If you have a platform to accommodate, would you share 1% of your knowledge, time or money to people all over the world? Well, I would! That’s what the 1% CLUB has been trying to do through their website: crowdsourcing solution for social projects all over the world. And to give the ‘1% experience’, they create the annual 1% EVENT. This year, nine countries participated in this co-creation event, they are: The Netherlands, Kenya, Cameroon, South Africa, Palestine, Tunisia, Somaliland, Indonesia, and Sudan.
Project Eden hosted the 1% EVENT Jakarta and this event was organized by #StartupLokal. We created the team for co-creation from #StartupLokal team (Ollie, Natali Ardianto, Nuniek Tirta), Telunjuk.com team (Redya Febrianto & Hanindia Narendrata, as facilitator), Glassfingers team (Edho Putra, Andy ‘Radju’ Irawan, Aditya Tedjamulja, Adrian Tedjamulja, Philip Agusani), SpotDokter team (Pascal Christian) and our guest experts & partners: StartupBisnis (Rein Mahatma), Presentonomics (Bernardus Sumartok), Astrid Arum, Indra Santosa, Jemmy Halim, and Antoine Leboulanger.
We were provided a case to solve from Cameroon. They’re building an anti-corruption Android app called Nobakchich (which means ‘no bribes’), to give people the right information about the documents required to deal with public services and the cost associated with it, so that they won’t be caught in a bribery situation. Even if they were still forced to bribe officials, they can report it using the app. The team needed a PDF documentation and presentation of the app, in English. And we had two days (13-14 September 2012), to finish the case, while being watched from Live Streaming.
We discovered that the app was being done in French and unfortunately nobody at the venue understood or spoke the language. Fortunately a friend, Astrid Arum, does, and she was willing to donate her time in assisting us with translating the project so we could proceed. Additionally we were soon joined by a Frenchman, Antoine Laboulanger, president commissioner of H&L Systems, who found out about the event and volunteered to assist. Obviously his being at the event greatly helped our efforts.
After language problem was solved, we moved on to the task planning and mapping out the individual skills to the tasks at hand. Since this was a project about identifying and highlighting corruption cases, we decided to ask the public through Twitter about what corruption is, using the hashtag #WhatisCorruption. The team in Cameroon love the idea and made a point that it will consider running its own campaign on social media on this project.
On the second day, Sumartok from Presentonomics joined the team and explained how a good presentation can make a difference in engaging the audience and how it applies to the Nobakchich project.
Two things I’ve learned from co-creation process:
- People with different backgrounds can come up with amazing ideas that we would never think of! The case that we had was about traffic jams and we asked the the team in Palestine to make a game out of it. Surprisingly the Palestinians came up with the idea of a speed dating game which encourages TransJakarta bus passengers waiting at the bus stops to interact with each other.
- We can finish everything when we plan, collaborate and have a solid deadline.
I want to thank the 1% CLUB team: Niels Jansen (I heard about 1% EVENT from Niels when I was in Amsterdam), Jaap van Kruis (who’s been creative with 1% video), Thijs van Bemmel (our DJ, you rock!), Nadia van Emmerik (handling all details about 1% EVENT, great job!).
You can see photos from the event on this Flickr page, and the Jakarta event here.
Aulia Halimatussadiah is an accomplished writer, publisher, programmer, entrepreneur who has always been heavily involved in entrepreneurship events and efforts. She has written more than a dozen novels, books, and helped others to self publish through her company nulisbuku. She is also one of the principals of #StartupLokal, the largest Indonesian startup community. You can read her blog at Salsabeela and follow her on Twitter @salsabeela.
