We were thrilled to have been able to participate in this year’s Evoke Summit at The World Bank. As describe on their website, “EVOKE was developed by the World Bank Institute, the learning and knowledge arm of the World Bank Group, and directed by alternate reality game master Jane McGonigal. This online game is a ten-week crash course in changing the world. The goal is to help empower people all over the world, especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to urgent social problems.”
Since the Evoke “powers”, collaboration, courage, creativity, entrepreneurship, local insight, knowledge share, resourcefulness, spark, sustainability, and vision, align so nicely with the values that we promote through DEED, we decided to present our work for the first part, and spend the bulk of the time leading a workshop on prototyping towards social innovation. As we do during our spring class, we introduced the 35 participants to the story of one of our collaborators in Guatemala.
We then had the group work in teams of 5 people to come up with:
- A focus to tackle (education, health, housing, transportation, etc.)
- Design a project, product, service, system, strategy, etc. to benefit any of the people mentioned in the story
- Write a paragraph describing the design
- Keep a running list of assumptions (since we believe that any work that is not doing with the community on sight is always based on assumptions that need to be tested in-country)
The results were fantastic and all participants seemed engaged and excited by the assignment. In just 30 minutes of workshopping, 7 teams came up with 7 great ideas that we could potentially bring back to Guatemala and test. One of the teams even made sure that the email address and domain associated with their project idea would be available!
Thank you to Bob and Jane for the invitation. If you were there for the event, please leave a comment letting us know what you thought of the workshop as well as our DEED project.