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With SocialLab at the Partnership2012 at CBS today - quite a change of environment!

Report is delivered. Thank you, everyone who´s been helping us out along the way! It has been a great pleasure, a very rapid ride and an important personal experience. Hope to see you all in to long.

(hopefully we will find more photos, thoughts and comments to post here but for now - doing everything that did not get done in the heat of producing a qualitative kick ass report)

Oops! We have not been updating nearly enough in here. No excuses. Here is a sample from the report we are currently writing as a sort of wrapping up of our project period:

Judith Owigar is the president of Akirachix, an organisation working to support women in technology. Yesterday we were at their event Mobile Garage here in Nairobi and had a little chat with her about them and what she was hoping to do for Nairobi.

Check out akirachix.com for more information.

After an amazing workshop with 20 of the finest students in Nairobi yesterday, today didn't disappoint us either. We joined in on the event Mobile Garage hosted by Akirachixs at IHUB to do further research. We left the place with many new contacts and good connections. Thanks to all of you who signed up for being a part of the our workshop the coming week!

Here is a selection of the pictures we took today. Thanks to all the amazing students at Nairobi University for an unforgettable Friday. We are looking forward to next week, but first, it is celebration time- a charity event where all profits goes directly to the Rhino Ark Charitable Trust, which supports nature conservation in Kenya. The band Sauti Sol will play, and the word on the street says they are the shit in Kenya right now. Cheers to Kenyan "boy band" style!

Enjoy the weekend. Peace out.

Jamila is co-founder and CEO of mobile startup MFarm, giving farmers more power in the market through smart information on prices, supply and demand.

This is another interview from the University of Nairobi. We are talking with Patrik about the challenges connected to traffic.

Tomorrow, friday the 18th of May we will hold a Social Lab workshop for 20 students around that challenge: http://thesociallab.dk/challenges/11/brief

A few pictures of our travel so far- more will come!

An interview from yesterday, with one of the students at the University of Nairobi, Science Campus: Pascal Aineah

Another great day for KaosLab.

Besides filling out our weekly schedule with amazing meetings, we actually had two fantastic meetings today, one with Growth Africa and one with a branch of Nairobi university. Growth Africa was very interested in the Social Lab initiative and both parts see great possibilities. Our meeting with the university led to an upcoming workshop with 20 students this friday. It was a very positive experience and we all look forward to a session filled with creativity and innovation.

Life is good in Kenya, and the people keep showing so much hospitality and engagement!

Our 3'rd amazing day in Nairobi is coming to an end and we would like to give you all a little update on our current and upcoming strategy to find the best possibilities for the implementation of a Social Lab in Nairobi in October 2012.

Networking, feedback, prototyping in the wild!

Already in the airplane on our way to Nairobi we gave out surveys to the passengers joining us on our travel, asking for insights and information to help us get the best possible start in Nairobi. To our surprise the outcome of these was not only information and insights, but we also made some valuable connections for our later work. People have been showing enormous engagement in our initiative and we have already exchanged e-mails and phone numbers with several people who wish to help us finding the right connections or wish to be part of a test workshop we are holding next week. Where ever we go, people are welcoming us with open arms. It shows great potential and possibilities for a successful cooperation. Thanks to all of you for your great hospitality and help, hopefully we will pay back with an amazing project.

Boniface N. Githinji (Picture)

Boniface is a Kenyan entrepreneur we met at Startup Garage, (which is a hub which helps start-ups and a lot more).. who after university had a business idea, but didn't know how to get started. (http://www.humanipo.com/blog/117/Startup-Garage-Nairobi-Launched)

Boniface went to NaiLab which is very close concept wise with Social Lab and got the help needed to kick off his business. Now he is working with 200 schools in Kenya and has 2 employees and expanding as we speak. You can read his thoughts on incubation labs at http://www.tusqee.com/blog/?p=94

Next week is full of appointments with universities, NGO's, incubators and local people- most of them made through direct approach; hand shakes, listening and lots of smiles.

Into the wild with KaosLab

#kaospilot #kaospilots #social lab #sociallab

This is where the everyday action in Nairobi goes down. Office space kindly provided and shared by the very nice people at MYC4.

#kaospilot #kaospilots #social lab #sociallab

We arrived yesterday morning safe and happy in Nairobi, our travel went smooth, no delays, no lost baggage and no lost team members! The weather is nice, its rain-season, so we have gotten hold of rain boots and umbrellas, but so far we have only seen the sun-not complaining :D

More details and information about our inspirational flight trip and all the cool and helpful people we have met so far will come soon. Take care loved ones, we promise we will.

All the love- from Nairobi

#kaospilot #kaospilots #social lab #sociallab

The reason for us traveling to Nairobi is to create a business plan for SocialLab, in order for them to know how to go about implementing their model for open social innovation in new contexts. After spending some time in Copenhagen with Sarah and Thomas - the founders of SocialLab - we have a much clearer idea about how we can do that in the most efficient way possible - and it is going to be loaded with action!

There are many angles from which to attack an assignment such as ours and there is just no stop to how much research one could conduct. The temperature for social entrepreneurship and innovation is burning hot right now. There are so many great examples of people, organizations, universities, incubators and others working in this field already and they are all keys in the ongoing transformation of Kenya and East Africa.

Choosing to see these examples as competition is not an option when working with empowering of people and social growth. They are all potential partners and co-creators in a mission to support the Kenyan entrepreneurial spirit.

We have made the initial choice to not go extremely deep in the bulking of all types of information and research that is available. Instead we will start our time of in Nairobi with a real life SocialLab to test out the model in the reality of its relevance. The first couple of days will be spend talking with people (which people? let us know if you know!) in the streets, cafe´s, universities and so on about their lives and what challenges they are facing. We will seek partnership with NGO´s, companies or others in order to set up a one or half a day SocialLab where we gather people around whatever challenge our interaction with different people will have shown us. The SocialLab model is discussed in more detail here:

http://kaoslab.tumblr.com/post/21201347651/why-is-sociallab-a-great-enough-idea-for-anyone-to

So we are of course excited about traveling to a wonderful country like Kenya and about our work there! Interaction and action research will hopefully translate to great learnings and a truly good time.

We would love to have loads of input from our readers. If you have any ideas about partners, people, challenges or whatever that could be relevant (or interesting) - contact us through your channel of choice:

http://kaoslab.tumblr.com/ask [email protected] twitter: @mattiasedstrom

#kaospilot #kaospilots #social lab #sociallab

A small update:

The KaosLab group is now collected in the great city of Copenhagen. A few six days from now we will travel to Nairobi, Kenya to find out where SocialLab fits in to the space between NGO´s striving for positive impact in developing countries and real social change.

Our agenda for being in Copenhagen is:

- To get training in the SocialLab process and facilitation.

- To prepare one or several actual SocialLabs for our time in Nairobi; Locating challenges, establishing partnerships and outlining timeframes.

- To get a load of practicalities out of the way while being 120% connected through phones and clouds.

Do you have any ideas for who could be interested in participating in a SocialLab in Nairobi?

#kaospilot #kaospilots #social lab #sociallab

Why is SocialLab a great enough idea for anyone to want to spend their time reading a blog about students creating a business plan for them in Nairobi? Or to get even more specific: Why would anyone invest time or money in helping us out with this mission?

First of all SocialLab is a great solution to an actual challenge: Charity is a subject being debated and criticized largely for not being affective - so what can we actually do? Can we support societies to redefine and reinvent themselves?

Charity tends to lend itself to curing the effect rather than the cause, when the actual chance for change is in the later. In the cause we have the possibility to either change it into something with a positive effect or to actually reengineer it from the start. Who is better suited for this work of observing and reinventing the causes than the ones that meet the effect face to face?

SocialLab provides a model of crowd sourced innovation where first the challenges(Brief´s) and then inspiration and ideas for innovative social solutions are provided by the actual people needing them. The same people chose the ideas that they believe in and those are than being supported to carry out the projects with know-how, funding and network. See the process of SocialLabs online platform above, from brief to projects.

SocialLab facilitates social solutions, based on the belief that creativity, collaboration and a positive mindset can make a difference. They want to take this model of social change-making to Nairobi, Kenya to provide a space for good ideas to be born and then supported with needed resources. We want to help them to do that!

After a long process with many proposals from companies and organizations we chose to work with SocialLab because we firmly believes in their vision, their process of crowd sourced social innovation and in the potential of Nairobi and Kenya.

What do you think about charity and this model of working with social challenges? Let us know.

#kaospilot #kaospilots #social lab #sociallab

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