Today I attended an event called: Collaborative Innovation for Urban Climate Futures, organised by Impact Hub Berlin in collaboration with the Better Together Award. The event lasted three hours and it brought ten companies together to talk about solution to climate change in the urban environment.
They divided the event into three sections, first they introduced us to the organisation and the theme, then they brought in the exponents who talked about their company and their alignment with the five aims of the Better Together Award, and then they opened the floor for open conversation with the people who exposed. For the presentation part of it, they brought the exponents in pairs and let them present for five minutes each and then allowed for ten minutes of questions, making this section brief, interesting and engaging.
I was astonished by the work all these people did, bringing in ideas of circular economies, technological innovation and social justice to their businesses. Each one of these businesses presented was unique and it used different strategies to achieve their goals, which in the end all converged to mitigating climate change. While their models are still in the early stages of development, most of them were eager to find ways of scaling their projects to a global level.
Models for social change are changing themselves. Development in the education sector have created an unprecedented amount of young professionals and the availability of technology has brought us all together, and has given us new tools to use for social change. On the one hand, the gamification of social research by the hand of smartphones and the Internet, is allowing us to conduct remote research much more rapidly than ever before; this is also allowing us to reach populations that otherwise might be difficult to reach. On the other hand, Collaborative innovation models are finally bridging the gaps between civil societies and the government agencies, making it easier for us, regular citizens to affect change at a policy level (while making money out of it! ).
So, what is the Impact Hub? Impact Hub is an international organisation that has established several communities with the mission of collaborating for social innovation. The space is normally held as co-working space, where people from several organisations as well as independent entrepreneurs come together to work. It is essentially, a shared office space, although it is a shared office space with a mission.
Are these forms of social activism going to replace traditional forms of non-violent action? I think is too early for me to even grasp what that would mean, but they seem to be effective. In the area of environmental justice technology, startups, grassroots non-profits are doing quite a significant amount of work to mitigate the impact of Climate Change, and it seems to be working effectively. They also seem to be impacting the decision-making at a policy level and I wonder whether we should be including this strategies to other models for Social Movements like Bill Moyer's or Charles Tilly's as they seem to come, to say the least, hand-in-hand.
I am excited to see where this kind of movements take off...(because sooner or later, I am pretty sure I will end up in one of them).