Class party!

The first week of teaching just ended, and we are already at a third of the way through our training program for 2010. Therefore, what better way to crystallize the week's learnings than a party?!

We are running two classes at St. Aloysius this year, based on the students' experience at running businesses. At Martina's suggestion, Lisa, Rimple, Eon, Barry and I brought both groups together for a few hours Friday afternoon. Under the guise of discussing naming and logo of their companies in prevision of the next week's marketing session, we have had the students pitch their business idea in front of 25 of their fellows.

After a week of class, the students are getting more comfortable at discussing their ideas in small groups as well as in front of the class. The joint session was therefore also an opportunity to get them out of the comfort zone again. Also, a study of entrepreneurship wouldn't be the same without elevator pitches! (though I'm not sure the metaphor is quite as effective at St. Aloysius...)

In contrast, it was good to take some time aside from the curriculum and encourage students to let their creativity flow, by having them brainstorm company names and mottos and collaborate on their business plans.

Finally, the joint session was a good opportunity for networking. As we are looking at increasing the post-program support we provide to our entrepreneurs, creating a sense of community within trainees is essential.

The seminar was a great success! Overall, students have made tremendous progress in only a week. Of course, there is plenty of work to be done, but today's seminar shows that they are not alone on the sometimes bumpy road to success.

How Web 2.0 Keeps Us in the Know

In a previous post we discussed how SE101 uses Web 2.0 (and most specifically Social Media) to drive awareness, engage our network and grow our community. In this post, we briefly want to let you know about one of the ways we use Web 2.0 and Social Media to keep us at the leading edge of information on Social Entrepreneurship and grow our network among the leading SE people and organizations.

Most people will be familiar with facebook (check out our page!) and how that works as a social device, i.e. you add your network, they add you and then you share your posts, pictures, movies, updates and etc. with you network getting general updates on their 'news feed' (whenever you do something) and specific updates in their notifications (whenever you do something that mentions/involves them). What this requires is the voluntary connection (your network) in the facebook ecosystem.

Twitter (please check us out here as well!) on the other hand allows you to 'follow' and be 'followed' in an effort to create and engage your network - think of twitter networking just like a cocktail party, everyone is there, and you can eavesdrop on public conversations, or you can engage and have conversation with people you want to network with. In twitter, like facebook, you can still post links and pictures etc. but twitter is much less of a 'restricted' social platform or self-selecting social network than facebook. The contrast can be boiled down to the difference between a social club and a community centre - facebook is built more exclusive, you need to be a member and people need to let you in their club.

What's beautiful about twitter (similar to the facebook news feed) is that in this ecosystem, not only are publicly posted tweets there for you to browse (following or not), but many tweeps add a "hashtag" to their posts so that other tweeps can follow a topic or trend.

All of the latest information (including links to images, video, articles and etc.) that tweeps post can be aggregated and searched by these hashtags and trends nicely for review - without having to dig into twitter, searching and following. For us here at SE101, this means we can follow the hashtag #SocEnt (Social Entrepreneurship) for example and see everyone posting with the hashtag (we also really like #NonProfit and #WEP - World Economic Forum).

Through the magic of Web 2.0 (if you really want to know how it works watch this video), innovative coding allows us to take these hashtags and trends to an all new level and a daily 'newspaper' can be created to give us the previous days most notable tweets. Paper.li has launched a service that allows you to create your own special interest newspaper, or, like us, allows you to follow topics and trends that are important to you in a nice, easy to read package instead of a mess of linear, historically listed 140 character posts.

Here are a couple papers we like:

1. #SocEnt http://paper.li/tag/socent
2. #WEF http://paper.li/davos
3. #NonProfit http://paper.li/tag/nonprofit

While these newspapers are informative (and they are!) they still do not replace live participation in the ecosystems that are the Social Media Cocktail Party. Please, check us out on Facebook and Twitter - like us, follow us, share our posts, retweet our tweets - with your help, we can continue to grow our community and provide our course to Kenyan Youth!