Socialcamp ’09 is a barcamp-style event that brings together social media people and NGO professionals. The aim is to exchange ideas for the public good. But after day one I must say that the sessions lack progressivism a lot. Their titles remember of a bullshit bingo playing ground: At least every second one has the words “social” or “fund raising” in it.
I’m not against anything social at all. But behind these titles are often people explaining a downgraded social media to NGO staff. It’s top-down lecturing that’s not barcampy at all in my eyes. I understand that some NGOs still need to learn a lot on how to use social media. But this way one common pattern becomes strengthened:
There are very few progressive social media projects by German NGOs. Instead, they tend to implement tactics that have been state of the art years ago, spending relatively much money on that. Often, resources are wasted due to redundancy since every NGO wants its own software. It’s not without reason that one session was called “Does it always need a new social community?”.
I think this money would be spend much more useful if NGOs would invest in progressive social media projects. Only they need to know about them beforehand. A socialcamp could be the perfect opportunity to elaborate ideas that take up the experiences of both social media experts, developers and NGO professionals. Instead, sessions are used to manifest old concepts.
Maybe that’s also because NGOs are generally perceived to be conservative and unable or unwilling to adopt new ideas. In fact, this can also be seen in sessions’ names. As I’ve said, “fund raising” is an important issue. It seems as if NGOs are mostly interested in funding their current projects. I.e. the question is “how can NGOs use social media to get money for funding” instead of “how can social media be used to reach NGOs’ goals”.
Luckily, talks between sessions have been much more interesting. I’ve met Tobias Eigen, the founder of Kabissa. The veteran in African social media is a partner of DigiActive – and Tobias even has a sticker of us on his mobile. Yay! Day two will hopefully feature a session with him as well as Christian Kreutz and Georg Neu of Transparency International on mapping for social change. It would be one of the very few sessions that are not centered on Germany.
Disclaimer: I know it’s not fair to complain about the issues debated at a barcamp, especially since I don’t hold a session myself. I’ll excuse the latter with my youth and the fact that it’s my first barcamp, and hope my criticism can foster a debate rather than piss off people.
Hey Simon, go start a session today!
[…] weekend I attended Socialcamp ‘09 in Berlin. The barcamp took place at a venue that is in itself very […]
I read again this post today, and I was wondering again to comment it or not. I had the same experiences at most of the conferences, forums, summits and discussions, that we are debating the same things again and again, trying to invent something new instead of using the tools we already have. And always the same vocabulary! I heard a sentence about this from Esther Dyson at Internet Hungary this week: “It’s not about continuing an old battle but starting a new one.” But don’t you think this problem exists because there are always loads of participants who go to these places (even to barcamps) to learn about new things there? That we have to review everything to help them to understand?
I also noticed, these events are never(!) environmentally friendly or economic. Even if each participant thinks that “we have to do something about climate change”, I can’t even imagine how many thousands of euros are spent on nice hotel rooms, high quality food, printed documents and prestigious conference halls while that money could be spent on supporting more participants who can’t afford the travel, or given to NGOs…
Das Socialcamp 09 in Berlin…
Kaum beim Socialcamp 2009 mitten in Kreuzberg im selfHUB angekommen ging es auch schon los mit der ersten Session im „Raum 6“ zum Thema Open Source und Open Campaigning. Ganz schön viele Pulliträger hier. Was natürlich a…