layout: post title: Innovation Commons must get built in Vancouver created: 1147647868 categories:
- Vancouver
- workspace
- innovation commons
- harold jarche
- centre for social innovation
This post was jogged by two things. One was seeing the post by Harold Jarche, who is moving ahead with putting together a Commons as well. The second was experiencing the fantastic space of the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto (thanks, Philip for getting us this space for DrupalCamp).
So, the Innovation Commons concept has to get built. Bill's Workspace shared office concept is a great solution as a business. But, the Innovation Commons needs to be a mix of businesses, non profits, and perhaps even public-private funding sources. I think the Centre for Social Innovation is a good model, but actually less of a focus on exclusively non-profit businesses. Creative, tech, non profit.
On to action items.
The SFU students that worked on an Innovation Commons business model did produce some good, lengthy documents, Excel spreadsheets, and presentations which really need to be posted in friendly non-proprietary formats and distributed under a Creative Commons license. Nik, I'm looking at you here.
As commons-type initiatives spring up around the world, we can hopefully pool our learnings and go farther faster -- check Harold Jarche's "Commons" tag on Furl. My eventual hope is that we can have linkages between different commons, so traveling members can connect locally when they are on the road.
The wiki is OK, but I've come to believe that every project needs a URL. A URL is a pivot point around which concepts can form. So, back to the drawing board there -- suggest some names/URLs and I'll get a wiki-fied site set up that we can centralize resources at (and move the existing stuff from the wiki).
The problem, of course, is finding another slice of time to focus on and champion this initiative. Rather than the large group we have had meeting and talking, we need a smaller handful of people that can actually commit some time. More thoughts on this over time.
(And yes, my dream location would still be buying the Sam the Record Man building on Seymour)
Update: it turns out we're building it Canada wide. I'm amazed that after talking to David Crow and Mark Kuznicki, that we've been thinking the exact same thing. Actually, it's spookier than that -- the business model and actual 3 year plan are nearly identical. So, innovationcommons.ca, coming soon, David Crow nominated as benevolent Executive Director for life.
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