Thailand here I come!
First and most exciting news... I've managed to get the time off work and sorted the tickets for the i-genius World Summit for Social Entrepreneurs! In case you're still thinking about it, tickets to Bangkok are currently about £500. Mine cost £489 from STA travel. It has some cancellation and change flexibility too. Trailfinders were about £30 more expensive on average. I'm flying on Sat 8th and getting back on the Sun 23rd March as planned. The plan is to get to Phuket via beaches and back the same way. I'm dreaming of sunshine already and the more the merrier if you feel like piling along!!
Meeting with the Red Foundation
This week I also met up with Jamie Thomas who set up the Red Foundation, which is a social action development agency that "aims to bring people together to do things that create a better place for us all to live and work in". The reason being that they have a government funded remit to modernise volunteering and are trying to do something very similar to us. They've also bought the i-volunteer.org domain name, which is along the same lines as the one I was looking at, which is iVoluntr.org.
Anyway, we had a very interesting conversation, the upshot of which was that we might look at ways of working together to do this in tandem. The key difference lies in our timeframes and set-up approach. Essentially I'm looking to get this off the ground a lot quicker, and without any dependency on either the non-profit sector or the government. As a first step though, we're looking into sharing research outputs, so more on this later.
Tech genius wanted
I'm also desperately looking for a tech genius type person that wants to experiment with future Open technologies and might be willing to take a risk on a startup. Any ideas?? Please let me know if there's anyone you think might be worth talking to.
A first look at the brand
Finally, and probably most exciting of all, is the news that we have first draft brand images for the Urban Survival Project!! A friend of Mel's, Elissa, has put together some very cool ideas and designs for us to start with. It would be great to get your views and comments on them. However, I really think they deserve their own post, so I'll put them up separately in a few hours!
Meantime here's hoping that Feb turns out to be a great month for all of you.
