Planning the “Products and Membership”
As said in the previous blog post we are now working in four streams to pull the Hub Helsinki plan together. The Product and Membership working group I (Sami) am facilitating focuses on questions such as:
- What are the products and services Hub Helsinki will be offering? And to whom?
- Which are chargeable and which are free?
- Which are for co-op members only (I’d hope none) and which are for all interested in Hub (I’d hope all).
- Which should help working, meeting, learning, connecting….?
- Which products and services should help facilitate aspiring entrepreneurs?
- Which should facilitate the discussion on general Hub agenda of social, cultural and environmental challenges?
Quite fundamental, interesting and perhaps leading questions…
Nevertheless, if anyone feels like contributing to the task ahead, please feel free to send me an email at sami.oinonen@hubhelsinki.fi or leave a comment to this short post.
The first working group meeting will be held at the Hub at 7pm on Thursday, October 8th.
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* What are the products and services Hub Helsinki will be offering? And to whom?
- Cafeteria
- working and meeting space (during the opening hours)
- 24/7 entrance
- entrance to the other HUBs around the world
- visibility in the Internet for the social enterprises
- office facilities (wlan, scanning, printing)
- SE related events
- few interesting newspapers and magazines (like social enterprise magazine)
- dedicated library/book crossing place
- global community of social entrepreneurs (some help in getting to know the HUBsters around the globe)
* Which are chargeable and which are free?
* Which are for co-op members only (I’d hope none) and which are for all interested in Hub (I’d hope all).
* Which should help working, meeting, learning, connecting….?
* Which products and services should help facilitate aspiring entrepreneurs?
* Which should facilitate the discussion on general Hub agenda of social, cultural and environmental challenges?
Nice list indeed. I think these all could be part of the standard Hub Helsinki offering. Obviously the question is at which order these should be implemented.
Personally one of the most interesting and important ones is the peer support and connections through the global Hub community. I think we have only touched the surface of rapid global collaboration.
But to start with we need to consider building also the local and national collaboration network. And by building I mean reusing and connecting to whatever makes sense.
Also the library and book swapping is a brilliant idea and one way for serendipitous encounters.
I think one interesting customer group could be the many dirrefent associations (RYs). Maybe some of them have activities that could be spinned-off as social eterprises owned by the association. Many large scale open source projects have hybrid organizational structures like that. Hub Helsinki could create a tailored process for this kind of projects.
See hybrid organization and google for more.
One product idea would be to create a (somewhat standardized) process for inviting and funding interesting people to come to Helsinki. Andrew Gryf Paterson arranged Michel Bauwens to Helsinki as part of Pixelache Festival’s “alternative economy cultures” theme last spring. He curated an tailormade programme for Michel and collected the money needed by peer-funding.
http://2009.pixelache.ac/festival/programme/alternative-economy-cultures/