Tagged: Ken Banks RSS

  • Gaurav Mishra 2:53 am on March 15, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Ken Banks, ,   

    The Importance of Storytelling in Spreading Social Innovation 

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    Ken Banks (@kiwanja) on the importance of storytelling in spreading social innovation –

    The ‘a-ha’ moment innovators-to-be hear about is rarely the discovery of a new metric, or a new business model, or a new way of presenting or collecting data. It’s the realisation that a problem can be solved, and solved in a new way. These answers often come by doing and experiencing, being out in the field, and there are almost always stories behind why the person was there, sometimes how they got there, and what they suddenly saw which gave them their big idea.

    Innovation and entrepreneurship start with passion, so we ought to focus more on that. We can help by speaking about our own interests, passions and stories – which most of us have – and less on the mechanical stuff (some of which, incidentally, includes the actual technology we’ve invented).

    I had earlier written a post on Three Reasons Why Storytelling is the Key to Social Media Marketing Success.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 5:29 pm on November 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Ken Banks, Kiwanja, , , , , Prakelt Foundation,   

    How to Build Social Mobile Applications 

    As I work on my MobiChange application for the second round of Knight News Challenge 2009, my thoughts return to two recent posts on building social mobile applications.

    Ken ‘Kiwanja’ Banks wrote a great post last week on the mistakes techies make in developing social mobile applications for the emerging world –

    Progress in the social mobile field will come only when we think more about best practices in the thinking and design of mobile projects and applications, rather than obsessing over the end products themselves. By then most of the damage has usually already been done.

    Ken gave some great advice, based on his own FrontlineSMS experience: understanding the need gap before entering development, learning from other tools/ players, prototyping early and cheap, partnering with grassroots non-profits, staying lean, being flexible, encouraging local customization, focusing on text and voice, starting small, working closely with early users, and building conversations and community over time. My own approach to MobiChange is similar and I’ll try to follow most of Ken’s advice in the months to come.

    It reminded me of another great post in which Russel Southwood critiqued the social mobile space (via Katrin Verclas) and raised several important questions around usability, impact, scale and sustainability –

    So if it’s such an obviously good idea, why can’t I name more successful, long-standing projects that have begun to change the fundamentals of communication or the lives of people?

    The immediate and seemingly reasonable response is that many of these projects are in their early stages. There did not seem to be a single project I spoke to at the (MobileActive ‘08) conference that was not a pilot: in other words it will be funded for a year to three years and then may disappear. However, the early pioneers stretch back further and few have found their financial feet or scaled up in such a way that they have made a significant major impact. Indeed one might ask: with so many pilots around, when are we going to see some flying?

    Russel argues that a social mobile project will work if it communicates more effectively with a group of people and/or it is more cost effective. I’ll add to that and say that a social mobile project will work best if it follows a commercial-social hybrid model, like the Prakelt Foundation in South Africa.

    I have some thoughts on how to apply these learnings to MobiChange, but that’s another post.

     

    • Wolfbernz 10:41 pm on December 10, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks for sharing this info.
      I am building a mobile community and I am surfing the web for info.

      All the best,

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