“The Hub Berlin is a co-creative community of people with good ideas for the world. This means anybody can bring their projects or business here. We enable people to work, relax, network and offer daily exciting events to all our members.”

People can rent anything from a few hours to a permanent desk at The Hub; conference rooms cost extra. What you get is not only a fully-fledged bureau, but also a bunch of interesting coworkers. The venue is aimed at people working for the good of mankind. They range from NGOs via activists to social entrepreneurs. In Berlin, there’s also somebody from a regular company who persuaded his boss to let him work there, but generally businesses seem to have concerns to let their employees cowork.

There are quite a lot of Hubs around the world – including some in places where I would not have expected them, such as Cairo or Sao Paulo. Unfortunately the network isn’t as strong as it could be. Members of one Hub can book conference rooms in another city, but not desks. But through an internal network, members of all Hubs can connect with each other.

The Hubs are not organized centrally, but independently from one another. In Berlin, there are three people who work full-time for The Hub that is currently working place to about 40 people. The organization is constituted as a cooperative, but I was told that they are thinking about founding a GmbH (similar to a Ltd. in Britain) to improve financing.

What’s also cool is that The Hub Berlin has a strong social-ecological focus. They exclusively use electricity from renewable energy sources, racks are built from used paper. They are also very international internally, i.e. signs are multilingual and English is a common colloquial language between coworkers.

Coworking is a very interesting concept, since it enables self-employed and small businesses to work in a social environment. I think it is especially useful for people who spend only part of their working hours at a bureau or job in different cities, but it should be interesting for everybody. It’s a quite young movement in this form, but I am certain it’s on the right way.

P.S.: If you are in Berlin and would like to find out how coworking suits you, I have a couple of vouchers for a day at The Hub Berlin. You can even bring a friend! If you are interested, just drop me a mail at [my first name] at [this domain].

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.

“It brings together talented software developers/designers and social innovators to build effective web-based solutions to social problems — and all in the course of 48 hours! [...]
Ideas will be accepted from seven countries in Central and Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) and volunteers will be drawn from all over Europe. The event will be held in Bratislava, Slovakia 16-18 September…”

The call for ideas has just started. So if you want to participate with an idea or as a volunteer, it’s time to submit your application. You can find more on what a Social Innovation Camp is here.

Dan writes a great blog at internet.artizans. He’s not only one of the co-founders of Social Innovation Camp; he’s also a former Director of the British Open Rights Group and currently a Digital Guru for the Make Your Mark campaign.

The Social Innovation Camp Central and Eastern Europe coincides with the Civil Society Forum that will discuss 20 years of post-communism in the region. My friend Marietta has written about it here.