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At last! A peek at the ColaLife Trial Plan

18 July 2011 By Leave a Comment

ColaLife Trial Plan EXEC and Key Diagrams CoverMany of our regular readers will be itching to see the culmination of our work over the last 3 years: our plan for the first field trial of the ColaLife concept – the snappily named ColaLife Operational Trial Zambia (or COTZ, when you are trying to fit it into a funder’s 600 character project description!).

We always said that ‘the devil is in the detail’ and it has taken 3 years: . . . from our first convening on Facebook in 2008, our link-up with BBC Radio, engaging with The Coca-Cola Company, our UnLtd award which has kept food on the table and came just in time as Jane and I decided we had to commit ourselves full-time, the sponsored cycle ride across France, our three trips to Zambia (Oct 2010, Jan 2011, May 2011) . . . All this has culminated in just 14 pages! Plus some very useful charts and diagrams, and for those who are not faint hearted: 39 footnotes and 17 pages of Appendices.

The Executive Summary and the key pictures, charts and diagrams can be downloaded here (PDF, 537 KB).

Because the plan still under consideration by funders, and partners have yet to sign the memoranda of understanding, we can’t yet put the full plan in the open – despite our commitment to Open Innovation. However, if you’d like more than the Executive Summary, you can also request a fuller version of the plan here.

We’ve built the plan using a co-design process, from a well understood need, but from the bottom up. The plan is not a rushed response to a funding opportunity. It is a detailed, and fully-costed, description of how we propose to rigorously test the ColaLife concept in Zambia through a local cross-sector partnership. The formulation of the plan has only been possible because so many big players have been willing to work together in an ‘unlikely alliance’ involving some of the biggest names on the planet. Here are just some of them:

Implementation partners:

  1. Ministry of Health, Republic of Zambia
  2. UNICEF, Zambia
  3. Zambian Breweries plc (Zambian subsidiary of SABMiller plc)
  4. Keepers Zambia Foundation, Zambia
  5. Medical Stores Limited, Zambia
  6. ColaLife

Partnering sub-contractors:

  1. PI Global (ADK Packaging)
  2. Mobile Transactions Zambia Limited

Operational research contractor (still to be selected by UNICEF, through competitive tender)

The planning process would not have been possible without the support at global level of The Coca-Cola Company, SABMiller and Johnson & Johnson and Janssen Pharmaceutica. We are also grateful to Rohit Ramchandani, currently studying for his Doctorate in Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, for his input on the trial design and many others too numerous to mention here, but many of whom are listed in the acknowledgements contained in the plan.

The plan has triggered confirmation of support from the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Citizenship Trust. Jane and I worked with a small team at Johnson & Johnson/Janssen Pharmaceutica in their ‘Innovation Bootcamp’ from October 2010 to January 2011 and this helped to challenge and refine the ColaLife concept.

The plan is now with potential funders, and we’ve been able to approach them with 25% of the total of USD1.354m we need already confirmed in cash and in-kind from partners.

Having the commitment of the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Citizenship Trust is a huge boost and will give some reassurance to others. However, we appreciate that other funders will still have to work hard to support us as we are not always responding to a specific ‘call for proposals’ from them.

We hope that the funders will now be able to show the same creativity and flexibility that we have seen from all the partners and supporters of the plan so far.

This is a really significant milestone in ColaLife’s short life. Thanks to everyone who has helped us get this far.

Onwards and upwards!

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Without a Coca-Cola life is unthinkable – Henry Miller

11 July 2011 By 1 Comment

Can Coca Cola Save Children's Lives?
A Shop in Soweto Township. Image credit: Nick Gripton

This is a much-used quote attributed to the late Henry Miller from his book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

I don’t know exactly why it’s quoted so often. I’ll need to read the book. But just imagine for a moment a world without Coca-Cola. Or, if that’s too much of a stretch for you, imagine Africa without Coca-Cola. Now hold that image for a moment and imagine someone coming up with the idea that every village in Africa should have Coca-Cola. Most people would think that this was a crazy idea. The majority would dismiss the notion as silly while a minority would challenge the idea with comments like:

  • Do you know how much a glass bottle of Coca-Cola weighs? Who is going to carry it there?
  • Do you know how much it costs to make a Coca-Cola bottle? The bottle would have to be returnable. How on earth are you going to get the bottle back?
  • Coca-Cola is a beverage. People will drink it. How are you going to guarantee quality and ensure they don’t get sick?
  • Who would want to buy a brown fizzy drink?
  • And so on. Add your own challenges.
This is the thought process I go through when, very occasionally, I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering if we can make the ColaLife concept work. I reassure myself that if it can be done with Coca-Cola it can be done with an anti-diarrhoea kit especially if those involved in Coca-Cola distribution are helping us.

 

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PedZinc samples arrive from Tanzania

15 June 2011 By Leave a Comment

PedZinc in AidPod PedZinc embossed livery

Regular readers will remember a mini-panic that we had back last month when we visited the Medical Stores Limited (MSL) warehouse to find the type of Zinc supplements we wanted but packed in boxes of 100 tablets (10 blister packs of 10 tablets each) – see the picture below.
ZinCfant 20mg

This is a real problem for us for several reasons:

  1. A course of Zinc supplementation is 10-14 tablets for a child 6 months or older and half that for children between 2 and 6 months. This packet contains 10 courses for older children – more than we need and more than the mothers and care-givers we are targeting could afford, or be willing, to buy in a single purchase.
  2. For good reasons, the pharmaceutical regulations apply to the medicine AND the way the medicine is packaged with its labelling, instructions and so on. This means that we would not be able to break these packets down and include just one or two blister packs in the proposed ADKs (Anti-Diarrhoea Kits).
  3. And finally, the boxes are too big to fit in an AidPod!

It was time for a re-think. The Zinc tablets we were expecting to find at MSL were PedZinc produced by Shelys Pharmaceuticals in Tanzania. These are already approved for general sale in Zambia but we still had no idea of the package size. Would these be supplied to boxes of 100 tablets too?

I contacted Shelys Pharmaceuticals and yesterday the PedZinc samples arrived from Tanzania and they are:

  1. Packaged as single blister packs of 10 tablets. The packets have all the required information on the back: tablet description; storage instructions; manufacturer; batch information including date of manufacture and expiry date.
  2. The package also contains a detailed data and instruction sheet.
  3. The packaging is very attractive with embossed printing on the front
  4. Two packets fit very neatly into an AidPod

The attractiveness of the package might seem an odd thing to highlight but the 2009 WHO/UNICEF Report, Diarrhoea : Why children are still dying and what can be done, recommended that products to treat diarrhoea need to be ‘attractive’ to mothers and care-givers and part of this will be the way the product looks. Other research has indicated that ORS is often not seen as ‘medicine’ and this is a drawback. Mothers don’t like to feel that are being ‘palmed off’ with non-medicine – a feeling that applies to mothers the world over I would suspect. PedZinc carries the look and feel of a high quality medicine.

A nice twist to all of this is that Shelys Pharmaceuticals is part of the Sumaria group which also owns the Nyanza Bottling Company Limited and Nyanza Bottling, which is based in Mwanza, is the Coca-Cola bottler for the Lake Region in Tanzania. I’m not the only one to have made this link . . .

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Zambia Diary | Day 8, Visit 3 | From lowlight to highlight

20 May 2011 By 2 Comments

On Tuesday night (17/5/11) I was worried when a potential problem was revealed to me that I hadn’t even thought about. Fortunately, we don’t get a lot of unpleasant surprises in ColaLife because we have been kicking the concept around our thousands of supporters for three years and this has meant that a lot of the issues we are likely to face have been raised and we’ve had time to think and consult on how we might deal with them.

So what was the potential problem?

Every country has some sort of Pharmaceutical Regulatory Authority (PRA). This authority registers medicines and medicines need to the registered before they can be sold. In Zambia medicines are classified as: GS (General Sales); P (Sales under the supervision of a Pharmacist), POM (Prescription Only Medicines) and Narcotic (I’m not sure what this means but it sounds pretty serious).

The components of the ADK (Anti-Diarrhoea Kit) we are proposing all fall under the GS category with things like Aspirin. This means they can be sold in any retail outlet – just like Coca-Cola. So far so good.

What I hadn’t thought about was package size. The potential problem arose when we went to MSL on Tuesday. There we saw precisely the product we wanted: Zinc?? but it was packaged in small boxes of 10 blister packs, each containing one course of treatment (ie 10 tablets). So each box contained 10 treatments. The boxes were labelled and contained the necessary instruction leaflet but the individual blister packs were white and had no markings on them at all.

I’m no expert but I would bet my house on the fact that the Zambia PRA (or any other PRA for that matter) would NOT allow us to break up a box of ten blister packs and put individual, unmarked blister packs into and ADK even if we did write our own instructions!

This whole experience is a real eye opener for me. What it means is that a medicine can be available in a country but can be inaccessible to the end user because of the way it is packaged. Obviously, it is much more cost-effective to put 10 blister packs in one box with a single set of instructions but this makes the medicine less accessible to an individual mother with a child with diarrhoea. She wants, and can only afford, one treatment not 10.

At this point I am in minor panic mode but trying not to let it show.

Time to ignite the ColaLife supporters network to see if we can find a solution.

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Intelligence from Kenya and Uganda

10 May 2011 By Leave a Comment

Hands on AidPod Children with AidPod

We have been in Pretoria today staying with Judy and Ian Goldman. Ian is a member of the ColaLife Virtual Advisory Board. The focus has been on catching up with emails and amongst these was this great report from ColaLife supporter Stewart Martin who is just back from a trip to Kenya and Uganda.

Hi Jane

I’m now back from Kenya and Uganda, and have placed a few photos and a couple of short videos on Flickr using the ColaLife tag. Coca-Cola was certainly a prominent product throughout Uganda as we travelled west from Kampala over to Queen Elizabeth National Park, to Bwindi, Lake Bunyonyi and onto Jinja. In those travels we passed a couple of major distribution points, plenty of rural outlets and opportunist crate sales as well as a number of Coca-Cola branded houses!

In Kenya in a remote community, not far from the border with Uganda (Malaba border crossing), we got involved in a project to improve a spring which serves over 600 families with water. While there I took a few photos of local children with the AidPods. In speaking to the village elder and through him a few others, the consensus seemed to be that they felt ColaLife was an excellent idea, and they allayed our concerns that the products might be taken out and sold/redirected. The people we spoke to felt confident that once the AidPods got to the rural communities there would be no problem with theft or redirection. The contents were familiar to the people we met, with the exception of the SODIS bag. People were travelling from miles around to get to the spring, which provided very poor water, and yet just half a mile down the road a couple of houses had Coca-Cola stocked (a scenario I’m sure you are very familiar with and giving rise to the ColaLife idea)!

Friends I met up with suggested that Pepsi are understood to be mounting a challenge to gain market share in East Africa, something we saw little evidence of (two lorries in the space of two weeks) but thought I’d add. I’ve left the AidPod and t-shirt with friends in Kenya, who will endeavour to take more (better!) photos over the coming weeks and months, and also use the flat-pack AidPods with children.

My friend in Uganda who works for DFID was concerned that the government is afraid of losing control (generally) and therefore would be reluctant to see health provision through alternative routes. My friend in Kenya who is effectively running a hospital and medical outreach programmes was far more positive, thinking the idea to be brilliant, and keen to be involved in any further work.

I could ramble on further, but hope that the photos prove helpful and if you need anything more please let me know. The developments in South Africa look great.

Finally, have you considered adding ColaLife to Everyclick*? It allows supporters to make ColaLife their everyclick charity, using everyclick for website searches and generating income over time for the charity. Only small amounts are raised but given the interest in ColaLife it could add up to a significant amount over time.

All the very best

Stewart

 

Many thanks Stewart.

* We will be looking at the Everyclick opportunity once ColaLife is a registered charity – registration has been applied for, as reported here.

 

 

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Cape Town Diary | Day 4 | SABMiller confirms commitment

7 May 2011 By Leave a Comment

International Business and Poverty Reduction Event
Ellen Siedensticker, Oxfam America and William Asiko, Coca-Cola – two of the three panelists at the International Business and Poverty Reduction Event in Cape Town on 6 May 2011. Off the picture to the right is Andy Wales, SABMiller and Zahid Torres-Rahman, Business Action For Africa (Chair)

This breakfast event was structured around the same report as the webinar I reported on earlier (see Exploring the links between international business and poverty reduction). However, on this occasion Coca-Cola was represented by William Asiko (President of the Coca-Cola Foundation for Africa) and Oxfam America by Ellen Seidensticker (Chief of Staff). As with the webinar, Andy Wales spoke for SABMiller. The report documents the use of the Oxfam’s Poverty Footprint methodology as applied to Coca-Cola production and distribution in El Salvador and Zambia. The methodology attempts to assess the impacts of Coca-Cola’s operations on those who supply inputs and those who distribute and sell the products. The report then highlights areas where the positive impacts could be increased and the negative ones reduced or eliminated. What is clear from the report is the extent to which Coca-Cola, through its bottler in these countries, SABMiller, was willing to open up and share information. Although Andy Wales pointed out that SABMiller already publishes its progress, country by country, against 10 sustainable development indicators on an annual basis on its website through their SAM portal.

It was Andy Wales who spoke last from the platform but before he finished he handed over to Chibamba Kanyama, Director of Corporate Affairs, for Zambian Breweries (owned by SABMiller) who was in the audience. Chibamba went into some of the detail of how Zambian Breweries were responding to the report’s recommendations. It was at this point that the ColaLife pilot got a positive mention. It is incredibly fortuitous, and a complete coincidence, that this work was done in Zambia and that a successful ColaLife pilot will contribute to the fulfilment of some of the recommendations made.

When Andy handed over to Chibamba it was a complete surprise to me. I hadn’t realised that Chibamba would be there. Regular readers will know that Chibamba was the first person we met from SABMiller on our first trip to Zambia in October 2010 which was reported here. Anyway, we were able to have a mini catch-up on progress which was a good preliminary to our meeting in Zambia the week after next.

The poverty footprint report can be downloaded here (PDF, 3.9 MB).

 

 

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Cape Town Diary | Day 2 | Social Enterprise Summit

5 May 2011 By Leave a Comment

IMG_2020

The Africa Investor Summit on Social Investing and Social Enterprise in Africa

(yes that is Prime Minister, The Right Honourable, Morgan Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe with South Africa’s Minister for Economic Development, Ebrahim Patel, and Aeneas Chuma, Resident Co-ordinator, United Nations)

Pitching the ColaLife idea to around 120 people, all interested in Social Entrepreneurship in Africa, was a great opportunity for us – with an exciting mix in the audience, from the biggest corporates, banks and foundations to small and more established social enterprises, as well as academics, network representatives and commentators. With Simon out chasing the elusive Coca-Cola crate as a ‘prop’ for the afternoon pitch, it fell to me to be chief note-taker, networker and question-planter.

We’ve already made some amazing contacts – and have been able to meet and speak to some very influential people several times, at the Africa Investor summit itself and in other events around the World Economic Forum: William Asiko of the Coca-Cola Foundation; Andy Wales from SABMiller, our trip sponsor and partner for the Zambia pilot; top representatives from The Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation willing to point us in the right direction next month when we start looking for funders; GAIN, who produce tiny, low-cost sachets of micro-nutrients for families, and the ever-supportive Zahid Torres-Rahman of Business Action for Africa.

There is growing understanding and interest in the potential of Social Entrepreneurship for Africa – to operate in the gap opening up between shrinking donor support and state cut-backs. This starts to sound like the UK. But throw in growing populations – with typically 50% under 16 in many African countries – an appetite for Public Private Partnerships, for innovation and ‘green solutions’ and a strong drive to create jobs and begin to address the problems of mass poverty – and you start to feel that social entrepreneurs in Africa could really make a difference.

Given, of course, the right access to start-up funding and ‘patient capital’; that refrain is the same the world over. Just like in the UK, two visions of reality competed at the Africa Investor Summit: ‘There isn’t any money for Social Enterprises; we fall between the two stools of commercial banks and foundations’ versus ‘The money is there, but the investors and social enterprises can’t find each other.’ Then there is the Catch 22 that ColaLife has heard so often: ‘The Social Enterprise is at the wrong stage for us; it isn’t investment-ready.’ Fair. But to get a social enterprise to ‘investment-ready’ stage is a long road, and somewhere along that road, someone has to trust you, or your idea will shrivel and die. ColaLife was very fortunate to win the backing of UnLtd, to give us time to develop. And we heard some fantastic stories of other initiatives that have succeeded against the odds: WaterHealth International, just launching in Africa with the backing of the Coca-Cola Foundation, Acumen Fund and Diageo. And the amazing story of Kenya’s Equity Bank – but that will have to wait for Simon’s post tomorrow…

 

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Cape Town Diary | Day 1

3 May 2011 By 1 Comment

Peninsula Beverage Company (PTY) Ltd

We arrived in Cape Town last night. The complex funding arrangements for this trip meant we had to take a bit of a tedious route: 3 legs, 2 lots of customs checks and 3 bag check-ins but all the flights behaved themselves and we arrived on schedule, 20 hours after leaving London Heathrow.

WARNING: What follows is one of those ‘it could only happen to ColaLife’ shaggy dog stories…

The weather here on our arrival was uncharacteristically overcast and rainy but we woke this morning to see this great city in all its splendour with an amazing smell of fresh, unpolluted sea in the air. I got up a 6am, as I had 5 AidPods to make. I was still hoping, against the odds, that I’d be able to get hold of a crate of Coca-Cola in time for my pitch to the investors at the Social Enterprise Summit organised by Africa Investor.

Last week, just before we left the UK, I Googled the Coca-Cola bottler for the Cape Town area. It turns out to be the Peninsula Beverage Company (PTY) Ltd. That rang a bell: a few months ago a ColaLife supporter offered to help if ever we went into South Africa as he has contacts in PenBev. It was a rather last minute idea, as the conference date was the morning after my arrival, but I made contact anyway and a few emails flew around. But no concrete arrangements were made to unite me with a crate of Coca-Cola bottles to illustrate my pitch.

Around 10am on the conference day, I thought I’d give PenBev another try. Again my contact wasn’t there but I got a very helpful person who suggested that, given the short notice, I go to the factory shop and just buy a crate and bottles from there. She gave me directions. So I set off, iPhone in hand to see if I could find PenBev. As the photo shows, I was successful. I went to the factory reception and they directed me around the block to the ‘Direct Sales’ department. This had a huge sign above the door saying ‘Direct Sales’ but for some reason I was drawn to the altogether more attractive entrance to the PenBev offices. I went in and started talking to the security guard about what I was trying to do. Suddenly, we were interrupted by a voice from behind me: “You’re not Simon Berry, are you?”. It was one of the PenBev directors who’d seen the emails but had decided that it was too late to be able to help – and I’d just run into him entirely by accident in the reception area!

What about that for a coincidence? Anyway, an hour and half later – after a cup of coffee and a very friendly chat about ColaLife in his office, I was on my way back to the conference with the cleanest Coca-Cola crate and bottles in Cape Town. Like many people, my new PenBev contact imagined we aspired to get AidPods into the crates at the factory, so did not think it would be possible. When I explained that we wanted to use the secondary part of the Coca-Cola distribution chain – where the Coca-Cola trucks stop and the army of small entrepreneurs take over – he got much more interested. >>more: an animation explaining the ColaLife Business Model

At the Africa Investor Conference, the ColaLife pitch went well and my visual aid of a real life crate with the AidPods in it really helped bring the concept alive.

A very rewarding day where many valuable contacts were made. More on these later.

Onwards and upwards.

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Exploring the links between international business and poverty reduction

11 April 2011 By Leave a Comment

SABTCCCWebinarWatchVideo

Last Thursday I highlighted a public webinar that then took place on Friday (8/4/11) to discuss the report on the ‘Poverty Footprinting’ work undertaken by SABMiller, Coca-Cola and Oxfam in Zambia and El Salvador. ‘Poverty Footprinting’ is a technique being used by Oxfam to assess the impacts big businesses have on the local communities they operate in. It doesn’t just look at the business’s operation in isolation but explores the impacts up and down the value chain; in the businesses that supply inputs, through to the businesses and individuals that distribute and sell the products.

Anyway, you can now re-run the webinar and the Q&A session here. This will be of particular interest to those who were unable to join the over-subscribed webinar on Friday.

It is a coincidence that SABMiller and Coca-Cola have come together with Oxfam to do this work in Zambia (and El Salvador) at a time when we will be working with SABMiller (with the support of Coca-Cola) in Zambia on the ColaLife pilot.

In the Q&A session, Afzaal Malik from Coca-Cola gave a really good summary of how big businesses are seeing the development landscape changing; they are moving away from pure philanthropy (although this still happens) to the leveraging of their business activities to have a bigger impact on the development of the communities in which they operate (40:36)*. This is not new and it’s been happening to an increasing extent over the last 5 years or so. We were struck by what Afzaal Malik from Coca-Cola said in the Q&A session when he was talking about the new kind of relationships big businesses were developing with stakeholders from all sectors to achieve this. He said:

And in this process you will need healthy doses of humility, lots of flexibility and patience and you need to look at these partnerships in the long term.

This certainly matches with our experience sitting on the NGO side of the fence!

We were also pleased that Andy Wales was able to mention our plans for collaborartion with SABMiller on the ColaLife pilot in such positive terms (35:00)*.

There is quite an active Twitter stream around this webinar as I type this. If you want to join in, the hashtag is #PovertyFootprint.

The full report can be downloaded here (PDF, 3.9 MB)

* Numbers in brackets are the points in the video in mins:secs. Drag the slider to these points to move straight to them.

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Convening Power

9 April 2011 By Leave a Comment

As it is the weekend(!) I am affording myself the luxury of straying from the day-to-day of ColaLife to write down the things I’ve been saying about “Convening Power” during recent presentations (Royal Society of Medicine, TEDx Berlin) and how we’ve used this to get where we’ve got with the ColaLife project.

The term, Convening Power, has an intentional double meaning – there’s more to it than I first imagined.

Most individuals, and I include myself in this, have very little power but we all have some. But as individuals we generally don’t have enough power to get the attention of very powerful individuals or institutions. So what do we do? We put all our little bits of power together – we convene to aggregate our power – and approach those more powerful than ourselves as a group.

This was the primary reason for setting up the ColaLife Facebook Group* three years ago. I’d got nowhere trying to engage Coca-Cola as an individual so it was time to gather more people around the idea to give me more power. This is what trade unions have been doing for years and it is captured beautifully in this UNISON video – one of my favourite adverts of all time.

So there is nothing new in this sort of convening for power but what is new is that whereas before you needed an organisation – like a trade union – to do it, today anyone who knows how to use Facebook can do it. Today you succeed or fail more on the strength of your ideas and less on whether you have the might of an organisation behind you.

So what other sorts of power does convening give you? Before setting up the Facebook group I had had a very positive, I’d even say a life-changing, experience, with the process of open innovation. So I was aware that exposing the ColaLife idea at an embryonic stage would generate comment, challenge and suggested improvements to the idea and this indeed has happened. The original published idea was:

What about Coca Cola using their distribution channels (which are amazing in developing countries) to distribute rehydration salts? Maybe by dedicating one compartment in every 10 crates as ‘the life saving’ compartment?

That was never going to work and soon we came around to the idea of making use of the unused space between the necks of crated bottles instead of replacing one with a tube.

ColaLife pods in place Model AidPods in a Coca-Cola crate
 What open innovation does. How the idea has developed by sharing it online.

If I’m honest that thought process – the idea of making use of the unused space – started in my own living room and came from Jane (my partner in life and ColaLife) – so you don’t have to have online systems to undertake open innovation but it does help. I’m sure she was stimulated by the online competition! Other improvements to the idea that have come from further afield include:

  • Insights into the way the Coca-Cola system and distribution chain works
  • The idea of the AidPod as a kit
  • The role of enterprise
  • The importance of local determination of how the concept is applied in a particular place
  • Ideas on how to increase credibility eg through our Virtual Advisory Board
  • Etc

Convening people around you and an idea increases your credibility. The higher your credibility the more power you have. Amongst our supporters are some of the most well respected experts in their fields. To highlight this fact we have asked these people to be part of our Virtual Advisory Board and make a public statement about their desire to see ColaLife piloted.

Another outcome of this convening process, which was unexpected, is the heightened sense of responsibility that it generates in you. When I went for that first meeting with Coca-Cola, way back in June 2008, it felt like the 1,000 members of the Facebook Group* were watching me. They weren’t all watching of course but that’s not important. The important thing is that it felt like they were watching. What that meant was that I gave a lot of thought to that meeting before I went in and in particular focused on what I might be able to take away for ColaLife supporters. I’ve attended many meetings in my life and always take them seriously but I had never felt that same level of responsibility before. This, perhaps, is more of a reflection on me than on the process of convening.

Then there is the power that comes with confidence. Exposing your idea to thousands of people and getting a largely positive reaction makes you realise that the idea may actually be quite a good one. You will never get 100% approval and we do not have this, but I can count the number of people who have said that the idea is NOT worth piloting on the fingers of one hand.

So whatever it is you are doing consider being open and sharing. This will give you various sorts of power and is likely to improve your idea and all of these things will help you get your idea implemented. It’s not always appropriate to take the open road of course but often it is. As Rowland Harwood of 100% Open said a couple of weeks ago at NESTA: ‘Default to open’.
Default to Open
Only keep things to yourself if you’ve got VERY VERY good reasons to do so.

* The ColaLife Facebook Group, which now has 8,420 members, has been superseded by our Facebook Page which has 4,240 members

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