commonspace

Curriculum lives, part two

San Francisco, USA

Last month's meeting with the Unlimited Potential team helped me frame this question in my mind: how do use the collective intelligence of teachers on the ground to evolve and improve curriculum? This living curriculum issue is an urgent one for telecentre.org. We need to work this out both for telecentre manager training materials and for curriculum that local telecentre people use to train community members.

Yesterday, I had a chance to drill down on this issue with Helen King from the Shuttleworth Foundation and Larry Page from Sun's GELC program. Some of the questions that emerged:

•    How are telecentre managers and teachers using and innovating curriculum they are downloading from the Internet (or getting on CD)?

•    How do you create incentives that encourage people to share their innovations? And can you?

•    If you can, how do you control quality, focus, brand? Is it possible to make 'good' curriculum using collective effort?

With these questions in hand, we've agreed to embark on a small applied research project looking at the question of living curriculum. We all have real world projects that can serve as inputs to this research. The plan is to hire a researcher who can frame the issue, and then to convene people from our projects to pull in real world experience. If it works, we'll at least have a roadmap to help guide future experiments in this area.

Business ecology 101

San Franciso, USA

There is nothing like an honest day of business coaching from a room full of kindred spirits, especially when that's not what you're expecting.

Lee Davis and Johnathan Peizer had pulled together an informal meeting of people doing hands on work at the nexus of technology + social enterprise + scaling. Grameen USA Tech Centre. Shuttleworth Foundation. TechSoup. Intel emerging markets. And, of course, telecentre.org.

We'd all imagined a fairly general conversation, rolling through case studies from the past and sketching out some general models. Instead, a common model snapped into focus almost immediately: we are all building or investing in networked social enterprises that rely on multiple players, mutual self interest and concrete value. While it probably doesn't mean anything if you weren't in the room, the diagram we all layered our projects on looked something like this ...

Having a common framework early on made it possible spend the bulk of the day looking at the future instead of the past. Each of us presented a current challenge in our work, and the others provided tough questions and ideas. On a very specific level, this helped me to refine thinking on the services R+D fund we're imagining in the new business plan. It also surfaced some common success factors: the right investment tools at the right time; business planning support and mentoring that comes along with any cash investments; passionate, entrepreneurial people.

While we all left with more questions than we started with, it felt like we'd moved an important conversation forward. It's a conversation we all plan to continue. 

Banking on social innovation

San Francisco , USA

Scaling anything (e.g. telecentres) is about passion, good ideas and hard work. That's for sure. But, like it or not, it's also about money. Not just having it, but also structuring it in the right way. This was the main topic for the 'innovative funding practices' panel at the Innovation Funders event.

As Lee Davis from NESsT pointed out, the financing options available to non-profits and social enterprises are both slim and rigid. The commercial world has access to a diversity of financing tools: venture funding for risky yet promising start-ups, equity to bring in cash for scaling, debt to handle cash flow, and so on. Most social enterprises, non-profit or for-profit, just have access to grants (unless they're so big that commercial banks trust them). One financial instrument, but clearly a diversity of needs. 

This is surely a problem we face in the telecentre space. Whether it has come from governments, donor agencies or corporate philanthropists, almost all of the money in telecentres has come in the form of grants. This is good for some things: building out purely pre-market infrastructure; developing foundational materials and services; creating a sense of movement. However grants actually can't be the whole picture if we are truly interested in scaling the number of telecentres and creating a rich palette of well packaged, replicable services to offer through telecentres. You see this especially when you look at microfranchise networks like Drishtee, TaraHaat and Nlogue, with great ideas but the need for resources that take things to the next level.

The (many) million dollar question: what does diverse financing in the telecentre space look like? Certainly, one thing we need is a small, nimble mechanism to finance service research and development. It's pretty likely we can create this within telecentre.org. In addition, there is probably a need for microcredit plus (larger than a phone loan), patient debt or low return equity aimed at scaling. One day, commercial financing might play a role, too. But that's a long way off.

Interesting and important stuff, and something I've been background processing for a while. I am grateful to Lee and others at the Innovation Funders event for helping me to dig a bit deeper.

Philanthropy with fuzzy edges

San Francisco, USA

A non-speedgeek highlight from the Innovation Funders event: listening to Howard Rheingold wax prophetic on exactly the kind of questions I've been ruminating on for our business plan. What is network-centric social investment? How do you blend networks, emergence and cooperative strategies into the practice of philanthropy and social investment?

Giving a glimpse of a paper he's writing for the Council on Foundations, he said: "We need to be thinking about something beyond programs and projects. We need to be thinking about something with permeable boundaries and smarts at the edges." We do, and we are.

Everyone loves a speedgeek!

San Francisco, USA

I came to San Francisco for the Innovation Funders Network Summit, a gathering of foundations, philanthropists and development agencies with an innovation itch to scratch.

As seems to be the pattern with any meeting facilitated by Allen Gunn, the speedgeek was amongst the highlights. Three speedgeekers stood out for me:

The folks from Youth Radio, a media access centre in Oakland. The fact that they provide a public space for young people to gain media skills is interesting enough in its own right. But, the icing on the cake, is that they're trying to do it as a social enterprise. The young people sell clips to NPR, podcast like mad through iTunes and offer media production services. A very interesting model for telecentres elsewhere to look at.

Holly Ladd from Satellife. Holly is part of the IDRC-funded team mashing up infrared, cheap PDAs and low bandwidth GSM data to automate health information flow in rural Uganda. I've heard the Uganda Health Information Network story second hand in the past. However, having a health-info-packed PDA in hand brought to life for me (and 100 other people at the event).

Peter Bladin, from Grameen Tech Centre. Grameen continues to blow me away with their smart ideas about how ideas travel and scale. As blogged last month, their village phone replication program includes a detailed 'how to rip off this business model' guide based on their successful initiative in Uganda. Their Microfinance Open Source (MiFOS) software platform, which will offer a complete backend for running a microfinance bank, is based squarely on the idea that the best way to digital-ize the microfinance industry is to give away the store (the software itself) and then build a business ecology around it (consultants and other orgs evolving the software).

Fun stuff!

Emergent thinking

San Francisco, USA

Running along the Embarcadero, Green Day blaring, it struck me that San Francisco is a wonderful place to ruminate. Which is fortunate if you're in the middle of writing a business plan.

The telecentre.org team started working on its 2.0 business plan in early in January. The investment lines and services have come pretty easily. Yet, there a number of big-ish, niggling questions ...

•    How do we play the tension between emergence and rigour, both of which we need in copious quantities? A what does emergent governance look like (if it looks like anything at all)?

•    Where is the line between 'what we do' (social investments) and 'what we catalyze' (a rich business ecosystem supporting telecentres)? What does a catalytic investment look like?

•    As we look to expand our pool of partners, what's the right balance between low barrier to entry and having real skin in the game?

Tough questions, surely. But, looking back over the past week, nothing that San Francisco, smart friends, focused meetings and a bit of rock 'n' roll can't tackle.