Join us for the social collaboration game at SHINE

My colleague, friend, and collaborator David Wilcox just posted about the social collaboration game we are going to be putting on at SHINE derived partly from the social media game and from our work on the Social by Social project.  Here’s what David said:

If you want to find out how social technology can be used collaboratively to solve neighbourhood problems, do join me and colleagues for a lively session on May 16 in London at the SHINE unconference for social entrepreneurs. You’ll find details here.

“If you want to do it quickly, do it alone. If you want to do it well, do it together.” – African proverb.
Join the Social Collaboration Game on day two of SHINE. Everyone’s talking about the advantages of collaboration, open-source working and social technology to drive through social change. But how do you make it work in practice? Based on real life problems that SHINE participants are facing, get ready for a two hour game where you’ll have to crunch problems, make quick decisions and find ways to work together to get the job done. You will be doing that within the framework of an imagined but realistic neighbourhood where people are trying to tackle problems innovatively as recession bites. There’ll be competing interests to balance, barriers to getting what you need from partnerships,…

There will be some similarity to the neighbourhood game I ran recently in Holland – but with far more chance to form alliances and work out innovative ways to find projects. A bit like social media game meets Social Innovation Camp, in miniature.

We have some top talent to design and run the session: my usefulgames co-designer Drew Mackie is coming down from Edinburgh, and Andy Gibson and Amy Sample Ward will bringing their expertise on similar events and the use of social technology for social benefit. We’ve recently been working on a Social by Social handbook for NESTA on that subject – details here. I hope we’ll be able to evolve the game so that it can be run over half a day or a day, using content from the Social by Social handbook. There might even be a version in a box, like the non-tech Regeneration Game Drew and I developed a few years back.

Tickets for two days at SHINE are a bargain, at £30 plus VAT, for individuals and startups, and £100 plus VAT for larger organisations.  Sign up here. That includes a party on Friday night.