CSW’s Summit in Bangalore on September 10 was the first Crowdsourcing Week event held in India, co-hosted by the Digital Empowerment Foundation.
The day’s presentations will be available soon and we will update this article with a link. In the meantime what follows is a brief recap on some of the event’s highlights and key points.
Crowdsourcing Week’s Founder and CEO, Epi Ludvik Nekaj, started the day’s events with an opening address that took the audience through the journey of crowdsourcing and the global impact it is currently making. While emphasizing the fact that crowdsourcing is a mindset and something that can only be achieved by working together, Epi pointed out the importance and value of social currency.
The first panel session of the day (main image) addressed this last subject in greater depth. SafeCity and Rang De are such platforms that dared to address non-issues and sat together with communities to solve these problems. Key learnings from this session were the need to work together to create trust and transparency in order to achieve social development through crowdsourcing.
After the panel session, the topic of discussion was Crowdfunding.
Fuel-a-Dream, founded by Ranganath Thota, supports and helps to fund innovative projects that serve a social cause. This raised the point of India’s crowdsourcing world being very much focused on philanthropic projects only. Fuel-a-Dream places high importance on what you will achieve with your product or project and what impact it will have on communities who are directly or indirectly involved.
Next up, Naveen Lakkur, Director of the Founder Institute, addressed the fact that there is not enough support nor investment into innovative projects. That is where the crowd comes in, again pointing to the power of crowdfunding to make ideas come to life. Nevertheless, the lack of awareness in India about crowdfunding is significant. Once more people know about the concept of crowdfunding, he expects that a rise in the number of innovative projects, both philanthropic and otherwise, will take place.
As a last order of the day, Epi Ludvik Nekaj hosted a COLAB interactive session. The entire audience participated in the session when they were asked to form groups based on their month of birth. The groups were then asked to form a venture of their choice. This exercise, based on the Birthday Paradox, helped create new synergies among the attendees. They were able to connect with people they might otherwise not have spoken to, and in the form of a fun yet task-oriented activity. There was also one shared birthday in the room.
Osama Manzar, Founder and Director of the Digital Empowerment Foundation, co-hosted this first CSW Summit in India. His closing remarks included encouraging each other to help one another achieve their goals. “By sharing ideas, knowledge, skills and even technologies, crowdsourcing can create a lot more change in India.”
Good to see the updates, do we have a site/page reflecting various crowdsourcing
activities – organizations in India. When is next crowdsourcing week event in India ?