PHOTO: African scientists installed servers and set up a new volunteer computing project for AFRICA@home, a website for volunteer computing projects which allow your computer to contribute to African humanitarian causes.
An African saying teaches: "“If you want to go fast, go alone; If you want to go far, go together…”Jeff Hamaoui is one of the many contributors to the Skoll Foundation's multi-blog portal on social enterprise, Social Edge. He starts off his discussion on Radical Collaboration declaring:
The key ingredients of radical collaboration include familiar basic elements (such as shared opportunity, relationships and simplicity) and can be applied to any community of practice--especially those collaborative enterprises focused on social change."The time for playing small and separate is over."
The emphasis, however, is not put upon strategic thinking but upon design thinking, which Hamaoui describes as "a collaborative,
iterative, and holistic approach to solving problems and mining opportunities."
Hamaoui does not choose to base distill these six concepts upon the traditional brokerage model (aka Big Rich Foundation
model). Instead, in observing how digital and mobile tools have enabled cheap, fast,
global networks of individuals to form, the lessons are drawn from the movie studio, which Hamaoui sees as providing
"an open collaborative space that permits creativity and flow."
There is a need to build platforms for truly breakthrough design by creating multi-faceted partnerships aligned to explore, develop and exploit possibility. What does that look like? It’s bringing together an international finance giant, a development agency and a construction conglomerate in synchronicity to build 100,000 units of low-cost housing in Central America. Business profits, the effect of public dollars is amplified, and poor families get affordable green homes. If this dance of interdependence is splendidly done, everyone wins.
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