Don't panic
School of Everything features in the Guardian’s Elevator Pitch today with a few snippets about what we’re trying to do and a photo of the five co-founders taken by Joe Lee. He tried his best… but there was only so much he could do with the subject material 😉
I’ve been hanging out with Scott and the gang at Meetup a bit recently and remembering what a fantastic tool it is for getting people together. So I’ve set up a Long Now London Meetup group to try and get people interested in long-term thinking and the work of the Long Now Foundation together. Do come along for a drink and a chat if you can.
So Social Innovation Camp is over and I think we can already say that it was a riproaring success. Congratulations to winners Enabled by Design and runners up RateYourPrison. All the teams did an amazing job considering we gave them about 42 hours to try and build a new social start-up including a working prototype of their sites.
When Dan, Christian and I cooked up the idea, I don’t think we had an inkling of how much energy and enthusiasm would suddenly be unleashed. We really tapped into a desire to use the web for social action and are so grateful to everybody who came along and put so much into it.
Anna deserves almost all the credit for making the event happen — she was fantastic. Although on the surface it might have appeared very freeform and low-fi there was lots of thought put into the format of the event and the exact mix of people who were there. It was also incredibly hard work (as the photo above shows) but we all slept pretty well last night I think.
There are hundreds of photos on Flickr, Twitter was fizzing all weekend, David Wilcox has been using Qik to post videos and Bobbie Johnson from the Guardian has been doing a fantastic job of blogging the weekend.
Now we just have to decide whether to do it again…
So the word is out. We’ve just announced our first round of investment for School of Everything.
There are all kinds of funny stories associated with our hunt for the right investors. 10 Downing Street, wearing the wrong kind of trousers, facebook stalking and a tank just for starters. I can’t begin to tell you how much we’ve learned. The overall lesson for me though is that if you have a good idea, a good team and can show you’re serious about making the idea reality, there’s no shortage of people willing to back you.
And then the money arrives in the bank account and the fun really begins… wish us luck!