Social Innovation Barcamp Paris

By Lilian Mahoukou

I had the chance to attend the Social Innovation Barcamp Paris on Saturday, and it proved to be an exciting and disruptive event.

While we tend to always link social media with its role in marketing, Barcamp reminded us that it’s much more than this. Social innovation needs purpose and meaningful actions in its own right to move forwards, and although marketing is key to funding and facilitating this progress, it can’t be the final aim.

From social entrepreneurship to the synthesis between payment, funding and social media, we covered a whole range of topics, but two projects really caught my imagination.

The first was AIESEC, the world’s largest student-run organisation, active in over 107 territories and countries with over 450,00 members, which provides a global platform for youth development.

AIESEC uses social innovation to bring skills, experiences and opportunities to young people from young people, through the likes of international internships and leadership projects. The team had some interesting insights from working in social media which resonated with me strongly:

  • remember that there’s no obligation to use social media – it has to stay relevant and valuable to the target audience
  • ask ‘why?’ before using any tools
  • focus on local initiatives while (globally) pursuing the same dream
  • remember offline (most of their WOM is still from real world conversations)
  • encourage people to share their own stories (peer-to-peer narratives) and to experiment

Then there’s Ushahidi, the crowdsourcing crisis open-source platfform that’s already scooped some wider media interest. This simply enables people to report on their local crises by sending texts, contributing visual details to emergency issues on a map. This accelerates the spread of crucial information, but remains true to a very straightforward principle and mechanic.

On a final note, all the social innovation project leaders expressed the importance of facilitating initiatives between their members – not dictating what they should do. Moreover, they emphasised that travelling and meeting with local ambassadors is the best way to start building sustainable relationships.

Social innovation is about people, and the people should always get more attention than the tools.

What are your favourite social innovation projects making headway?

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Brought into the world on Monday, June 28th, 2010 and filed under Events, Global.

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