reaching out new kinds of people — teachers, filmmakers, lawyers, journalists. These people will play a key role in shaping the future of the web.

The Festival brought together over 400 people, including innovators seeking to transform education and the usual suspects from the Mozilla community - open source geeks, free content/software evangelists, and programmers creating open source software, open standards and online platforms. The format of the Festival was open-ended and disconnected, with most of everyone's time spent spread in smaller groups spread out in many buildings and tents set up in an open square and only occasionally was everyone in one place for plenary talks and discussions.

It was a challenge to participate in a productive way while getting a taste of all the great innovations being worked on in the different sessions, and so I ended up spending most of my time working in the  Badge Lab, which shows the greatest potential for Kabissa Connections. Other topics I am deeply impresed by and recommend to you are Storming the Academy, Local Learning incubator, and Printing Lab.

Message for #ICTGTZ and #SCB10: Drumbeat is still searching for its core purpose and approach, and are spreading a wide net to welcome collaborators from around the world through a newsgroup, weekly calls that anyone can join, and local Drumbeat Events. Through their website you can also check out - and join - the types of projects Drumbeat is already supporting and add your own. I think Universal Subtitles, CrisisCommons, and P2PU School of Webcraft should be particularly interesting to you.

ICT for Rural Economic Development: What Does The Future Hold For ICT in International Development?

• When and where: November 18-19, 2010 in Berlin
• Official Website and Session Notes: ICT for Rural Economic Development Conference
• Hashtag: #ictgtz (see also flickr and youtube)

The conference was hosted at the  GTZ office in Berlin, a great space for small conferences. The stated purpose of the conference, from the 2010 ICT4D Conference Homepage, is as follows:

Organized by GTZ on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the conference participants will debate e-agriculture, ICT business innovation, ICT-backed financial service development, and universal access to ICT infrastructures.  They will share project practice and experiences, analyse the impact of ICT policies and regulations, the benefits of ICT for local communities, investigate innovative business models as well as the impact of new technologies.

Having just come from the Drumbeat Festival, I was struck by the professional organization and process/outcome orientation of this event. It was positioned as the start of a three part consultation, followed next by an online discussion from November 24 - December 1 on e-agriculture.org and the much larger ICTD 2010 Conference in London December 13-16, 2010. Like Drumbeat, BMZ was also using their event to bring together leaders in the sector to gather ideas and set priorities.

BMZ very clearly stated that it does not intend to fund ICT4D projects going forward but wants to see ICT4D incorporated into other development programs it funds. Participants generally seemed uneasy about this, but from my outsider perspective I saw in this shift an opportunity to encourage people running ICT4D projects on the local level (e.g. telecentres, mobile services etc) to develop entrepreneurial business plans and for the rest of us (e.g. Kabissa) to partner with them as they try to find or invent sustainable and useful ICT-related services they can offer people in their communities.

Message for #Drumbeat and #SCB10: In order for such partnerships to be viable and equitable, I see a need to put emphasis on strengthening online communities and networks of ICT4D practitioners/entrepreneurs as well as on building tools for creating/sharing content that can be localized and "remixed" to make it locally relevant.

Roxanna Samii (@rsamii) from the Internatonal Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) wrote a good roundup of the event:

• Berlin calling: Development world, please wake up. There is an urgent need to put back #ICT4D on the global development agenda

SocialCamp 2010: Bringing Together German Charities For Shared Learning On Social Media For Fundraising, Campaigning and Collaboration

• When and where: November 19-20, 2010 in Berlin
• Official Website of SocialCamp 2010 (program and session notes)
• Hashtag: #scb10 (or download PDF containing twitter documentation)

This is the third annual SocialCamp event in Berlin, modelled on the barcamp format in which sessions are proposed and put on the agenda at the beginning of every day. The events take place in German. The stated purpose this year, translated from German from the SocialCamp 2010 page on mixxt.de, has two pillars:

• The first pillar provides a space for sharing "best practice" and "lessons learned" examples of current campaigns and network performances by and for nonprofit organizations.
• The second pillar serves as a practical forum for the exchange of knowledge and experience. Here are topics on the program, resulting from the process of a specific project from idea to realization: What resources do I need for a successful social network campaign? Which communities have proved successful? How do I find the right agency? What are the success factors for a successful pitch? What is important in a system and contract specifications? What are the success factors for SEO and SEM? How do I measure the success of an online campaign?

I was only able to participate for a few hours on Friday, but was able to listen in on a session led by betterplace.org (@betterplace_org) on social network fundraising (e.g. providing tools to enable people to ask their friends to donate to charities on their behalf) as well as get my feet wet in a very interesting knowledge sharing session on online collaboration tools. They were not familiar with Etherpad, a web-based collaborative realtime editor I learned about at the Drumbeat Festival.

Message for #Drumbeat and #ICTGTZ: As at past SocialCamp and SocialBar events in Berlin, I was struck by the fact that Germans are making tremendous progress on using social media for social change projects and in support of charitable organizations, but that language is a barrier for many potential users of tools developed in English. There is a great need for localization of online tools and free software, as well as bridging between German and English language communities.