NetSquared Campfire Paris

What was the event?
The first BarCamp ever in France focused solely on social innovation
When was it?
26 th June at La Cantine, a leading venue for technology and social change in Paris
Who sponsored the event?
La Poste (French Post Office) & Bollore
Sponsors paid for venue, t-shirts, some refreshments
Who supported the event?
NetSquared, WiserEarth, InformEthic, Kiva France, Silicon Sentier, FING, FinanceSolidiare, La Ruche, 27eme Region
Social Innovation BarCamp (Net2 Paris campfire)

Why did I participate in the event?
Original suggestion to host an event focused on social innovation made by a participant through a WiserTuesday event in Nov 09 (collaboration between NetSquared & WiserEarth)
In January 2010 Camilla spoke to Amy – felt a good opportunity to ‘do something together’
Decided to do a Net2 Campfire event instead of full NetSquared camp event – Why?
Found the contract too ‘legally binding’ and ‘liability’ aspects worrying from a European perspective as an individual European freelance consultant (without any special insurance)
Multiple people wanted to get involved, so I couldn’t ‘claim’ the money that would be paid by Net2 fairly to myself
Enjoyed chance to create something more open/ad hoc (in the end a BarCamp) with contributions of group of co-organisers
NetSquared brand/logo totally unknown in France so little benefit to use the Net2 brand

Diversity of sessions and participants
A diverse group of almost 100 people attended
including social entrepreneurs, researchers, directors of new start-ups, nonprofit leaders, community managers and many more
Tagcloud of the day shows diversity of topics
13 different sessions set up attended on average between 5-20 people
Etherpad pages set up for each session to allow participants simultaneous editing and addition of notes
Tagcloud: Wordle, created by Olivier Maurel, Danone Communities

Sessions & Outcome
Did we bring greater clarity to the topic of social innovation?
While the sessions were varied, there were several underlying themes that were shared by many of the participants throughout the day…
The value of creative and collective thinking
The need for collaboration
The importance of ecosystems
Technology
A desire to bring greater visibility to work already being done
Other shared values, such as a belief that we need to create a more equitable society
Popular sessions - How to manage an international online community - Research and development around social innovation - Industrialization of social action - Neuro-connections and creative intelligence - A tour of Asia meeting innovative social entrepreneurs - How global NGOs can get the most out of web 2.0 - Open money and microcredit - Community management - The use of media in conflict resolution - Next steps after the BarCamp

Web Support
Organizing committee supported by an online project group on WiserEarth & registration page on BarCamp.org
BarCamp page included area for participants to propose slots / talks (http://barcamp.org/SocialInnovationBarcampParis)
WiserEarth group put up WikiPages of all meetings for all participants/committee members to participate in and maximize transparency of organisation & included discussions e.g. name
LinkedIn publicized event & blogs on the LinkedIn website
Blog posted online discussing social innovation prior to event and distributed among media
included link to registration page on BarCamp.org
Social media used before/during and after the event with a focus on Twitter as the main vehicle to share info on the day of event & connect with others
Social Innovation BarCamp on FaceBook
Twitter : # SocInnovBCParis

Multimedia - Video
2 videographers recorded the energetic and positive atmosphere created by participants at the event
We aim to share the compiled footage with participants in September at a community screening
Multiple videos captured by participants on the day added to VideoMogul (incl. YouTube)
Photographer took shots which were added to Flickr and FaceBook & shared with participants

Blogs and websites - before
Media/websites discussing event beforehand:
Atelier-IDF.org
Reporters d’Espoirs – newsletter sent to all of its 5000+ readers
Collaboratif-info.fr
NetSquared
WiserEarth.org
Liens.coop
And plenty of bloggers… Apprendre 2.0 , Alexis.monville.com , Assoc-supelec.com , Levidepoche.fr , Dev.af83.com , Internetactu.net , EcoloInfo.org , Explorateurs du Web , Association Finequity …

Blogs and media – after event
Media discussing event:
1000heads : Social Innovation BarCamp Paris , Lilian Mahoukou 6/28/10
Global Voices - The Mirror: BarCamp Paris: Web 2.0 as a Means to Foster Social Innovation 6/27/10
Voice, Making social media real for nonprofits: Unleashing Positive Change through Social Innovation & Non-Profit Technologies , David Pires 13/7/10
The Mirror – BarCamp Paris: Web 2.0 as a means to foster social innovation
Australia Social Innovation BarCamp Blog
WiserEarth & NetSquared : Making History at the Social Innovation BarCamp
French National radio
Atelier des Medias (Radio France Internationale) – interview with Camilla Burg and 2 other participants
BFM – interview with Camilla and 1 other participant

Stories of the Day
Ziad Malouf, a journalist, from French International Radio almost didn’t come to the day, but changed his mind last minute. He said that he’d been to lots of similar events and thought that it would be too generic but he was especially inspired by the creativity and targeted nature of the dozens of projects that were shared at the social innovation BarCamp/Paris Campfire event.
He was inspired enough to invite 4 of the attendees and organisers to attend a 12 minute radio show about social innnovation (a new topic to many French people) broadcasted to 4 million listeners
Christian from MakeSense, a project which aims to bring to light projects by innovative social entrepreneurs in Asia got back from his travels just one week before the event. He’d seen that the participant list was full but nevertheless emailed one of the organisers – as this was a BarCamp, we said that we’d turn a blind eye if one more person happened to turn up…which he did.
He turned out to be one of the star presenters with almost 40 people listening to his video and story of his social innovation project. He said he got a lot of interest in his project from attending the event.

Other positive outcomes
Notes from the 13 workshops available on: BarCamp wiki (in French), photos available on Flickr and YouTube http://barcamp.org/SocialInnovationBarcampParis
Flickr
YouTube
“ Social Innovation”, mailing list - the first of its kind in France was created as a direct outcome of the event
49 signs up so far (and we hope soon to be more as the French all on holiday in France in July & August)
Gaelle, one of the volunteers looking for work at the event, offered her first project working with one of the event sponsors
Compiled video screening of event to take place in Sept/Oct
Sydney Social Innovation BarCamp used some of the notes from the Paris event as inspiration
this event took place on August 14 th
Gaelle, one of our volunteers

Key Learnings
Work as team of people to organize the event and easily share out tasks to make it less impactful on day job
- shared out communication, media, proj. mgmt & sponsorship and it worked well
Ensure that participation focused on quality of participants rather than quantity
Early on we decided that this was key, and it did make a difference to the quality of the interactions
Ensure venue willing to be flexible to accommodate changing needs
Our venue was willing to waiver the venue hire if didn’t find a sponsor
Organize and search for sponsors early on
We only secured sponsors in final 2 weeks before the event.
It also made managing the budget e.g. what refreshments to give etc much more challenging
French organisations generally unfamiliar with BarCamp concept and suspicious of ad hoc format
Found it difficult to encourage people to take notes
Despite using Ethernet for note taking, we found it difficult to get people to take good quality notes from sessions
BarCamp format good for informal networking but less for getting people to commit to ‘next steps’
We liked the open and transparent aspects of the BarCamp format but the limited success that we had in following up with participants (encouraging them to join the social innovation mailing list) & encouraging some type of ‘next steps’ afterwards was sometimes frustrating
Limited success with social media
Needed to start our social networking strategy sooner
Also Twitter still relatively new in France, so limited success getting people to tweat

NetSquared Campfire Paris

by NetSquared on Aug 26, 2010

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NetSquared Campfire Paris — Presentation Transcript

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