community, identity & science / fiction.

cc by Shanghai Daddy

Whoever has been to Jakarta knows how it is to be stuck in traffic. Epic, hopeless congestions will make you want to tear your hair out, especially if you are trying to get home after a long day and you KNOW your home is – in theory – only a few kilometres away.

Unfortunately, Jakarta does not have a rail-based public transport system like tram, underground or similar. The only other means of getting around slightly faster is… by motorbike. Because bikes can weave though the traffic and thus get to the next traffic light just ahead of the pack.

cc by tb smith

DIY motorbike taxi

Jakartans have known this for a long time, and unsurprisingly, Jakarta’s streets are full of motorbikes;  in fact I believe they are key contributors to the traffic problem, but let’s leave that aside for now.

Motorbikes are pretty affordable, and a small industry has sprung up around the idea of motorbike taxis. Normally, the way this works is that some motorbike-owning emang with not much to do offers his services to whoever happens to walk past. This type of informal, unlicensed transportation service is called “ojek”.

Motorbike taxis clearly have potential, but most of the wealthier Jakartans are reluctant to use this service. Of course, riding a motorbike means being exposed to heat and rain, to smog and dust. It is not very safe and the average ojek driver isn’t necessarily experienced or well trained.

Go-Jek

Smart move of Jakarta based starup Go-Jek to tackle that problem. Of course they can’t away take the heat and dust, but their mission is to make ojek smarter, safer and more convenient by providing a more formalized service. However, instead of putting new drivers and bikes on the street, they choose to work with already existing drivers that are selected by 3 criteria: their experience, their reliability and whether they have a valid drivers’ license. The call-an-ojek hotline now makes it possible to give drives additional rides, leading to less idle time. (App to follow soon, I hope!)

This is what their website looks like. Apart from transporting people, Go-Jek also offers courier services for goods.

So simple, so brilliant! Go-Jek has received quite a lot of attention, also from international media such as this time magazine video and won numerous Indoensian business innovation awards.

On my next visit, I will definitely use this service.

A typical trip from Kemang (South Jakarta) to Menteng (Central Jakarta) would cost me 40,000 IDR, which is about 3.8 Euros. By car, this trip could easily take 60-90 minutes. By bike, perhaps half that time.

I have to say it is rather expensive (a regular taxi ride would not be that much more), but if I get there way faster it may still be worth it. I hope Go-Jek has plans to provide training and more long-time security for drivers under its program as the company grows.

Several interesting startups were presented at Penn Olson’s first Startup Asia Conference last week in Singapore some of wich I would like to review here.

Innova Tech Anti-loss gear

Manufacture of electronics is Singapore’s economic backbone. So no wonder there are some interesting hardware startups springing up here. This one tackles a very common problem – losing stuff.

Innova Tech has come up with a small credit-card sized, bluetooth-based device you can slip into your wallet, handbag, or attach to whichever item it is you’re concerned about losing. If this item gets within several meters out of the range of your cell phone, you will receive a call.

Despite there being one major flaw to this setup (What if its the mobile phone you’re concerned about losing, huh?!?) I guess its a start.

Enough people seem to think so since Innova Tech has managed to get crwodfunded through indiegogo and even overachieved its funding goal before the campaign ended.. I hope they’ll develop this product further, to make it even more useful!

Hardware startup Vibease

Another hardware startup caught my attention – or your I say xxx-ware? This seems to be a bunny-shaped smartphone controlled vibrator. Vibease, as the device is called, comes with a selection of videos and a chat option to put you in the mood.

What do you think ladies?

Collaboration and image tagging tool mocku.ps

This may not be the most unique idea, but I like the way mocku.ps works! I’ve seen and tried conceptboard and conceptshare, both of which are more powerful I guess, but mocku.ps strips it down to the basic function of uploading an image, (while giving an option to present it on a background image, or stage), add comments which can be associated to specific areas of the image, and sharing it conveniently via url. Everything looks nice and is intuitive to use.

The result is then something like this: http://mocku.ps/q0qzc8

Hoping to see this develop! Threaded comments with each note… share option to twitter after commenting, etc.

The Winner

To those who missed it: Last Thursday we had a great award ceremony, we chose this guy Robin Sukroso (aka Rainer Hirl) out of the three finalists as our trustee.

His plan is to build a simpler, ready to plug in version of his custom made techno guitar. We think he’s amazingly talented and his idea has a real potential. We hope you like our choice!

Runner Up

Rebecca Loyche‘s project is an installation called “circadian project”. It’s basically a room full of light. She says lights like these are used for therapeutic purposes to treat depression, especially in the nordic countries where going without daylight for weeks has bad effects on your health. She proposed to create this room as a public space, a place you can go to to recharge your batteries in winter.

Rebecca Loyche - Circadian Project

Runner Up

The third finalist was Dickon Stone, an adorable guy who lets bugs compose music. His project Bug Box Drum Machine is a type of installation, a white canvas which attracts bugs at night. As these bugs fly around they hit sensors which in turn trigger various drum samples.

He explains this idea comes out of something of a Zen approach to music, letting the ego of the composer step back and instead using the intellect to let nature’s beauty shine.

Dickon has made a similar instrument called “Bees in a Sitar” – using the hollow of a sitar to house bees and enabling them to create sounds.

Thanks for setting up the Fundraising 2.0 conference, dear organizers Alexa Gröner and newthinking. I was lucky to be able to come, if just for one day on Friday the 20th.

As a community manager, I wanted to find out how community is discussed with you in the non-profit and creators sector. It seems to me that building a strong, healthy community would be extremely beneficial, especially to smaller NGOs, artists or informal groups with niche topics and minimal funding, so I was expecting to hear a lot about the topic.

Yet, to my surprise, the word “community” never fell once during the presentations (at least not those I visited). Rather, there was a strong focus on instruments and tools, talks about optimizing landing pages and donation forms, up to the color of the buttons (yes, the color makes a significant difference). And of course was also talk about using Twitter, Blogs, Facebook as “Marketing Channels”, being present and allowing interaction.

I found the focus a little off. These are all merely tools which enable you to find, understand and foster your COMMUNITY. The community being: people who care about your topic, and, in some cases care enough to get involved with your cause. Without your community, it’s like you’re building a huge palace which then stays empty.

I think a lot can be gained from viewing your entire communication through the perspective of creating community – think of it like being pioneers together in a some grassy plains. You’re basically creating a civilization from scratch.

Here are some first thoughts off the top of my head.

5 Tips for Nonprofits who want to build up community

1. Find people who already care about your cause.

The world is huge and that means that there are already groups, clubs or individuals who care about your cause and may even be active in one way or the other. Your first goal should be to identify those people, see what they have been up to, and think about what you could do to help them achieve their goal. Since their goal is the same as your goal, this is a good thing. For starters, just try a twitter search on a topic that is relevant for your organization, such as #wastemanagement or #alphabetisation.

2. Connect people not just with you, but with each other

In a community, it is important to strengthen ties within the network. Instead of putting yourself in the limelight and attracting many connections to yourself (your organization), connect the people supporting you, by introducing those of similar interests to each other, or creating situations in which your community learns about each other and can team up to work on something.

3. This works only if you know who you’re talking to

This point is extremely important to me. Even though your interactions are through facebook or other social media, this does not mean you are talking to some faceless mass audience. No, each like and each comment comes from an actual person, who could potentially become a loyal supporter to your cause.

Really start to think about your audience as individual people: who are they, what drives them, what is the best way for them to engage with you? Who keeps coming back, who haven’t you seen around for a while?

4. Be a good gardener

When you start out with building up your social media channels (better: building up your community!) things will go slowly at first. Growing a community takes time… you will probably start out with friends and your network. Give them specific tasks, use them as guinea pigs in your communication environment. They’re your friends, so they won’t mind!

It is important to get a sense of what interactions feel like in your environment. If need be, create your own “fake” conversations, to give others a sense of whats possible and to kickstart conversations. But use this method only if absolutely necessary, because it will come across as super phony if overdone. As you start inviting more and more newbies to your community, this ensures there will already be some content to look at, there will be a sense of life inhabiting your environment, and this life attracts further life.

Make sure to greet newcomers accordingly and make them feel at home. Its ok to tell them that your community is only just starting out, and that they are pioneers in this environment. Those people who start the community with you can become extremely important as your core members, and you can rely on their honest feedback and support later on.

5. Think about those below the surface

As in any community, only a small fraction of the people who have liked your page or signed up to your newsletter will be active and responsive all the time. There’s the good ‘ol model called the 90-9-1 rule  according to which only 1% of your sign-ups are active users, while 9% are intermittend users and the vast majoroty of 90% never does anything at all.

I’m not sure weather that ratio has to be true for all communities, I believe strongly that activating more of the ‘lurkers’ to become at least slightly active IS possible and that is is worth focusing on that effort. Acquiring new sign-ups is expensive, and after all, those people have ALREADY liked, signed up or followed you at one point. Try to find out: why did they stop being interested? Are you not providing what they need, can you change anything about that?

Community first

To bring this to an end, a last thought of why I think community is so important in this sector. Crowdfunding has become a huge thing, and I have witnessed some cultural projects relying on this new ‘tool’ to get their project off the ground. Yet often, crowdfunding fails – because you can’t crowdfund without an already committed community.

I would love to explore this topic further… for example as in developing a simple 10 Step Guide for NGOs and creative projects to handle their community building. Please leave comments if you’re interested!

Awesome Berlin is back on February 2, 2012, applications start now! (open until Jan. 25th 2012)

The  Awesome Fund Berlin is a EUR 1,000 grant awarded several times a year to a truly awesome project taking place in or around Berlin. The Award winner will receive the money upfront in cash, in a brown paper bag. This grant is provided with no strings attached and claims no ownership over the projects it supports. Its sole purpose is to help make awesome ideas happen.

Who can apply?

Anyone can apply if they have an awesome idea and if they’re sure they can pull it off. It is hard to define awesome, but we’re sure you know what we mean. We’re looking for ideas that are unseen,  captiavitng, and that manage to inspire audiences.

How?

• go here: http://awesomefoundation.org/submissions/new
• Choose Berlin Chapter
• Fill out the application form
• Send!
The Trustees of the Berlin Awesome Foundation review all applications and will contact three applicants to make it on to the shortlist. These three finalists are invited to present their project in a short 5-minute talk at the day of the award ceremony at Betahaus, Prinzessinnenstr. 19, Feb. 2, 2012, 9.30am. The Trustees will  announce their decision shortly after the presentations. The winner takes home the brown paper bag with EUR 1,000 cash.

Previously funded by Awesome

Birdhouse building workshop and turning election campaign posters into birdhouses flashmob – coordinated by Jay Cousins

Parts of Graffiti Research Lab Germany’s Light Rider projection bike

Indonesian Startups Radar

I’m on my more or less anual visit to Indonesia, where I grew up. Indonesia’s social media and tech scene has been rapidly developing these past few years. Indonesians have been particularly eager to adopt social networking sites and smart phones, making them the third largest group of users on facebook. But twitter is huge, too, with several prominent twitterers well over the 1 million follower mark, and recently a shooting startup called koprol, a location service successfully sold to yahoo.

Beyond the big players, Indonesia with its 238 million people is a large audience and more startups catering specifically to local needs have sprung up in the past.

Startuplokal and Sparxup Award

The platform startuplokal.org acts as aggregator for newcomers, and there’s an annual startup award called Sparxup which honors new ventures in 8 categories each year.

Browsing through the sites, I handpicked some recently launched services which particularly caught my eye.

1. kartumuu

This platform allows members to choose a virtual greeting card, personalize it and send it to someone directly via twitter, facebook or email. Members can also upload their own card designs. The idea may not exactly be new, but the way it seamlessly connects to your friends’ profiles is nice, the branding concept is well executed, and it’s simple to navigate and use.

Culture factor: sending greeting cards/sms/mails  on all kinds of formal and informal purposes like weddings or religious holidays or for fun or flirts I believe is much more common here than in Europe, at least as far as I can tell.

2. Localbrand

A retail site for fashion. Yaawwn. The cool factor about it is that this platform represents small, indonesian made high-end fashion brands by local designers only.

Culture factor: Indonesian fashion designers are struggling to compete against the dominance of foreign luxury brands. That they now join forces to market themselves together is a smart move.

3. Sedapur

Sedapur (roughly translating as “in one kitchen”) is a marketplace for homemade treats. Members can open a shop to promote and sell their homecooking, food lovers can order and eat their favorite munchies.

Culture factor: Cooking and baking and selling these products in the neighborhood is a common form of extra income for women in Indonesia. The number of hyper-local snacks is huge, and  people bring local snacks as gifts from one city to the other. What if you could order your favorite type of Dendeng Balado anytime instead of waiting for aunt XYZ to visit..?

4. bouncity

 bouncity is a check-in-and-get-rewards type of platform. However, bouncity  works only with a few select partners, (which makes it more like groupon, I guess)  say, with some specific outlets of the forzen yogurt chain Sour Sally and a gamification aspect involving actual challenges like solving a quiz or taking a picture of something before you get the reward (like a free desert or an extra topping). The aim is to engage the customers on location in a fun way.

Culture factor: I think this concept could exist anywhere. In fact, does it already exist elsewhere? I think people would go to great lengths just about everywhere to get a freebie. If it involves doing something silly, like singing in a frozen yogurt shop, this could get pretty spectacular and perhaps even a little viral. And teens love to challenge each other to do embarassing things in public, at least we used to.

5. BisTip

With BisTip, travelers can signal they’re willing to transport a 3rd person’s parcel to their destination. travelers can type in their travel route and date, senders can search for specific routes and contact the traveler. In a way, it’s a little bit like Mitfahrgelegenheit.de – except not with co-travelers but stuff.

Culture factor: in a country where the post service is unreliable and expensive, “nitip” (to ask someone to take a parcel along on whichever route) is a widespread practice. Also, I imagine this service is interesting because it allows international routes. Ordering from outside Indonesia is tedious and unreliable, a human transport (only legal stuff of course!) seems like a great idea. How would one ensure only legal stuff is being transported though? I wonder if  smuggling issues could become a serious problem.

6. Jelajah (Alpha)

Jelajah does not yet show much more than this landing page. I’m still mentioning it because I find the idea bold and wonder how they will pull it off. So the idea is to – wait for it – crowdfund your travel. This is a travel community (share trips, find travel partners) but the main idea is to get your trip funded by “making it valuable”, either by offering rewards to your sponsors or acting as a tour guide. Number one sounds interesting. What might that be? Bungee jumping off a bridge in Kalimantan wearing a Gudang Garam Shirt? Or bringing home a bag of sand from Belitung for family and friends? I truly wonder if a kickstarter principle will work to fund trips. The second option seems more achievable: offer trips in which the offeree acts as guide and gets payed for by the other travelers. Extremely individualized, guided trips to remote places could have its charms.

Signing up for a new service usually means receiving at least one little ‘welcome’ email. Often it requires you to confirm your email address, or simply tells you about your next options.

Most of the time I open these kinds of mails blindly, skimming the text until I find the confirmation link or any other important call to action. These mails always look the same, an go something like this:

“hi xyz, welcome to xyz, the best blablabla.  Please…” and so on.

Sometimes these mails are sent from a no-reply address, signaling: “it’s an automatic system talking to you here, don’t even think about getting in touch, just read the manual and be on with it. Ok, if you really need help [idiot] there’s the support center.”

BUT there are exceptions to the rule

1) founders2be welcome mail

From founders2be, I got this nice personal letter, the sender introduces himself as one of the co-founders and uses a regular email address with his name. He tells a little story about how the startup was born and convinces me to fill out my profile information because this will increase the value of the experience. I think the mail was personalized to the specific status of my profile information. It wasn’t particularly nice looking or fancily html formatted, it just looked like any old email from a real person who wants you to make the most of the service you’ve just signed up to. +1!

2) Gidsy keeping early sign ups happy mail

Some services allow registration before the actual launch. In some cases you end up forgetting you ever signed up because nothing happens, or you get frustrated by boring, newsletter type emails promoting a service you don’t feel attached to yet. Gidsy however have treated their early sign-ups really well, inviting them to a test round of the newly available features. The email is layouted in a subtle way, still looking like an email and not newslettery. Also notice the please-reply address – nice pun.

some REALLY mess it up

While what feels like at least 90% of messages of this type resort to the mediocre, standard variety, there aren’t only those who stand out as positive deviations from the norm. No, there are also the really annoying ones which make you lose all appetite for a service before even using it.

1) Pistachio blackmail

When pistachio pitched at betahaus the other day, they invited the audience to tweet for an access code. I found the concept interesting enough to want to test it. But instead of access to the service, I got this mail. They thank me for requesting an invite. Um… no, actually YOU invited ME, remember? Then they go on to ask me to invite more friends to the service. In fact, they blackmail me with what sounds vaguely like a threat: “the more friends you invite, the sooner you’ll get access”. You know what… I never really liked pistachios all that much.

I’m sure my colleague Jeroen had made  a very similar experience when he tweeted this just a few days ago:

I’m not exactly a feminist. I’m not even a very political person. But I’m a woman and I suddenly realized I don’t really know that many women and there are definitely more men than women in the group of people I would call my “professional network”. That sucks! Which is why I went and joined  the recent netfeminism meetup here in Berlin. Hopefully, strengthening the ties among each other and making us more visible, in a way, will lead to less male-dominated events and conferences and more and more women being recognized for the good stuff they do, online and offline.

So while I’m on this train of thought, I made a mental list of women that have inspired me lately and which I truly admire. Why not write this down here and repeat the exercise every now and then.

Here we go:

1. Régine Debatty

I don’t know her personally at all, but from the outside it looks as though Régine leads the life of my dreams! She’s the main writer of one of the coolest blogs I know, we make money not art. She reports on cutting edge technology, arts and sciency stuff, right up my alley and she’s always on the move. I can check into WMNA any time of day, any day, and I’ll find a mind boggling story worth exploring. I got in touch with the Open Sailing collective after reading a WMNA article, and though this project is at the moment dormant for me, I’m so glad to have met César. Oh and I have tried to get Régine to speak at Pecha Kucha Berlin during my time there, but unfortunately it never worked out due to scheduling problems. Doesn’t matter – one day I’ll meet you, Régine, and give you a big long hug, hehe.

2. Mercedes Bunz

She founded de:bug. Nuff said. Too bad she’s left Berlin for London but on the other hand good for her. She still writes some incredibly smart stuff.

3. Tina Fey

I was never all that much into 50Rock or knew much about Tina Fey until I heard some podcast with her as a guest. Somehow that intrigued me to find out more and then I got the audiobook version of “bossypants” read by herself and I realized I find her sooo funny that I’m even giving 50Rock another chance. Too bad she’s not on twitter. (Yet? Yet??)

4. Gina Trapani

Gina is my favorite person on this week in google! While the guys are sometimes bragging and repetitive, Gina is always modest, funny, sharp as a knife and always has an interesting perspective to add. She’s a hacker, entrepreneur and what not. Yay!

5. Jane Bussmann

Although I was only at one book reading of hers in Berlin, and that was by accident, the memory of that evening is still fresh in my mind! I mean, who is gutsy enough to go to Uganda – alone – in some sort of investigative journalism mission and turn that whole experience into an extremely funny book? Uhh.. no one? Except Jane Bussmann? Read the book, or go to one of her shows!

6. Dr. Kiki

I listen to Dr. Kiki twice a week, at Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour and This Week in Science! The first is an interview show featuring one guest on one science topic, the other is a weekly roundup of the craziest and most relevant science news which she does together with a (sometimes a little annoyingly self-confident) male co-host. Dr. Kiki definitely holds together both shows. And she’s also a role model for showing how to be a scientist, podcaster and mom all in one. Sometimes her baby cries a little during the recording sessions, but that’s ok.

7. Ela Kagel

A networker and enabler of ideas and events, Berlin wouldn’t be the same without her! She was a curator at transmediale, made tons of events happen, like the workshop series “Free culture incubator“. Can’t wait til her new project space Supermarkt  finlly opens – this will be sometime in November. Will be a reason to make the trip up to Wedding more frequently.

I now realize I probably should have done this post on Ada Lovelace day – like Mercedes Bunz did in this article for the guardian! Next year, then.

By lucky coincidence I came upon this post by David Eaves which is already a couple of moths old. Reading this reminded me that any Comunity Manager can learn a lot by looking at how Open Source (Coding) Communites work and manage themselves.

The interesting thing he describes, is that communities can manage themselves better, and work more efficiently together – and ultimately enjoy themselves more and be motivated – if they have access to community data.

So, instead of merely monitoring the content YOU yourself put in, or the activities that happen right around you, any member of the community could see metrics about what the community has achieved as a whole. This could be a key to keeping motivation levels high, and ensuring members know where and how to engage most effectively, and immediately see the effect of their actions.

And of course there’s a parallel to the idea of Open Data (David is also an Open Data activist and advisor). In most online comunities and networks, access to community data is likely to be the priviledge of those who manage the platform. As Community Managers we know how enriching and motivating it can be to publicize data now and then, such as “there have been contributions from 190 countries, including South Sudan” or “this month, we’ve cracked a record in new active members”.

Why not make that a habit and provide relevant data in real time? As David explains in the post the video below, knowing more will help each member understand what’s going on around them and act accordingly. And of course it will also help Community Management in analyzing and reacting to issues.

I totally love this idea of an open dashboard of community data, accessible for all members.

Talk by David at the Mozilla Summit

Makerplatz is in full swing: the idea is to bring together all people and projects that have come to life in the past years around the previously rather desolate area surrounding Moritzplatz in Kreuzberg.

My contribution was the creation of a  visual guide connecting the spaces physically (and with some data).

Makerplatz visual Guide

My contribution was the idea to create a visual guide that would connect the spaces physically and through information. This consisted of a map, assigning each space its own color . The map was enhanced through QR codes, which let you surf to the site-specific timetable of events immediately.

Using the actual Moritzplatz roundabout as the starting point, I created drip lines with each color, leading right up to the respective spaces. Of course I used DIY, eco-friendly paint. It consists of flour, a type of chalkstone and pigments. It dillutes easily and will fade away within a few days. A similar recipe can be found here.

I also experimented with balloons. I created flying sign posts in front of each location, which would give visitors a sense of direction from far away and would tell them they had reached the right location.

Digging deeper into the idea of using balloons to carry lightweight material, I teamed up with Emre who is doing a “Dream Drawing” workhsop. Creating a dreamy and cozy environmend for the workshop, we made a tent-like structure of very thin, translucent plastic foil which is held up only by balloons. The tent sides waver about a little with any kind of air movement, which makes it very dreamy indeed. Inside the tent, there’s a table and two chairs, and Emre will receive his visitors in there to teach them techniques how to capture and visualize their dreams.

Part of Makerplatz

I’m glad Jay and the ODC people saw this potential and initiated Makerplatz – for the first time I really came notice that is an exceptional entrepreneurial and creative energy all around that area.

There’s the pioneer coworking space betahaus, which has become a hub for startups in Berlin and also houses ODC; a workshops space for a community of makers and tinkerers of all kind. There’s the IMA, in which EstyLabs have quickly become a lively hub for regular workshops and conferences for Berlin’s creative class. And more recently, the huge gray giant Aufbau Haus, housing Planet Modulor and other small shops and workshops, has awoken. And then tere’s the magical community garden Prinzessinnengärten who have (wanted or unwanted) become a lunchbreak hideaway with healthy food for the Platz’ residendts.

Good times, thanks for making it happen Jay!