FutureChallenges.org at the Social Media Week in Hamburg

Social Media Week is a global platform that explores the impact of social media and its role in driving economic, political and societal change. A global event, the presentations and get-togethers take place simultaneously in more than 20 cities all over the world. Futurechallenges.org was invited to give a presentation on our efforts to crowdsource policy ideas in Hamburg on 17 February 2012. You can watch our session „Big World – Big Challenges: can a big network help?“ here (not accessible today, 20th February)- it was livestreamed and recorded.

Giving consideration to the title of our session (Can a big network help?) we took an innovative approach to complete our presentation. We asked our blogger network to contribute to the presentation by adding one or two slides. The result was amazing! We received almost two dozen slides from 19 bloggers from 13 countries, giving an overview of good examples for using the Internet and social media tools in particular to generate engagement in the political sphere. Thanks to all our bloggers who made a contribution!

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Our goal was not to announce final solutions in terms of best practices for global problem solving but rather to get feedback on how futurechallenges.org can improve in engaging its readers. Is it a viable option to crowdsource policy ideas for global and complex problems? If so, how could we achieve this goal?

Basically, there are two aspects that were interesting and important for futurechallenges.org:

1. The experience of compiling a crowdsourced presentation with a truly global perspective.

2. Feedback on futurechallenges.org: all participants agreed that it is an too ambitious goal to crowdsource policy ideas on such a complex topic: correlations between global megatrends. They said that we should instead focus on some chosen policy sectors to engage the people.

FutureChallenges is constantly evolving and we take into account suggestions from readers, bloggers or network partners. We will discuss the feedback that we have received at the Social Media Week in order take the next steps. Thanks once again to all the contributors to our presentation!

Ajinkya Pawar, India, @thejinxedone
Anuja Upadhyay, India
Mac-Jordan Degadjor, Ghana. @MacJordan
Anneliese Guess, USA, @DCAnneliese
Bhumika Ghimire, Nepal, @bhumikaghimire
Irwin Cruz, Philippines
Purple S. Romero, Philippines @purpleromeropo
Juliana Rincon, Colombia, @medeamaterial
Lucía Querejazu, Bolivia, @luciaquerejazu
Rini Mukkath, Sri Lanka, @rinimukkath
Sopheap Chak, Cambodia, @jusminesophia
Sushma Joshi, Nepal, @joshisushma
Clément Renaud, China, @clemsos
Rahul Kumar, India
Badrud Doza, Bangladesh
Alexey Sidorenko, Poland/Russia, @sidorenko_intl
Otgonsuren Jargal, Mongolia
Blanca Vera, Venezuela
Kira Kariakin, Venezuela
Robert Schwarz, South Korea/Germany