Guestblog post by Sveinung Skaalnes, Project Manager “72 Hours for CHANGE”, Hyper Island. He explains how the school, partners and its students uses today’s social web to crowdsource and create engagement in the community – all in the name of peace.
Yesterday, Hyper Island and ad agency CP+B surprised over 300 Hyper Island students. Locations in both Stockholm and Karlskrona, Sweden kicked off a three-day event that will result in over 60 innovative solutions for positive global change.
The event is the first in a series of Hyper Island projects under the “Create for CHANGE” initiative. The initiative aims to inspire and stimulate students to harness their creativity to toward positive social change in their communities and beyond.
During the “72-Hours for Peace” event, students explore ways to leverage technology to encourage peace within their communities. The outcome is a collection of complete and viable concepts, made openly available for anyone to implement. The entire process unfolds across multiple platforms and everyone is invited to follow the event in real time. By leveraging Twitter and other social media in the idea generation, the students not only share their process, ideas and inspiration – but they also invite the global community, stakeholders in peace processes and individuals in conflict areas to identify relevant challenges, and co-create innovative solutions.
By end of day Friday, the final 60+ concepts will be uploaded to www.72hoursforpeace.se with the ultimate goal of establishing the largest global Creative Commons database of ideas for peace.
In addition to being available for anyone to engage with, build upon, share and implement, the database will be sent to leaders and change-makers around the world, including Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Carl Bildt, and US president Barack Obama. So far, both the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Minister himself have tweeted about the event – and several articles have been published.
Change-makers challenge student ideas
In addition to cross-campus peer-critique rounds, constructive feedback from CP+B Creative Directors, and a constant flow of twitter-interaction, the students engaged with a team of invited “doers” and social entrepreneurs, including JunglePax, Framtidsboxen, Medicine Sans Frontieres, and GreenB. This gave students a chance to have their ideas put to the test by seasoned, real-world change-makers.
From the initial spark, through thousands of wild ideas, and wrestling with real-world tensions and needs, to that final change-making concept – the students’ journey has been facilitated and supported by Hyper Island’s unique experience-based learning methodology and CP+B’s creative process.
All this leads up to the third and final day, where students refine, package and present their concepts – for the world to see.
Be inspired at www.72hoursforpeace.se and #72hPEACE on Twitter.
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