I’ve got friends….who go to conferences
When @jameselbaor tweeted that he was on his way to the Columbia Business School Social Enterprise Conference one Friday morning, I immediately sent him a message asking if he could take notes as I would be spending the day sitting in the office. And he did!There are many great conferences out there, probably even way more than I know of, but going to all of them is probably impossible–unless you are a social enterprise conference roadie. A great way to address this problem is to have friends who go to conferences too. James Elbaor is the Co-Founder and Executive Director at KR Student Loans–a peer-to-peer lending platform for students–and a member of the Nonprofit Millennial Blogging Alliance. Here are James’ two main takeaways from the Social Enterprise Conference:
1. Openness is not the enemy of quality. Jimmy Wales said this during Nancy’s questioning the openness of Wikipedia. The idea is Wikipedia serves as an example that people want to be objective. The fact that Wikipedia is completely open for anyone to make additions/edits and that the vast majority of wikipedia is correct and objective shows that people by-and-large want to be objective. So extrapolating that, Jimmy feels that businesses should be as open as possible and allow feed-back from others. Doing so creates a “community” atmosphere where people want to be engaged with a company and its products.
2. Micro-finance is over. This came across in a lot of panel discussions. The space is over-crowded causing micro-finance institutions to lend to people for commercial means. I.e. people are receiving loans for T.V.’s rather than to start a business. Increasing access to credit is good but the new question is: Are we now keeping people perpetually in debt rather than actually lifting people from poverty?– which was the original goal of micro-finance.
I do love the Wikipedia model and think that the idea of “openness is not the enemy of quality” is really speaking the same language as the work being done to increase transparency and accountability in both the nonprofit (thinking of charity:water’sgeo-tagged project photos) and corporate (thinking of Zappos for example) sectors.
In terms of microfinance, hmm…sounds like a wave of potentially bad PR and brand management of the “microfinance” concept. I wonder how things will move forward in this area and how micro-finance thought leaders will continue to use this model as a way to catalyze change and development.