Yearly Archives: 2014

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Year: 2014

Regional Conference – June 14th, 2014

 Our summer conference in Norfolk.

‘The RSA East of England conference will happen this year on Saturday 14 June, 10am – 4pm at University of East Anglia, Norwich. Join Fellows, community partners, colleagues and students at the University of East Anglia for a lively and informative day of conversation, projects and activities from Fellows within the East of England region’.

The Conference this year takes place at UEA in Norfolk. You can listen to our keynote speakers and take part in a variety of interactive workshops across a number of themes.

Fellows and guests are happy to welcome RSA Chief Executive Matthew Taylor, whose keynote will be The Power to Create, and Professor Tim O’Riordan, who is the Emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, who will be speaking to Listening to Young Voices for a Fairer Deal.

Twitter iconYou can join the conference Twitter conversation at #RSAEAST  – you can also follow the conference @CommunityatUEA and get re-tweeting from there.

flickr button image  Our conference images will be posted to the flickr account RSAEast2014

The conference group sessions include…

  • University and RSA research collaborations
  • Empowering Invisible Norwich: some initiatives undertaken by the Norwich
    Area Fellows Education Forum
  • Crowd-funding for Entrepreneurs, Creativity and Social Good
  • What is a learning city?

The Fellows will also have created ‘The Marketplace‘ again this year. Where you will have the opportunity to meet and explore a variety of organisations and projects with links to our regional activity.

You can catch up with our last regional conference in Cambridge here. This year in Norfolk is going to be as lively and informative as the previous event.

interneticon  Book your places on-line here, as well as view and download a full copy of the conference programme. We look forward to seeing you in Norwich on Saturday, June 14th, 2014.

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Regional finalist – Art Museum of the Year 2014

The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts has been selected as a finalist in interneticon the Art Fund Museum of the Year 2014 competition.

Designed by interneticon Foster + Partners, this iconic building rests in the University of East Anglia campus landscape and is perhaps the pre-eminent collection of modern art in our region. The permanent collection housed at the Centre was relaunched with a complete re-display in September of 2013.

At the same time the Centre’s largest exhibition to date was opened – interneticonMasterpieces: Art and East Anglia. The exhibition was assembled from some 250 works, donated by over 60 institutions. The  ranged from neolithic flint hand axes, tomb effigies from East Anglian churches to paintings from the Norwich School artist John Cotman.

The space, with its endless variety of ways to approach the works, still attracts a sense of wonder and deep engagement. The short video below, featuring the Centre Director and art historian Philip Mould, conveys this sense of connection well.

If you have never visited the interneticon Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, you should. Not least to see how the curatorial energy of the Centre team has won them a deserved place in this competition.

interneticon  See the Art Fund pages and details of the other finalists here. cropped-conversationsEASTbanner2.jpg

The Social Progress Index 2014

A new indicator of human well-being and potential delivered, the Social Progress Index for 2014,  uses non-economic data to map the nations of the world and to determine their relative rank in achieving social progress. interneticon Discover it on-line here.

A recent article and the latest RSA Short focus on the issues of economic growth and how there are omissions in the singular pursuit of economic growth, as a proxy for the development of the human condition.

It is an interesting idea that there should be a non-economic proxy for human well-being, regularly and cogently calculated, which serves as a measurer of human development. The pursuit of which leavens the aggressive one-sidedness of capital by pivoting economic activity into a pursuit for human happiness.

Could the Social Progress Index be the proxy long awaited?

Poorer countries are often compared using to the UN’s Human Development Index, though this tends to be highly-correlated with GDP, with all the limitations that implies. One of the strengths of the SPI is that, by only using social and environmental indicators and excluding all economic measures, it is easier to compare how countries with similar GDP are doing relative to each other.
Matthew Bishop – The Economist

In this 2014 analysis the United Kingdom ranks 13th in the world in terms of the values subscribed to by the index. The top three world nations are New Zealand, Switzerland and Iceland.

The interneticon data clusters used for the index are divided across three main headings – basic human needs, the foundations of well-being and opportunity. The U.K. does well in global terms with regard to water and waste infrastructure for example, as to be expected, and has a good score on the opportunities available for individuals to change their lives. We do poorly on rankings around  equality and inclusion.

This short video compares and contrasts Gross Domestic Product outcomes with the SPI…

The new index is fostered by the Social Progress Imperative. A movement that subscribes to the goal of developing and guiding access to social investment ‘…which creates a shared language and common goals to align different organizations and achieve greater social impact’.  interneticon Find the Imperative on-line here.

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The Science Museum Group Journal

The Science Museum Group have just launched the first issue of their bi-annual on-line journal. interneticon See the first edition here.

A collaboration between  the Science Museum (London), the Museum of Science & Industry (Manchester), the National Railway Museum (York) and the National Media Museum (Bradford). The Group has achieved Independent Research Organisation (IRO) status with major UK Research Councils.

The Science Museum Group Journal is an open access publication. Designed to be freely available to all readers and ‘knowledge distributors’…( a conversationsEAST concept? Ed.) The articles can be freely copied and adapted, as long as the appropriate attribution is given, under the terms of the interneticon Creative Commons Attribution licence.

(Care should be taken of course, if the articles contain imagery or data that is subject to copyright by other individuals or organisations).

Ian Blatchford, Director of The Science Museum, writing in this first issue opines…

Academic publishing is going through a period of extraordinary change and its future is somewhat uncertain, but the Science Museum Group Journal takes advantage of being born in a digital age, with all the opportunities that this offers. One of the greatest of these, perhaps, is the ability to share our extraordinary library of images, film and multi-media, not just as wallpaper but as an important and often beautiful primary source in its own right…

Reading the first issue a couple of articles shone out for us as a wonderful way to use the internet to contextualise history.

Florence Grant, a post-doctoral researcher at Yale Centre for British Art writes about George Adams assembling large amounts of ‘philosophical instruments’ for George III in the 1760’s.

The illustrations in the piece echo the research findings about the importance of using old engravings in the design process for new instrumentation – cutting and pasting in the modern vernacular…long before Microsoft Word. interneticon Read more here…

Similarly,  Alice Cliff’s piece on William Bally and his phrenological specimens uses graphics to effect, helping us understand the variety and scope of this Manchester made 3D archive.

The article reveals that Bally used interneticon a pantograph to create his specimens. A piece of equipment well known to sign makers in the mid 20th century before the arrival of the micro-chip and the keyboard. interneticon Read more here…

We enjoyed exploring the first issue of this new journal – academically sound, rigorously produced and open to all. If we may be permitted a thoroughly unprofessional salutation…way to go Science Museum Group!

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Economic growth, the full story?

In this RSA Short for April 2014, Growth is Not Enough, Oxford economist Kate Raworth looks at the constantly heard economic mantra of growth. Is it all that needs to be in the economic outcome basket of results, despite the repetitious demands of politicians?

What should economies aim for is Kate’s key question? We recently published in our RSA East journal a short interneticon TED Talk by Harish Manwani, Chief Operating Officer of Unilever, where he stresses that brands, corporate business endeavour, can be a force for social change in communities. His take on growth was to stir in responsibiity to the fiscal admixture.

The Raworth argument pivots on the notion that un-mediated economic growth leads to deprivation, degradation and inequality.

Richard Wilkinson, one of the co-authors of The Spirit Level, gave a stirring TED Talk on inequality a couple of years ago. He effects to compare and contrast the data on major economies of the world and how inequality in societies affects the lives of millions.

interneticon  How Economic Inequality Harms Societies – well worth a look.

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Become a Skype Granny?

Sugata Mitra, Professor of Education Technology at Newcastle University, has recently seen the wider launch of his interneticon School in the Cloud project. Based on the use of technology to formulate and deliver Self Organised Learning Experiences (SOLE), the project is the fruition of a partnership between Microsoft and his university.

School in the Cloud was launched as a global online platform in order to accelerate this research by asking educators — be they teachers, parents or community leaders — to run their own SOLE and contribute to the global experiment by sharing their experiences and help design the future of learning.

The key notion is that anyone can, using the internet, deliver a big question, or an important skill or perception, and share that idea or skill with interested children across the globe.

The project web site offers a way to profile contributors, to manage the structure of the ‘big question’, and to give learners and teachers the opportunity to feed back about their project  experiences.

The short film below gives a flavour of what it is like to be a interneticon Skype Granny, as part of the project delivery. A warm, sharing and grounded experience for all, built within the framework of the School in the Cloud project. (Can I be a Skype Grandad?…Ed).

Being a Skype Granny on School in the Cloud from School in the Cloud on Vimeo.

Mitra’s idea is to make learning available to children everywhere. The development of a SOLE should have the potential to stimulate enquiry, imagination and to engage with other cultures and communities. Answering the big question by utilising resources that would otherwise be unavailable in the child’s own community.

The East of England is not without educational projects, web focused, that work with distant communities. Nor is there a shortage of Fellows who may warm to the idea of remote support for children interested in their own subject or experience.

Is The School in the Cloud the perfect medium for this delivery?

In our region a group of Fellows are currently pursuing engagement with a course in Human Centred Design for Social Innovation. (See our interneticon events page for details). Could there be a real synergy between our Fellows current HCD efforts and the creation of SOLE instances?

We think it’s an exciting idea.

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Crowdfunding Science

Here at conversationsEAST we have gone USA! We have picked up the news that science crowd funding site, Microryza, has relaunched as Experiment.com

Although only functioning for U.S. researchers at the moment, the Experiment team do have plans to offer non-U.S. researchers the opportunity to call for investment on the site.

Begun by a group of young researchers, frustrated at budget cuts and an inability to link science research to interested investors, they have re-designed and relaunched Experiment.com as a result. Worth a look, just to test the concept.

The RSA also supports Fellow’s project through crowd funding too. Check out the RSA KickStarter page below.

Here at conversationsEAST we think that ethical, impact investing along the Experiment and KickStarter model has a powerful future too. We share the excitement of connecting researchers in the bio-tech, renewable energy sectors.

Renewables particularly, with a concept of initial demand, at launch, for capital infrastructure, followed by the development of a smooth, much lower cost, lower environmental impact production flow, is a model that will seriously challenge traditional business matrices in the mainstream energy sector for the next generation.

Lets call our conversationsEAST impact investment model PowerStarter.

Are there any Fellows out there in any sector ready to contribute to a  non-profit , web based project communication and investor linking bulletin board, a la Experiment?

Write to the conversationsEAST team and declare your interest. emailIcon4 Contact Us

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Profit pitch or social welfare?

The short film below, from the TED talks series, is delivered Harish Manwani, the Chief Operating Officer of Unilever. It is not, perhaps surprisingly,  an advertisement for soup or soap.

Harish joined Unilever in 1976, rising up the corporate ladder, to his current eminent position. This talk seeks to add to the three basic tenets of growth, Manwani argues, which traditionally is built upon consistency, competitiveness and profitability, by adding responsibility.

The notion of adding social value as a contingent outcome with economic value is not new, but the telling of it by a key player in a world wide corporation is remarkable.

Manwani tells of the Unilever project, interneticon Shakti, which seeks to empower women in small business (..and to sell soap). But he argues with passion that science underpins his company’s activity, yet teaches millions about hygiene and hand washing as life saving activities.

‘A brand can be at the forefront of social change’ he says – this is a powerful argument for the interneticon Social Business model we think. Do you agree?

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Climate Data – Microsoft contributes

Microsoft Research has recently announced its commitment to provide large amounts of cloud computing resources to help research projects contribute to the White House Climate Data initiative, a response to the Climate Action Plan sanctioned by President Obama. interneticon

The programme involves Microsoft Research providing 40 successful bidders with 180,000 hours of cloud computing time, using Windows Azure, and facilitated with 20 Terabytes of cloud storage.

Microsoft will also provide researchers with training and classes to ensure that project teams are best equipped to exploit cloud data mechanics.

Microsoft further commits to the deployment of FetchClimate, a climate data resource for past and present observations and for climate-prediction information. FetchClimate will be available as a fast, free, intelligent environmental information-retrieval service and as a cloud-based system that can be adapted to the specific needs of new projects.

interneticon You can read more about FetchClimate, a Microsoft free on-line tool tool, here.

The process for research teams to apply is not complicated. Short, three pages, submissions must be sent in by June 15th, 2014.

interneticon The on-line application form is here.

interneticon The call for proposals FAQ is here.

If you do, the very best of luck. See you in the cloud.

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Social entrepreneurs rewarded

This month the Skoll Foundation, based in Palo Alto, California announced the winners of their 2014 Skoll Award prizes for societal innovation. Driving forward help for the dispossessed and disconnected.

Each winning organisation receives $1.25 million dollars and a support package over three years from the Foundation. ‘The Skoll Award distinguishes transformative leaders who are disrupting the status quo, driving large-scale change, and are poised to make an even greater impact on the world…’.

This year the winners represent seven organisations, working in partnership across 35 countries, who are achieving outstanding results in tackling societal problems of the prime magnitude. ‘Driving transformation on a range of issues to maximize health, education, opportunity, transparency, and accountability in some of the poorest places on earth, these pioneers should be on the watch lists of everyone who cares about the future of the world…’. The winners are featured below.

B Lab        interneticon Connect with B Lab on the web here.

‘B Lab is fueling a global movement to redefine “success” in business, so that all companies compete not only to be the best in the world, but the best for the world. B Lab is challenging the status quo by building a new sector, legal structure, and standards; …advancing public policies that enable companies to create financial, social, and environmental value for both its shareholders and for society’.

Fundación Capital               interneticon  Connect with Fundación Capital  on the web here.

‘Fundación Capital is a pioneer in inclusive finance innovation to help the poor save; grow and invest their assets; insure their families against risk; and chart a permanent path out of poverty. Already reaching three million people, Fundación Capital is working to reach eight million more in the next few years by expanding access to training, capital, and opportunity…’

Girls Not Brides                      interneticon   Connect with Girls Not Brides  on the web here.

‘…the bold goal of ending child marriage in one generation. Child marriage traps girls and their communities in poverty. By ending the practice, the global community can start to address some of the most difficult challenges in development. Girls Not Brides is a global partnership of more than 300 civil society organizations working across 50 countries’.

Global Witness                        interneticon  Connect with  Global Witness on the web here.

‘Global Witness investigates and exposes the shadow networks underlying  deals over natural resources that fuel conflict, corruption, and environmental destruction. They collect evidence and launch hard-hitting campaigns to find global solutions and end the “resource curse” by tackling corruption, protecting the environment, preventing conflict, and defending human rights’.

Medic Mobile                                           interneticon    Connect with Medic Mobile on the web here.

 ‘Medic Mobile builds mobile applications for community health workers, caregivers, and patients to increase life-saving health care coverage. Across 20 countries, its tools support 8,000 frontline health workers and benefit approximately six million people with plans to double these numbers annually for a total of 200,000 health workers serving 100 million people by 2018’.

Slum Dwellers International (SDI)                   interneticon   Connect with SDI on the web here.

‘Slum Dwellers International works to have slums recognized as vibrant, resourceful, and dignified communities. SDI organizes slum dwellers to take control of their futures; improve their living conditions; and gain recognition as equal partners with governments and international organizations in the creation of inclusive cities. With programs in nearly 500 cities, including more than 15,000 slum dweller-managed savings groups reaching one million people…’

Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP)            interneticon Connect with WSUP on the web

‘Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor has turned the traditional charity model on its head by developing commercially-viable models to bring water and sanitation to nearly two million people in urban slums in six countries…offering a creative package of private-sector, nongovernmental-organization, and academic expertise, WSUP equips public and private service agencies with the capacity and incentives to serve all citizens in their city’.

Every one of these projects represent a paradigm shift in how lack of resources of all kinds are tackled. Two favourites of ours were WSUP and Global Witness.

WSUP presents practical and openly available resources about how to get the water flowing. We also warmed to the new Global Witness campaign to press for the abandonment of ‘anonymous’ companies. Making it harder to hide corporate actions and ethical deficits behind un-named business registrations.

We were inspired to start a social business for good. Were you?

Project narratives: Courtesy of The Skoll Foundation.

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Image credit:

News Desk image by Markus Winkler, Creative Commons, Unsplash...

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