2011 SE101 Team Recruitment - Info Session

YES YOU!!

Are you a student interested in social entrepreneurship and important issues such as fighting poverty and international development?

The Sauder Africa Initiative is entering its 6th successful year of operation and is starting to recruit its 2011 team. Applications for Sauder Africa Initiative - Kenya 2011 are now being accepted until November 25 (before midnight).

You can find the application by going to the Sauder Africa Initiative website at: http://www.africa.sauder.ubc.ca and looking at the home page under "Latest News."
SE101 is recruiting for two dedicated groups of students who want to change the lives of youth in the poorest parts of Nairobi, Kenya:

a) a Vancouver-based team who will help support the ground team through fundraising, curriculum development, mentoring, communications, and other tasks as needed;

b)a traveling team who will deliver a three-week program based in Nairobi, to help Kenyan youth develop business plans. We are opening SE101 to those of you who aren’t able to travel to Kenya because many of you have expressed a desire to contribute in some way to SE101. We encourage you to consider this opportunity to join the team. For the travelling team, the 2011 project will be held in Kenya July 28-August 19, 2011 and will be conducted in partnership with Kenyan youth organizations and Strathmore University. You can read more about the project requirements by going to http://africa.sauder.ubc.ca/SE101_Kenya_2011.html.

The Info session for SE101 will be held on Tuesday, November 16th, 1-2:30, in SCARF 201. The information session will provide an opportunity for you to learn more about this exciting project and meet some of the participants from previous years. If you have any questions about the program or the application procedure, please contact Professor Nancy Langton (nancy.langton@sauder.ubc.ca).

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!