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SSWC #3 Discussing the future state of the Swedish web

Emily Green Haskell SkrivaPå-Scrive-SSWC-Social Swedish-Web-camp-Tjärö

Social Swedish Web Camp 3 at Tjärö Nature reservoir, Sweden 2011 gathered developers, thinkers and other internet enthusiast to share their thoughts on the ecosystem around the Swedish scene, ideas and culture around the future state of our internet.

Emily Green and I hosted a SkrivaPå tech session about Haskell, we´ll she did most of the talking on functional programming, functors and monads, and i continue looking t tutorials on sundays. I introed a short talk about SkrivaPå and  most of that info can be read in the blogposts here, and the talk can be found on SlideShare.

Pernillan asked me to participate in a talk on how to do an internet un-conference (like GeekGirlMeetup.com) together with Kristin Heionen + Thomas Wennström (who arrange SSWC) and Stellan Löving who arranges Webbcoast in Gothern burg. A lot of questions were raised of how to organize un-conferances and personally I believe control is an illusion, what you can try achieve is adaptability to change and clear communication of the state of the project and how much effort is needed/spend in projects.
A happy and fun thing i observed was PM Nordqvists Twitter printer, that he built during his maternity leave, just for fun.

Talking of fun, this year i did not jump the cliff, like the first and the second year, as i didn’t think it felt like much fun, but mostly pressure. Clapping pressuring hands before i jump wasn’t what I opted in for, I just did it for fun. Altho i was happy to see the fun continue in a good tradition.

The most appreshiated sponsors were as always Binero with morning coffee, chasing away the sheep, and the guerrilla pillow sponsors.

The riots in my London

The riots in London have been going on for about three days now, spreading to other cities in the UK. Wether its opportunistic gangmembers or random bored kids in need to bee seen, feel authority or just happy get another kettle from Argos, or even stealing a plasma television into their (!) Audi it is indeed a bit wierd being in London at the moment, when everything shuts down, you cant buy food and you fall asleep to more police-sirens than usual. However this quote seems adequate (via Catherine).

“When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, discriminate, drive people into deeper poverty and shoot people dead whilst refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up and express their anger and frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard.” – Martin Luther King

London calling + SkrivaPå = Scrive.com

. I’ve moved to London.

. I´ve joined the Stockholm based startup SkrivaPå.se to internationalize the service with the new name Scrive, opening up the London Office, yet we are still a highly boot-strapped, lean start-up developing in Haskell. SkrivaPå & Scrive.com do digital signatures for contracts and legal-papers.

I first met lead-developer Gracjan Polak, while presenting my last startups RunAlong API at Disruptive Code conference in Stockholm autumn 2010 (post from Programmable web). The Startup community is Sweden is a close knitted newtork and we know eachother, and here was this new guy asking excellent questions, who was he?
Gracjan Polak, the Polish technical co-founder of SkrivaPå, introduced me to the Swedish founder and Stockholm School of Economics student Lukas Duczko. We ended up talking all evening about API´s, scrum, web-strategy, and how to manage distributed teams and other fellow founders startup-issues.

As we continued talking  about business and strategy during autum 2010 and spring 2011. To make a long story short, i moved to London, the UK working on opening up the RunAlong.se API publicly, and letting go of that for a bit. Lucas was fast to ask me to join SkrivaPå, after all the discussions i knew the product well, understood the business model and had no doubt when i said yes to working with this garage startup.

The fun part that i discover what it is like working with a highly effective distrubuted team. Scrive has 3 people working in Sweden, 3 in Poland, 3 in London, one in Turkey, and one travelling. We have things like the Tibetan Patches, pieces of code that our developer Eric Normand wrote in Tibet and Xian, and pushed up to the dev server when accessing wifi in the Himalayas. How wonderful insn’t that. Let me put it this way, i feel like I work for the most modern startup i can ever imagine, giving co-workes and co-owners freedom to do what they love.

As part of my work with Scrive i can also continue my work with GeekGirlMeetup.com, an un-conferance about web, code and startups aiming to create more female role-models in tech, new networks for women in tech and active knowledge exchange. Conclusion, Scrive gives GeekGirlMeetup.com an active sponsorship, it’s the first of the organisations sort.

Ideas know no borders

Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus vistits Stockholm, Sweden today to give a talk om his new book “Social Entrepreneurship”. Mohammad is known for his work with Grameen Bank that he was awarded the Nobel prize in peace for. Grameen Banc loans money to female entrepreneurs, due to their capability of paying back and using the profit to invest in their kids education, and reinvesting in the company with aims to take them out of poverty. Today he gave a broader talk on Social entreprenreurship and how ideas spread.

“Social entrepreneurship isn’t taking 10% of a comapnies profit and giving it to charity or a festival you want to be closely associated with even if it could be a good idea, thats profiling. Social Entrepreneurship is is making business in a way where an idea that benefits the world, validates return on investement”, Mohammad says.

A question raised was how can Swedish companies become better att social entrepreneurship? Take a part of your % that you use for CSR and and invest them in a fond with the soul aim to develop the companies good ideas, social ideas with aims to make money.

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“Good ideas know no borders.”- Mohammad Yunus.

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Live stream part one, Live stream Part two (above)

More about Yunus from Wikipedia:

Stockholm Startup School for the future bright minds of tomorrow

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Photo: Niki Lundberg

Today i have been invited to a participatory idea development for the Stockholm Startup School, combining technology and entrepreneurship for 15-18 year olds, initiated by The City Of Stockholm.
Together with Christer Holger and Hans Renman (Tänk Om), multitalent Isabella Lövengrip (Egoboost) Walter Naeslund (Honesty) and highschool student Melina Nilsson Nikopoulous (Melinas), Marcus Tägtström, Kärnhuset. A pleasent day with lots of post-its and love for the future bright minds of tomorrow, we are designing the school we wish for. The school will start autumn 2012, more info soon, and heres a bit of reading for now.

If you prefer readning in Swedish, heres my Nya Affärer post about Stockholm Startup School.

GeekGirlMeetup 5: GameOn!

The fith GeekGirlMeetup conferance with the theme GameOn was wonderful, and as the theme suggests playfull. An ode to the teams pulling this of, we wouldnt have done this without you!

The program team:
Miriam Ohlsson @miriamolsson
Maria Sjöber @nefalia

The streaming team:
Lead Streamer, Emma Koszinowski
Natalia Medina (thanks for graphics)
Ingela Hjulfors Berg
Anna VGA
Lisa Carlbom
Agnes Attling
Ingrid Karin Holmberg
Jenna Jonsson
Maria Ekman
Monika
Joana
Ida Pettersson
Karolina Brantås

The Organizational team
Chief organizer, Maria Söderberg @mariasoderberg
Lead Designer, Natasha Ehlen @natasha_sthlm
Koordniator and PR, Josefin Nässil @josefinnassil
Afterparty eventorganizer, Jeanin Day @jeaninday
Co-founder and Sponsorships, Heidi Harman (thats me) @heidiharman

I was sick during the whole thing, with 39° but it was ok. I summed up our history during theese two and half years in a talk, trying as well as possible to mirror our development, aim, results, wishes and dreams. We also had  Malmö´s founder Anna Oscarsson up on stage. The Danish founder Henriette Weber, and Mexicos Oyuki Matsumoto joined in by Skype.

Twingly liveboard day one!

Twingly live board a week after:

Quarter 2 – The beat goes on


Henrik Berggren, giving a talk at SSES.

StartupDay 2011, hosted by SSES was eminent, more writes about that at NyaAffärer where i write more frequently (in Swedish).

Media – the beat goes on.

Keep an eye on:
This is stuff that i would look into if im intrested in preparing to work in a startup or start one myself.

Ungas innovationskraft – aktuell utlysning
Tillväxtverket och VINNOVA söker organisationer/företag/ideella föreningar som önskar ta fram eller vidareutveckla befintliga modeller, metoder eller koncept för att tillvarata och utveckla ungas innovationskraft.
Medel kan sökas för att genomföra aktiviteter som riktar sig till personer (18-30 år) för att stimulera, utveckla och kommersialisera ungas idéer. Sista ansökningsdag är 2011-05-06 kl 14.
Läs mer om utlysningen på VINNOVAs webbplats

CAP – Scrum projektledarutbildning
Antagligen en av Sveriges roligare 1 års utbildningar som förbereder oslipade diamanter och projektledar-rävar till scrum-ledare. Ett samtida krav som behövs för att jobba i en start-up eller på webbyrå. Sista ansökningsdag 15 maj. Agileleadership.se eller läs mer på CS.

Swedish Hackers – the book

My friend Linus Larsson (and Daniel Goldberg), a reporter at Computer Sweden has been working ages on this book “Svenska Hackare“, Swedish Hackers – and tales from the shadowland, it was released just recently. The book features the dark stories of the web from Swedens most (in)famous hackers. Multifaceted the book features stories from the 16 year old who hacked into Pentagon etc, gets past the annonymacy barrier and discloses many women being hackers, yet never disclosing their gender.

Things take time yes, and the one that waits for something good doesn’t wait too long at all.

Would you like to read it in english, leave your mailadress here and I’ll collect a list for Linus, and share it with him. Hopefully this will speed the translation process up a bit with the publisher.

Week 6: New Egypt Now

(Image from Fffound)

It was only a few moths ago I was visiting Egypt with the Swedish Institute giving a talk on the internet being the infrastructure for change for young leaders, journalist and changemakers. I was invited again to give a talk on GeekGirlMeetup for the SheEntrepreneur program, a mentorship program with entrepreneurs from the MENA region initiated by the Swedish Institute.

My adept, sadly enough did not have the opportunity to show up, but i had a chance to meet interesting women from the region, that put a strong perspective on their (and my) everyday entrepreneurship.

During the last evening presentations Mubarak stepped down, and it was an emotional moment, without a doubt. The girls called it New Egypt, im from New Egypt.
That night was the entreprenuers freedanced. And like we say at the Kaospilots, if I can’t dance its not my revolution.

Young Swedish Entrepreneurs on the rise.
This was not the only young entrepreneurs i met this week. I also had the priviledge of being invited to DAC (Digital Arts Center) to be on a panel for the future bright minds of tomorrow in IT, presenting their ideas. With Peter Sandberg aka @poppetotte from Disruptive.nu and a few others we had the chance to give them feedback on ideas and presentations. Thank you, it was very inspiring!

(Image from Fffound)

Week 3-5 Andman Islands & Nicobar, a working studio


It’s not everyday you have a friend from school, that buys land, on the Andman islands, located in the Bengal Bay, planning to start a working studio. So when your asked to do the digital strategy, you say yes, pack your bag and check out the premises.

And there i was thinking i should be able to work from there. Well, the satelite internet has a lot left to wish for, and i barley managed to finish the assignments i was already working on, so there we go, yes theres a need for a propper working studio in paradise. Paradise works!