May

Diogo Vasconcelos 0

If not for his premature and tragic death last July, Diogo Vasconcelos would be 44 years old today.

Diogo was much more than the first chairman of Dialogue Café. He was our driving force. He believed that we are what we share and dialogue and collaboration are the most important tools in a world where the challenges we face are increasingly urgent and increasingly global.

His passion for Social Innovation and his dedication to make dialogue Café reach its maximum potential were a reflection of the way he saw the world - full of opportunities, interesting people, amazing projects and ideas. He saw dialogue Café as a platform to bring all this together in conversation, a place free of prejudice or preconceptions, where people learn from each other and find new solutions for old problems, together.

Many people that worked and supported Dialogue Café over the last few years were touched in many different ways by Diogo's intelligence, his optimism, his uncompromising belief in the human spirit, his wit and kindness and most of all by is generosity and warm smile.

Diogo was the only person I met that was completely untouched by cynicism. He saw the world with a unique sense of wonder and opportunity where everything was possible and everybody had something good to offer. He had a unique capacity to keep looking at things like it was the first time.

Fantastic, amazing, the best, stunning, great, were words that he used in almost every sentence and about almost everything. And this was not out of exaggeration but out of a desire that we all saw things and people the way he did.

Most of us spend our lives wanting to be liked. Diogo spent his life wanting people to like each other.

Most of us believe that when we share, we loose something. Diogo believed that when we share we end up with more and better that we had originally.

Dialogue Café was Diogo's dream. And we are working every day to honor his memory and make sure it becomes what Diogo believed it could be. It's just harder without his guidance, his enthusiasm and his wisdom.

Sara Piteira

Jun

The pros and cons of Web 3.0: how to meet the challenge of the semantic Web 0

Tomorrow at Dialogue Cafe, students from Minor Knowledge Sharing & Web 2.0 from the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, University of Applied Sciences /Media, Information and Communication Programme  in Amsterdam and students from the Escola Superior de Comunicação Social in Lisbon will be discussing The pro's and con's of Web 3.0: how to meet the Challenge of the Semantic Web at Dialogue Cafe Amsterdam and Lisbon.

  What is Web 3.0 going to be like? It's for sure that it will be a semantic web, with a lot of linguistic and data-mining technology integrated in it.  This semantic web is going to be an intuitive web with the ability to scan and label information automatically and link the right information to the right person on the right moment. The knowledge society will come closer, because people don't have to take any steps anymore to make themselves known as a specialist on a certain subject. The Web 3.0 will do that for them. Just being on the internet and search for information will make you known as a person with a certain interest.   Publicizing on the internet will make you known as an expert in a certain field of knowledge and without any effort you can reach the status of connoisseur! And what is even better: Web 3.0 will be able to generate knowledge representations around certain subjects and proactively suggest knowledge that is needed for certain tasks. Just being present on the Web 3.0 is enough to make you world famous as an expert!

But there are downsides as well. Issues of personal data management and reputation management will become more important than ever. And the role of the information manager/knowledge manager/journalist will certainly change, but how? Will it be be changed to one of relationship facilitator? Or to that of a quality checker?   Here are some pros and cons of Web 3.0.

  Pros:

    More specific (better) information will be available
    More relevant search results
    Working on the Internet becomes easier because the Internet is more personalized
    Knowledge sharing is made easier
    More difficult to "fool"people and to operate with a fake identity online
    Possibilities of personalised 'mass' entertainment - and the social consequences of it

 
Cons:

    Privacy policy is needed more than ever
    People that aren't active on the web 3.0 "don't exist"
    Using search results and user data in marketing
    Easier to find personal/private information
    People will spend more time than ever on the internet.
    Less anonymity
    Reputation management will become more important than ever

For more information about events and activities at Dialogue Cafe contact julie@dialoguecafe.org

Jun

Funding Social Innovation: exploring the funding ecosystem in Europe 0

Yesterday, SIX organised a session on social finance as part of the Social Innovation Europe Initiative. The main purpose of the session was to get practical input and thoughts on the current state and current developments in the funding systems in place to support social innovations in Europe. These thoughts and insights will now be woven into the Social Innovation Europe initiative's report on the topic for the European Commission. It has been shown over the last decades that there is a lot of excitement and energy surrounding social innovations across Europe but no sustainable market for social investments. Apart from traditional grant funding infrastructure, there is little appropriate support for social innovations and our focus must turn to new financial instruments.

As part of the session, participants discussed the following questions:

What type of funding has promoted the most socially innovative activities?

How can the European Commission encourage and support social innovation activities? What kinds of finance would better support social innovation?

What role should the private sector play? What would be the role of different tools offered by that sector - for instance through capital markets or through banking finance? How might private investors be empowered to drive positive change? What can be done on a European level?

Can foundations play a greater role in funding and financing social innovation? How could this be further enhanced by European Commission support

Where do we want to be in 10 years time? What do we want the finance infrastructure look like?

For more information about social innovation exchange and the Social Innovation Europe initiative see www.socialinnovationexchange.org

May

Funding Social Innovation: exploring the funding ecosystem in Europe 0

Tomorrow at Dialogue Cafe:

Funding Social Innovation:
exploring the funding ecosystem in Europe and around the world

This event is organised by the Social Innovation eXchange (SIX), with Cisco and Dialogue Cafe, and will bring together participants from Belgium, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy.

This SIX TelePresence session will focus on the ecology of finance which supports, directs and, in some cases, blocks the processes of social innovation. All over the world, there are now many funds for social innovation, as well as institutions with dedicated innovation units or teams within large institutions who play a key role in mobilising resources for social innovation. Despite this, finance for social innovation is often inadequate, ill-suited, or unsustainable, and therefore remains a key factor hindering the development of social innovation.

This TelePresence session is part of the part of the Social Innovation Europe Initiative. The Social Innovation eXchange will be producing a report which will explore what a new funding model for social innovation in Europe might look like and how the selection of projects might be optimised. The idea of a multi stage fund through stages of innovation will be developed. The report will look at types (and possible combinations) of instruments needed by social innovators and ways to improve access by social innovators to existing financial resources. This TelePresence session offers a unique opportunity to guide this report and its eventual recommendations at a key moment in its development.

On 1 June 2011, SIX will bring together a selection of people for whom the ecology of finance is a primary concern; public managers and staff, social innovators, business partners, researchers, consultants and others with a stake in the finance and growth of social innovations will come together for a truly global discussion.

For more information see www.socialinnovationexchange.org

May

More connections are the way to learn the real meaning of democracy for a better egypt 0

By Ahmed Maher who participated in co-creating democracy from Cairo:

On the occasion of the Social Innovation Exchange forum which took place in Amsterdam on 24th of May, Dialogue Café, affiliated to the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) gave Tarek Osman, Karim Kasim, Laura Kfoury, Raha Kamal and me the opportunity to connect with Brazil, Qatar, Portugal and the Netherlands to share our thoughts and ideas about the importance of technology and social media.

In Egypt, mobile phones, Facebook and Twitter paved a path for protest. Now the seeds of democracy are being sown. Tarek Osman, the Egyptian young writer and author of "Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak", he spoke about the Egyptian revolution and stressed on how the young generation sparked the rebellions that toppled the Tunisian and Egyptian administrations, and is currently leading the effort to accomplish similar changes in Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, and Libya.

During the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, youth groups of all political movements and backgrounds came together to discuss politics. Not only political movements' members but huge number of youth participated as well in such discussion which proved that the Egyptian youth are eager to learn about politics.

I think that these days are very important to have Dialogue Café in Cairo. Because we do need to listen to others as much as we need our voices as Egyptian youth to be heard. Because it's very crucial after the great success we reached from my own point of view to move on and build on our success. We really need to learn the real meaning of democracy, how to be part of decision making and how to move on and start the real change. This will not happen without experience sharing and listening to real experiences from all around the world.

By Ahmed Maher

May

What happens when people, passion and technology collide? 0

Martin Stewart-Weeks shares his experience of co-creating democracy @ Dialogue Cafe:

There's something powerful about the way people, technology and passion collide to create real insight and engagement. That's what happened at both Dialogue Cafe events at the SIX Spring School in Amsterdam last week.

Rehearsing the bare facts is impressive enough...two sessions on successive days linking Amsterdam with Cairo, Doha, Dubai, Lisbon and Amsterdam, connecting some 50 or 60 people across the two sessions in lively debate about the Arab "spring" of democratic change and what it might mean for the region and for other countries too. And all enabled across a platform of high quality video technology that made you feel you were just around the corner, not right across the world.

But these basic facts are not the real story. The real story is the kind of human interaction and engagement which the Cafe provisions, creating a relatively simple platform (give or take a bit of technical wizardry behind the scenes!) that allows people with insight, experience and expertise to share and teach.

We talk a lot about the need for massive doses of understanding, learning and tolerance to ease some of the tensions in our world and to build effective bridges between cultures. Indeed, that is what the Dialogue Cafe venture is all about. But in the end, you build bridges between cultures by nurturing connections between people. In fact, it's the only way to make change happen and to make it stick. What we saw last week in Amsterdam was a powerful illustration of how that works in practice, one lively, engaging and provocative conversation at a time.

And the quality and impact of both sessions motivated their own consequences, with energetic agreement by those involved to come together in a couple of months to keep the discussion going, to learn more and to look for ways to support the "spring" reforms in the Middle East and, just as importantly, to put the lessons being learned about the power of co-creating democratic change to good use for all of us.

Powerful stuff indeed...

By Martin Stewart-Weeks