• What was the event? – The first BarCamp ever in France focused solely on social

innovation

• When was it? – 26th 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 byOlivier Maurel, Danone Communities

Sessions & OutcomeDid 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 14th 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