Hi everyone, it is a pleasure to be asked to provide an update on the Social Change Collaboratory group and what some of us have been up to recently.First though, Gathering ’11 is about to kick off – and what a line up there is (check out the program and register your place). There has been a tonne of planning and we plan to have a mountain of sharing. Gathering ’11 intends to kick start ideas for change, where we get to make a difference and contribute to building better futures.
Now David has been working hard since our planning day and as a lot of you know, Melbourne has quite a buzz about itself. I don’t know of a similar time when so much inspiring work is happening, collaboration is occurring and the diversity of people, background, and expertise is being discovered all in one place to do something good.
The Designing for Social Impact workshop was a short while ago and the outcomes were amazing. I had the privilege of spending a Saturday working with 40 people in an idea compression chamber to transform the vision of four projects to a highspeed roadmap for success. A key component of this was using the principles of Service Design Thinking.
Everyday I work with people to facilitate new ideas and innovative ways to solve everyday problems. It is always a surreal experience when complete strangers come together to generously share their time for a great project for social impact, even if it is someone else’s project.
My point is that the Social Change Collaboratory group got a huge boost from this event. We generated a roadmap and are working on a range of activities, online and offline to provide a platform to support people coming together for social change projects.
Opening Kick-off presentation for the OpenIDEO Local Food challenge
Before I sign off I’ll add that the Social Change Collaboratory group and its members got some air time in Brisbane about the great community we have in Melbourne. David Hood, Melis Senova from Huddle Design and myself were invited by the Premier of Queensland, Anna Bligh and IDEO to participate in the first offline workshop of an OpenIDEO design challenge. The workshop focused on finding new innovations around local food. There were 617 concepts put forward which is the largest number of ideas OpenIDEO has ever had since it began.
Again in an idea pressure cooker, 70 people ranging form food industry experts to designers, to movers and shakers in Queensland. We had 2 days to take 20 concepts voted by the global OpenIDEO community to prototypes that can be implemented in the following 48 hours, check them out here.
Our pressure cooker highlighted the amazing productivity that can come from a shared goal to do something good, and a recognised vision that we need to find better ways of living and build a better future.
To be apart of any future events, sign up and leave a comment below. We’d love to hear form you.