knowledge

In this interview from Knowledge@Wharton, Alex Brown, owner of the website Alex Brown Racing, dedicated to the welfare of horses (and saving them from the slaughter house), gives us a first hand account of his experience building the website and its popularity using social media tools including Wikis, discussion forums, YouTube Contests and Twitter.

What I really like about this video is how open Alex is about the mistakes he made, the difficulties experienced, and more importantly, how he used these tools to help raise funds for the cause.

If you're a social media veteran, you might find some of the tips Alex shares elementary, but if you're new, this is a video you want to watch to understand the decision-making process involved which led Alex to use the platforms he does today. (And it's not every day that people talk about how they raise funds with these tools.) Enjoy!

By Su Yuen, CHIN (suyuen@gmail.com)

Lesson # 15: Capturing the Knowledge

Last week our fearless Tech4Society event team leader put together a day devoted solely to distilling all of the knowledge we have or think we have about the invention and technology space within social entrepreneurship.

It’s a brilliant idea and a rare opportunity here at Ashoka to turn off email for the day and reflect on how far we’ve come in our understanding of a space we just stepped into three years ago with the support of The Lemelson Foundation.

As is tradition here, everyone participates.  Interns, volunteers, senior leadership, junior staff—it’s an equal opportunity chance to share in some serious mind work.

We started out with a few presentations by the Ashoka Tech blog crew, the Youth Venture team, and a review of a recent flash dance in Chicago, just to keep things even more interesting.

The afternoon was devoted to free-wheeling brainstorming—first as a large group and then in small groups of 3 or 4. Ideas bounced round the room as people wielded smelly markers and Post-it notes like seasoned pros in the noble quest for Knowledge.

Road to Hyderabad: #14 On the Calm before the Storm

As the people who receive an ever increasing number of emails from me at 6am can attest to, our time on the Road to Hyderabad is rapidly winding down.

We are just 9 weeks and change from our February 11-13 event in Hyderabad, 9 weeks away from hosting 100 Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows along with business, academic, and policy leaders on the Indian School of Business campus. In the words of some action movie hero somewhere, "it's go-time, baby."

All of the lessons we've learned from our lead up meetings in Nairobi, Sao Paolo, Singapore and Chennai are part of our agenda.   The details are coming to the front and center and soon it will be time to start calling everyone up to make sure they've gotten their plane tickets and visa letters.  Soon we'll be talking strategy about room assignments and by the end of January I'll be blogging from a little flat (ground zero) in Hyderabad, spending nights lying away thinking about airport pick ups, av cables, and where I'll be able to get the 20 pounds of modeling clay we need for our interactive ice-breaker.

Road to Hyderabad Lesson #10

Capturing the Knowledge

One of the fantastic things about getting social entrepreneurs together is all of hte knowledge and lessons and trends that come out of those sorts of meetings.  One of the tricky things is how to go about capturing and processing that knowledge.

Sometimes the easiest way to draw lessons learned and trending topics out of a meeting is simply to record EVERYTHING and analyze it later.

But its one thing to have transcripts of the conversations and panels and meetings, its another to know what the mood and atmosphere was behind the words recorded.  When you have both, the word-for-word and the atmosphere, its much easier to draw conclusions about what's important to share and analyze.  Its possible to even pick up on trends that people didn't mention outright but that were touched upon by everyone.