Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

I just came across extensive blog coverage of the Skoll World Forum, written by Vivian Hutchinson. He heads the Social Innovation Investment Group and the New Zealand Social Entrepreneur Fellowship. He did a comprehensive take on the conference that I found very interesting. Of course, one of the reasons I liked his blogging is because he used several photos I took, which I posted on Flickr! I just got a brand new camera and I've been having lots of fun taking pictures of the many events I attended in the last two months. Go to my Flick page to see photos from the Skoll World Forum and the Gathering of the Social Enterprise Alliance. There are always interesting conversations going on when you get lots of social entrepreneurs together. There always seems to be a definition conversation going on, something along the lines of either "what is a social entrepreneur?" or "what new name should we use for social enterprises?" Tim Freundlich passed along a ton...

The Balancing Act: just about right This is my third Skoll Forum, and I definitely think that it was the best. And that's saying something, since I got my award last year and that was pretty exciting. The challenge here has been the balancing act between the business school home of the Forum and the practitioner community. A couple of years ago, the focus was too academic and much of the material was not interesting to the social entrepreneurs. And, I know that academics need this kind of interaction: it's their career and passion. This year I think they got it right. Most of the plenaries were focused on inspiration and building the field as a whole. As usual (based on last year), we got to see four Sundance-created short films on Skoll entrepreneurs. The researchers got two days of focused seminars and content, while the practitioners and non-academic attendees were happily engaged in workshops and what I dubbed "master classes:" where Skoll Award winners wou...

The big celebration was also in the Sheldonian: the 2007 Awards for Social Entrepreneurship. And it was exciting! Below, I have picked a few select photos: the rest are on my Flickr page. Salman Ahmed got the crowd pumping as before, and then we met our four rockstar presenters (well, at least one is literally a rock star, and the other three have a pretty good claim to the status): Jeff Skoll, Peter Gabriel, Sally Osberg and Muhammad Yunus. The ten new Skoll award winners got their moment in the sun (well, the klieg lights). For social entrepreneurs (except Jeff) this is the Academy Awards, and the smiles were beaming. I picked Dan Viederman of Verite out as a good example. Do you have any doubt we are looking at a guy who has slogged through a lot of tough stuff and is celebrating the moment with zeal?