People in Beta (session) @ Convention Camp 2012

The Idea

You can’t get creative insights sitting behind an office desk. Everything is more or less predictable and contradictory things can be left outside. Out in the world, it’s more chaotic. You have to deal with unexpected findings, with uncertainty, and with irrational people who say things you don’t want to hear. But that is where you find insights.

That is why at the convention camp, we are not making a presentation of how we work, neither telling about our successful stories, nor our failures. We are venturing in the convention camp pursuing learning without any hypothesis or script, but to challenge our comfortable assumptions (and the ones o of its visitors)

We want to know How will we un-share the world in the future? We want to learn about the limits of openness, connectedness and sharing. And imagine scenarios which narrate our insights into a story. This story is a spontaneous reflextion of what happened at the convention camp, and we will share it at the end of the day with all.

The Process

This process should not be seen as a fix scientific structure but rather functions as the drum’s player in a jazz concert. It serves as a reference for participants and it might be spontaneously updated, changed or ignored depending on the flow.

Part 1: Gathering insights (Open to all)

1.     9:00 – 10:00; betabreakfast
2.     10:00 – 12:00; Scout the convention looking for insights

Part 2: Understand insight and find out patterns (Open to all)

1.     13:30 – 14:00; Cluster insights
2.     14:00 – 14:50; Open* Discussion

(*The discussion is open for all to participate, but be aware that it is facilitated and that might get uncomfortable)

Part 3: Creating stories

1.     15:00 – 16:30; Envisioning scenarios, Session*to translate ideas into tangible stories.
2.     16:30 – 16:45; Present and film scenarios
3.    20:00; Present video with the visualized story.

(*Session for 20 participants, contact pedro if you like to take part)

The session is facilitated by Pedro Pineda. It is designed to visualize an spontaneous reflection to the convention camp and what is happening at this very moment.
The session is inspired by betahaus which is a co-working space. Here things are not predictable, some things are very contradictory and irrational people try to change the world.

Team

The session will be kickstarted by Anne, Alessandro, Rick, Maximilian,  and Ricardo. All from different backgrounds, have never work together before, do not even have an action plan,  but are all co-workers willing to get out of their comfort zone.

Ricardo Ferrer (@ricferrer): The generalist

Ric Ferrer is founder and chairman of the advisory board at 533 AG, a  company he started recently in order to support and fund projects  related to “the future of work”. He is co-founder of the coworking space  EDELSTALL (http://edelstall.de) and the cloud storage start-up doctape (http://doctape.com)  where he is currently working full-time as Chief Creative Officer. He  uses his extensive experience in management, design and programming to  advise and help in the conceptual design on all projects he is involved  with. Having been raised in Venezuela, gone to school in the U.S.A. and  spent big part of his adult life in Germany, his multi-cultural  background serves him well in order to predict the needs of an emerging  digital generation of nomadic professionals.

Maximilian Doerner (@maximiliandoe): The Futurist

Max Dörner is a Future managment researcher and Business Anthropologist engaged in a multitude of fields including future analysis and foresight, design thinking as well as business culture and innovation management. He uses integrative, interdisciplinary techniques to determine complex contextual problems, and solve them. Working as a Marketing Executive, Analyst and Consultant in different industry fields such as marketing, design and innovation he has an array of viewpoints to draw upon and contribute. Born in Germany, raised in New Zealand, he studied Anthropology and Ethics, continued on to do postgrad in Development Studies in NZ and Berkeley,California. He then returned to Berlin to complete his masters in future studies.

RicK Scavetta (email): The Optimist

Rick Scavetta was born in Toronto, Canada and completed his Ph.D. in Germany at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. In addition to Canada and Germany, Rick has also conducted parts of his training in Singapore and Iran. Throughout his academic career, Rick has consistently been engaged in student leadership, actively promoting the personal and professional development of his peers. Thus, it was a natural transition for Rick to go from the laboratory to a research support role as a co-founder of Science Craft. Science Craft is dedicated to offering outstanding transferable skills training to graduate students in the life sciences. Since it’s foundation in February 2012, Science Craft has attracted growing interest from many top-level research institutes in Germany and  will begin offering international workshops next year. Rick combines his infectious enthusiasm for science and its communication with a unique ability to inspire life scientists in their career development.

Anne Kjær Riechert: The Dreamer

Anne is a 2006 graduate from the KaosPilots in Denmark. From 2006-2009 she worked as creative lead and corporate social responsibility consultant for the Copenhagen-based brand strategy company, Stoic, where she amongst others developed and implemented Samsung Electronics award-winning CSR strategy for Scandinavia. Since 2006, Anne has also managed her own humanitarian project, We Have a Dream, which organizes global workshops to empower youth through drawings and discussions about their dreams for the future. The project has reached over 3000 children in 22 countries. Anne exhibits the drawings in public and political places to increase awareness and raise funds for children growing up in disadvantaged areas.

Alessandro Contini: The Realist

Alessandro Contini is a designer and a tech savvy.  He works with sounds, images and coding. After graduating in Computer  Science with Music Technology in Milan he started collaborations with  international companies such as Interaction Design Lab, Nokia, Eyebeam  Art + Technology center for the Arts, and taught classes at Milan Polytechnic  University, NABA and Domus Academy (Laureate International Universities). Currently he’s a freelance creative technologist,  interactive artist and regular hackathon-goer!

Pedro Pineda (@pedropiba): The Connector                                

Born in the Canary Islands (1985) , Studied  Design & Technology in London and now is living in  Berlin where he is developing different ways to apply collective &  creative problem solving to challenges that affect us as individuals or  as society. He sees design as a tool to create and facilitate experiences. It “is  not enought to look at the isolated product or service but at the whole  experience that we want to create” His work is released open source for all to copy, build upon and distributed.

He has co-developed numerous projects like MakerLab, Enable Berlin, We Creative People,  and Open Design City. He has co-developed numerous projects like MakerLab, Enable Berlin, We Creative People,  and Open Design City

Openness: Community & Participation

There is a growing trend to use the term Open-, and the fields where this applies vary from programming, design and even data.
We see a huge opportunity to change the way we work together, how we consume (or prosume) things or even understand the social structures. Even though it is starting and we still do not know if it is an utopia or a plausible reality, we already see how we could create solutions for the every day life and for very complex challenges in a more collaborative, creative and effective manner.

In our research we wanted to find out the current situation in relation to this current trend of opening up. And we found several topics that people are discussing: community, participation, business models, copy and authorship, misuse of the term open-,…. To share our findings with the community, we started a series of episodes that gather these discussion insights and help others to understand what is going on and hopefully trigger some interesting discussions.

We have chosen to start with “Community and Participation”:

How do we create Open Culture?
How do we let the community take part in the process?
How do we structure collaboration?
How do we design complex things involving the user?

Openness is dependent on the community behind it and the content they create. It is a personal choice and a way of living.

Interviews: Pedro Pineda
Production: Hans Goedecke
Filmed at DMY Makerlab 2011.

Opening Up: Session Fees

We would to open up here the way we charge for our sessions.

The graphic displays how we use the money that we receive. (Session Design is 20.8%, -the top right bit-, then follow clockwise)

If you claim to be doing something social and fair, we believe that everything should be open and transparent.
Of course sometimes is scary to open up and show what is happening behind the curtain, but if we are sure that what we do is fair, why shouldn’t we do it?
It helps us to show that we believe in what and how we do it, but also other people to learn about the work that is behind the process.

So here is the first chart with the distribution of our fees* and a little explanation of each component.

• Session Design: Meeting with the client, Understanding the Challenge, Setting goals and background research, designing the creative process for the session and gather the participants.
• Session Hosting: Preparing space, tools and materials, visuals, hosting participants, leading session and documentation.
• Session Facilitators: Fees for facilitators.
• Space, Tools and Materials: Rental space, materials and tools for people to play with.
• Miscellaneous: Usage/rental of technical equipment.
• Catering: Food and drinks for participants.
• Kick Starter**: Kick starter for a team that would like to take ideas forwards as Start-up/ social business.
• Enable Berlin: Budget to continue developing Enable Berlin, legal issues, …

Further info:

* Fees: They are in percentages because they are not always the same amount, so we prefer to show how we distribute them rather than a final quantity.

**Kick Starter: This is our idea for Crowd sourcing. It was introduced at our last session (visions for Mobility). If we are earning something with a session we also want that the community gets something. At the same time we wanted to support locals to be proactive in solving social challenges. So we came up with this kick starter idea:

If any of the participants in the session is inspired to take further one/some of the concepts generated in the session in the form of social business or start-up, we will give them a small grant to help kick start the project.

We will welcome feedback about what you think about this step we are taking towards more transparent structures.