Brian Griffin at Hub Westminster is encouraging all the "Hubbers" to get in the habit of making a brief video every month. The first one should say who we are, why we're at the Hub, and some good things from the previous month - and if we turn up this Wednesday Brian'll help us to make it. Hence these thoughts about the kind of thing I might say.
Who am I?
I'm a social innovator and analyst, and I work in collaboration with others under the name of Dadamac.
On a practical level I've got a good track record of making things happen, including unconventional collaborations between the UK and rural Africa. Our speciality is bringing people together who have very different experiences of using the Internet. We build collaborations beween people from different cultures, and with different specialist knowledge, and we help information to flow between them.
Our UK-Africa projects are models of cost-effectiveness and long-term impact, which are relevant for research, policy making, and practical projects. We have a high-trust network that connects innovators in various parts of the world. We are genuinely both local and global.
Dadamac is very different to organisations that came to power and prominence before the end of the 20th century.. We have never been part of the Landscape of the Past. We belong in the Landscape fo Change, which is a landscape of uncertaintes and disruption. The work that we do couldn't have been done before the Internet. The ways we work in Dadamac, and our high-trust collaborative relationships, are what create our value.
Why Hub Westminster?
It's Dafamac's way of working that has brought me to Hub Westminster (Hub W). I've been on the fringes of Hub W for a while, but now I'm joining properly, to become part of the community here.
I'm attracted to Hub W because it's not just for hot-desking. It does have a much wider vision than that. It was set up with an undersatnding of the radical disruption that is part of our present reality. The Hub W founders have the same ideals of peer collaboration, and learning-by-doing that are at the heart of Dadamac culture.
Although Dadamac's real home is on the Internet - in 'the cloud" - there are some things that do require us to have a physical presence. This is in order to build connections between two parallel worlds. One is the world of established, heriarchical organisations and power - a world that is highly visible all around us here in the heart of London. The other world is bubbling up all over the Landscape of Change. It's the world of Dadamac and others like us. It's vibrant, creative, innovative, rapidly changing, higly inter-connected and collaborative - it's and largely invisible, to people who don't inhabit it.
I believe there is an urgent and important need to build connections and collaborations between these two worlds and I can't imagine any better place to try and do that here at Hub Westminster.
High spots from last month
It was a good month in Dadamac so there'll be a lot to choose from. Fortunately most of the details can be read on other blogs, so I shouldn't need to say much - just give some headlines and references.
What I'll really say
On the video I'll only be able to express a fraction of what i've written above - but writing it has served a useful purpose. When I started writing this I had a feeling that maybe I didn't really belong at Hub W because although I'm a successful social innovator, I'm a non-starter when it comes to being a financially sustainable social entrepreneur. Now I've looked more closely at why I'm attracted to the place I feel much more confident about being there - another reason to be grateful to Brian and his video making ideas.
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