Another week, and 10 more outstanding session ideas for SOCAP13 on SOCAP Open. In case you missed our first recap, the community sprinted out of the gates running with 30 fantastic submissions. This week we saw discussion heat up on a few topics, and new ideas adding even more depth to an already interesting field. What are folks talking about?
Climate Change
If you haven’t heard, we’ve officially passed 400ppm of carbon in the atmosphere. The good news? The SOCAP Community is on it, and unsurprisingly this week we saw two new session ideas tackling this. One from Jessica Margolin asking What Now? that will discuss what leadership looks like in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic, Ambiguous) environment. The Carbon War Room would like to host a session reminding us not to get caught up in the doom and gloom, but instead focus on the tangible, high impact opportunities to make a difference. They’ve proposed mapping the technology and capital streams to help us tap a still untapped, abundant resource: energy efficiency in building.
The Path to Impact
Quite a few sessions are diving deep on specific trends and uncovering the best path to impact for social enterprise.
Continuing on the ever important theme of actually learning from failure, Israel Kloss suggests diving in and looking at why major, crowdsourced buying and funding platforms like Kickstarter and Groupon have thrived, while non-profit platforms of a similar nature focused on taking action have failed. It looks to be a provocative exploration uncovering lessons for all of us moving forward.
Christine Duong Mason wants to talk about the power of games and take us through some of the latest developments in games being used both for social good and health.
Building on years of work in the state department, Steven Koltai is looking to share how entrepreneurship is the path of world peace.
And Steve Schwartz is asking us to take a hard look at Mission Impossible (funding for early-stage, high risk ventures in the space) and wants to present concrete frameworks for developing early stage social ventures.
Interactive Workshops
Personally, I’m always happy to see opportunities to interact and dive in with our fellow participants. One intriguing workshop that is already generating some good discussion is looking to map the social enterprise support system. Another wants to harness our collective potential to consider some hard questions around ethics and sustainability in the global travel industry and develop recommendations to be published in the travel industry’s leading magazines.
We invite you to tell us what you think about these ideas right on SOCAP Open. And if the session you want to see in September hasn’t been proposed, jump right in! You have until June 17th to submit.
