Policy crowdsourcing, Thaisong, Hybrid-value chain

the last two days were intensed, the Ideas Festival! for ideas.in.th. Asia’s first policy crowdsourcing experiment, is going very well, the minister of the PM office as well as PM’s Advisor K. Apirak were joining the event. The judges were really helping out with over 6 hours of American Idol-style policy ideas judging. Now we have 20 ideas from 50 for the public to vote on! interestingly, there are so many people participating, much more than I thought! we even had few mentally unstable people participating as well. among cheerfulness of people there, one guy who lost was telling me that ‘without money, you can’t do thing’.. that is sad but he should change the attitude first to get things done.

I’ve met Brittany from ThaiSoong, the fairtrade organization is trying to help the urban poor in slums to produce fashionable bags from recycled plastic and export them to the U.S., we will be helping them with biz planning, they seem to be a great social enterprise startup! check out http://thaisongfairtrade.org/

I’ve met K. Sinee and Chris from Ashoka as well about the coming Social Enterprise Asia Workshop on 15-16 Nov., seeing how they might be able to help make this serve the real needs of social entrepreneurs in the region! they are thinking about promoting “hybrid value-chain” a partnership concept between social enterprise – businesses – NGOs – gov for sustainable development, there are many great works such as low-income housing scheme in India, check out the publication on this at http://fec.ashoka.org/content/request-copy-new-alliance-global-change

Lastly, I was thinking about revising the policy sets for the coming national social enterprise committee meeting, instead of just plan SE incentives scheme, perhaps go more proactive into sustainable economy stimulation in order to reduce inequality as well as properly promoting sustainable growth engines such as fair trade, community-based ecotourism, cultural-based community products and so on!