Diapers, cots, prams, bottles, soft toys, baby clothing, teething gel are just a few thoughts that spring to mind of an expecting mom. To enrich parents and parents-to-be more about baby stuff was the SABC Education Baba Indaba. The Baba Indaba was designed to inspire new moms to delight in their pregnancy, bring fresh ideas to parents, stimulate toddlers and entice kids with various essential, interesting and fun products.

This annual event was held in Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town. On 23-25 July the CTICC was the venue where parents, babies, toddlers and tweens were entertained, inspired and encouraged to discover a world of fun and education with a variety of exhibitors. For the first time in South Africa the Kids Indaba, which focuses on children between the ages 6-12 years, was part of the already well-known Baba Indaba.

Among the necessary new-born products, nutritional and healthy food, educational cartoons and maternity fashion shows, was Bridgetown’s very own Reconstructed  Living Lab (Rlabs) to stimulate the children via computers. Rlabs was determined to take Social Media Surgery to the younger generation, who were eager to interact with technology. Rlabs aimed to increase the understanding of technology and to educate the children between the ages of 6-12 years about various educational sites, children from as young as three years old were playing games on the Wii, X-Box and the PC’s.

Most of the children who passed-by showed an interest either by pulling their parents towards Rlabs or running towards a pc or the games projected on the screens. They were knowledgeable as well about the internet and exchanged their favourite sites with the Rlabs team.

Technology has weaved its way to the very young ones and to enhance the phrase “…if you can’t beat them join them,” Rlabs encouraged the parents to embrace the ever transpiring evolution of the online world by introducing them to sites beneficial to their children’s development.

Content:
This one day training “hands-on” workshop will cover the following areas:
1. Background to Social Media and tools such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, wikis, and multimedia file-sharing sites
2. Provide guidelines to how your business can utilise and reap the benefits of social media
3. Practical opportunities for participants to engage with some of the Social Media tools
4. Social Media and mobile phones
5. Drafting a Social Media Policy for Businesses

Objectives:
• Understanding of Social Media and its context
• Identified tools that could be integrated into the business sector to support its vision and objectives
• Introductory level of hands-on experience using social media tools
• To use mobile phones as possible social media devices
• Understand the importance of Social media for Businesses
Workshop Details:
All required equipment will be provided for the workshop and this includes all refreshments for the day. The price of the workshop is R1, 500.00 for the day or RSVP your seat with the code RLABS by the 5 July 2010 and we will waver your fee by 33% (You Pay ONLY R1,000.00).

Workshop Details:
Date: Tuesday, 20 July 2010
Time: 9:00 – 13:30
Address: Impact Centre, 66 Tarentaal Road, Bridgetown,Athlone, 7764
Contact person: Clinton Liederman – Clinton@rlabs.org – 021 6991453

- Brent’s Journey: Day 1 of The Innovation Fair
- From The Balcony: RLabs partners with the World Bank
- She’s the Geek: Innovators Panel 1 and 2
- King Ross
- Madam Geek

Follow #InnovFair on Twitter to follow and join the conversation.

A quick background on this event: The World Bank Development Marketplace has been taking ideas to action for the last 10 years. The Development Marketplace is holding the first of a new generation event – the Innovation Fair on Moving Beyond Conflict and Fragility. The event is tied to the 2011 World Development Report and draws on a pool of innovative solutions collated through an online competition that invited applications, got users to vote and shotlist social impact ideas.

This Innovation Radar registered 2000 users, produced 223 project applications from 40 countries. 50,000 users viewed and engaged with the ideas online – and a final 30 social impact ideas were shortlisted and invited to Cape Town for the Fair. These ideas can be reviewed by clicking here.

You will note that these ideas have come from regions such as Sierra Leone, DR of Congo, Kenya, Burundi, SA, other African countries – and also from Columbia, Srilanka, a few from India. In some of these countries, the existence of conflict and the fragility of the communities is a very real scenario. And most of the ideas directly focused on how technology and innovation can be applied to empower, equip, build economic opportunity in such a context.

Egbe Osifo-Dawodu from the World Bank Institute wrote a great piece on why the subject of moving beyond conflict and fragility is relevant – and why this forms the basis of the innovation fair.

The ideas were collated and presented around 2 broad themes:

1. Improving Service Delivery and Governance through the use of Communication Tools
2. Innovative Research and Practical Approaches to Conflict and Violence Prevention

The application of Communication Technology forms a thread across many of the ideas – and while several of the ideas are in initial prototypes, a few have also created a fair amount of impact in more advanced pilot stages.

A few core themes have run through the discussions over the last two days:

• The role of the government in conflict areas to support innovation
• How do you scale beyond the initial pilots
• How do you sustain some of the ideas and get community really involved in owning and taking them forward..
• Role of institutions like the World Bank in supporting the social innovators…etc

Some of the discussions and quick excerpts of all the different presentations are accessible at the following link http://innovationfair.ning.com/

My comments on the Panel discussion on Scaling Social Innovations were really around the core thought that it is possible to ‘Design for Scale’ – rather than ‘hope that the idea will eventually scale’… Given the nature of early stage innovations being discussed, shared 3 key thoughts around scaling…

• The notion of Innovation: Its not about the initial breakthrough idea – but about a series of ideas, which when layered together create significant impact. This usually involves innovations around the product, service model, revenue model, operation models etc, all combined together. Examples such as the evolution of pre-paid services on mobile phones that created a layer of a service and revenue model over the base mobile technology to make mobility accessible to millions of people. Without this extra layer of innovation – mobile phones would be limited to very few people. So the notion of innovation asks: What is that set of ideas that makes your core proposition strong and relevant?
  

• The role of the innovator: If the above is true then scale is built into the notion of Innovating, especially since the innovator needs to build a cohesive set of ideas that make a proposition work. This means that its important to start finding ways to succeed in creating the impact, incorporating many more simple solutions as the idea slowly takes shape… and find ways to have many people adopt your idea, thus creating a natural pull for your idea. The innovator has a role to play in building the core idea from the simple workability of the idea, through acceptability and adoption – and finally to a model that demonstrates the scalability of the model and its impact. Which stage is the implementation of your idea in right now?

• The role of the Ecosystem: And here come organizations like the World Bank, Ashoka Foundation etc – who have the capacity to facilitate collaborations, provide initial funding, exposure, learning for the innovator and his/ her team, help evaluate and provide a global platform for sharing, cross learning and fostering partnerships – that can give the social innovator speed. The most core resource is of course the funds. But its critical for Social Innovators to treat the funds as Working Capital - and not funding. Thus designing the models for sustainability very early on in the life cycle.

We talked through examples in India such as ITC eChoupal, SMSOne, Akshaya Patra that have approached scale in a structured manner.

A great example of a sustainable social impact model in a conflict environment presented itself right here at the Innovation fair!! The Social Media team anchoring the event – RLabs or Reconstructed Living Labs – is a beautiful idea that identifies disadvantaged youth, builds capability in them to use and apply technology and social media – and then finds a market for these skills and create economic opportunities. Was great to see them in action at the fair.

Guest Post by: Parvathi Menon

Innovation Fair: Moving beyond Conflict from WBI Innovation on Vimeo.

RLabs and its Social Media Factory project have been elected as the Social Media Partner for the World Bank’s conference. This opportunity to partner with the World Bank is such a great honour and especially considering the story of RLabs. Most of the RLabs team are community members from a developing community who had no formal education or computer literacy and many with no hope and not much to live for. Seeing how the team have grown and how the community are adopting and using technologies is testament to the great work being done by this group of incredible individuals. We will have a special post on the team who will be at the Innovation Fair this week who will share more about their backgrounds and experiences being part of RLabs.

The Reconstructed Living Lab is one of ten in South Africa, and the first one in the Western Cape. The project has grown out of collaboration between Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) and a community organisation Impact Direct. It has features that are unique in living labs as it is community led and is based in a social deprived area in Cape Town.

“Introduction to Social Media for Non-profits, NGOs, Community-Based Organisations and Charities”

The “new web” has transformed the way people connect and social media platforms have become an essential part of the organizational and business strategies. These technologies can be useful for non profits as strategic tools for engagement, relationship building with stakeholders and communities, networking and fundraising. With millions of users of social media in South Africa alone and over a billion worldwide across various platforms (PCs, Mobile phones etc.) this is an opportunity for non profits to share with the masses using FREE tools available to support the vision of such organizations.

Content:
This one day training “hands-on” workshop will cover the following areas:

1. Background to social media and tools such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, wikis, and multimedia file-sharing sites
2. Provide guidelines to how your organisation can utilise and reap the benefits of social media
3. Practical opportunities for participants to engage with some of the social media tools
4. Social Media and mobile phones
5. Drafting a Social Media Policy for non-profits

Objectives:

• Understanding of Social Media and its context
• Identified tools that could be integrated into the non-profit operations to support its vision and objectives
• Introductory level of hands-on experience using social media tools
• To use mobile phones as possible social media devices
• Understand the importance of Social media for  non-profit

Workshop Details:
All required equipment will be provided for the workshop and this includes all refreshments for the day. The price of the workshop is R1, 500.00 for the day or RSVP your seat with the code RLABS by the 23 April 2010 and we will waver your fee by 66% (You Pay ONLY R500.00).

Workshop Date & Time: 4 May 2010, 9:00 – 13:30

66 Tarentaal Road, Bridgetown, Athlone, 7764 – Tel: 021 6374037/6991453 – Fax: 0862113079

contact email: rene@rlabs.org

1. Understanding of Social Media and its context
2. Identified tools that could be integrated into the non-profit operations to support its vision and objectives
3. Introductory level of hands-on experience using social media tools
4. Lets go Mobile

If you belong to a non-profit organisation and would like to reserve your seat then please post a comment about why you think social media could be useful in your organistion below. Only a limited number of seats are available.

Some of the topics covered that got the participants talking was the use of blogs, micro-blogging and mobile phones as part of the organisation to engage with various stakeholders. Some of the challenges for many of the non-profits were the lack of resources (E.g. bandwidth, having staff dedicated to social media strategy etc). However, during the workshop we were able to discuss a basic Social Media strategy that could support Non-profit organisations. Using the following steps as part of the Social Media strategy proved to be useful to the participants:1)listening 2) participating 3) creating 4) building networks and 5) evaluating.

At the end of the day all the participants managed to start a blog, micro-blogging, get involved with social networks and draft a basic social media strategy for their various organisations.