The Road to Hyderabad: Bringing Social Entrepreneurs Together Lesson 1

Besides being a sporadic blogger for Ashoka Tech, I'm also the coordinator for the Ashoka-Lemelson Tech 4 Society collaboration series.  That means I spend most of my time planning, executing, and learning from events that bring Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows together in collaboration.  So far we've held one gathering in Nairobi and are gearing up for three more in Sao Paolo, Singapore, and Chennai, before heading to Hyderabad for a larger, grand shebang in 2010.

Putting together events teaches me a lot about bringing social entrepreneurs together, what works and what doesn't.  Last night I sat down to write a post about everything I've learned so far and was sort of shocked by how many words I was putting down on the page.  Then I thought, why stop with what I've learned so far, why not continue sharing what we are learning on this journey to Hyderabad in 2010?

And thus a new series for Ashoka Tech was born.  Without further ado, I give you The Road to Hyderabad: Bringing Social Entrepreneurs Together. It won't always be techy but hopefully it will be a good source of tips for effectively bringing together amazing social entrepreneurs.  I don't have all the answers yet, but I hope to be well on my way by the time we head to Hyderabad in 2010, and I am thrilled to be able to share what I am learning with you.

So here goes nothing!

Lesson #1: If collaboration and learning is the goal, pick a topic and/or goal that touches on everyone's work but doesn't define it.

It's really easy, when bringing together a group of awesome social entrepreneurs, to hope that by bringing them together, they'll come up with THE solution to solve a particular social problem, that somehow, when it comes to these amazing individuals, 1 + 1 can equal 3 or more.  It's so true in some instances, but more often than not, the most successful results are far less dramatic.  When you are bringing together a group of individuals who've devoted their lives to solving a particular problem in their own unique ways, its important to remember that they've ALREADY come up with a whiz-bang solution to the problem, otherwise you wouldn't have invited them in the first place. Tasking the group with developing a whole new solution can often lead to debates on the merits of each person's existing approach.  Better instead to choose topics and goals that encourage all of the participants to refine, improve and augment their own approaches based on what they discuss as a group and can learn from one another.

In Nairobi, the end goal of everyone's work was basically poverty reduction; yet, rather than talking about how to reduce poverty, we talked about mobile tech and mobile phones.  Most of the Fellows were using mobile tech in some aspect of their work but they all used them in different ways, to achieve different goals, and with different levels of expertise.  Some send SMS to farmers about crop prices, others used mobile phones to host software plaforms.  Some didn't even use mobile tech directly in their work but worked on different ends of the supply chain.  One Fellow we invited works on providing green electricity to rural areas so they can charge cell phone batteries, among other things.  Another is looking at ways to more productive recycle cellphones. 

It might sound counterintuitive to gather social entrepreneurs together who had almost nothing in common, but in this case it made for one of our most productive collaboration sessions.  Rather than debating the merits of one approach or another, each Fellow was able to come away having learned new techniques, ideas, and technologies from one another to apply to their own work.  Two of the Fellows, Adrian Mukhebi and Vijay Singh have plans to work together on a new software platform for Adrian's organization.  For other's, like Mathias Craig, the meeting gave them a road map for how to take advantage of mobile tech in the future.

So that's it for Lesson 1 on the Road to Hyderabad.  Till next time, stay techy.

Photo by: flickr/Michael Ransberg