Local Venture Activation Centres

An activation programme focused on delivering "watch-try-teach" community-led innovation in UN SDGs and multicapital accounting.

Built a community-led activation programme over seven years realised in a network of thirty centres. Involved with Reporting 3.0 r3-0.org.

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Good people want to do good but most don't know where or how to begin. Often they don't know they'll need support, connections and mentorship to get started, become sustainable and scale. Many have never been exposed to the tools and technologies which can help them do good. This is what we have discovered over seven years of running Venture Centre and being embedded in a network of thirty Venture Activation Centres across New Zealand.
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TL;DR: Blend the experience of building Venture Activation Centres in NZ over seven years with a focus on UN SDGs, Multicapital Accounting and DeFi using Cardano to evolve a Cardano Activation Centre programme and resources that scale on a city-by-city chapter basis globally.
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Summary: Our proposal is to contribute all the creative commons material and experience we've developed over the last seven years running a community-led and centred Venture Activation Centre; package it with our sustainable development and Cardano knowledge and develop a programme for instigation of Cardano Venture Activation Centres — a tested and deployed programme format, set of resources, and supporting advise that can be deployed around the globe as part of the Ambassadors program.
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The programme aims to scale vertically and globally with local city chapters being supported to form using a light touch approach modelled after Legal Hackers ( https://legalhackers.org/people/ ) and RadicalxChange's ( https://www.radicalxchange.org/community/chapters /) chapter model; we are co-organisers of Legal Hackers NZ. The principle difference from these will be, organisers of Venture Activation Centres will be able to draw from a growing body of material to help them run local events, workshops, and tap into a global mentorship programme.
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As capability is built chapters can evolve into full Venture Activation Hubs modelled in the image of Venture Centre and its co-working space Basestation. Chapters and Hubs will have full access to necessary content and guides as they are developed, and be able to contribute their learnings specific to their context to a Venture Activation Knowledge Commons. As the programme scales we will collectively organise regional and global events. Again this is inspired by LegalHackers events such as the Computational Law Festival (https://legalhackers.org/clplus2020/) and regional summits (https://legalhackers.org/summit2020/).
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The primary focus is on venture activation to solve local problems in a sustainable way. The emphasis will include thinking, testing and use of DAOs and DeFi with Cardano. Our intent is to bring socially-oriented entrepreneurs, designers, and developers together to solve local problems — creating progress and prosperity in partnership — something we've been doing for seven years.
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We aim to wrap the programme's development, content production and support into a proto-DAO with a collaborative accounting model similar to SourceCred ( https://sourcecred.io/ ); dogfooding our own advice.
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Reference: https://clik.vc/magic
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Proposal: Our proposal aims to kickstart what will be an ongoing effort dependent on funding and DAO participation. We will develop as part of the programme a number of resources and event formats. Wherever possible we'll be drawing upon the work of the Cardano Community and the Venture Centre Community to help research, produce, and test material including:

• Sustainable Development scenarios and case studies (including short videos discussing the case studies). We'll start with Goodness Group ( https://goodnessgroup.co.nz/ ) and CLOSER.coop (Cooperative, perpetually affordable home and community development).
• Self-paced training and reference material aligned with the scenarios and case studies giving more depth to how Cardano can be used to solve the problems in our case studies.
• Onboarding material for public presentations and getting started. To help Local Ventre Activation Centres onboard members, entrepreneurs and do outreach into other parts of their local economy.
• Small Group Workshop programmes to give people hands-on experience and group discussion/support for Cardano inside their venture. That could include running social simulation exercises ( https://socialsimulations.org/ ) to help people understand how Cardano can be used to solve social problems.
• Develop a Mentorship programme based on Venture Centre's existing programme but imbued with a Cardano mindset and toolkit.
• Guides and resources Running a hackathon/start-up weekend format along with resources and guides. We've run lots of these over the years so have a pretty good sense of how to make a great event run smoothly.
• Code and Smart-Contracts that support the scenarios. The purpose here is for demonstration and teaching, not production code. This will include Marlowe contracts that can be easily customised and deployed. Our aim is to leverage work already done and wrap the material into a standardised way. For example explaining and using the AlphaBonds model developed by Shruti Appiah (IOHK) with Block Science and IXO.
• Wallet and backend analytical tools to help coordinate and account for the collaborations in the invisible economy. To help scale the Cardano Venture Activation Centres operations and reduce the burden of running one, we need tools to help us.

We can start with a specialised Mobile Wallet Application that helps account for the invisible economy with token accounting and Self-Sovereign Identity in an easy to use way, tailored to the social and collaborative needs of the programme.
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All bootstrapping material and initial event formats will be deployed, tested and refined by Venture Centre at Basestation ( https://basestation.nz ). All material and programme format development will leverage our experience with Ventre Centre and our technical understanding of Blockchains and DeFi. Merging that experience with an underlying theme of Cardano, the UN SDGs, New Zealand's Living Standards Framework, and our partnership and involvement with Multi-Capital Accounting and Reporting 3.0 ( https://www.r3-0.org/ ).

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We will be drawing upon our deep experience and deep connections with other Ventre Activation Centres around the country and across the globe. That will include drawing from and testing material with our extensive network of 6,000 fellow travellers. And will includes groups such as Enspiral ( https://www.enspiral.com/ ), the Edmund Hillary Fellowship ( https://www.ehf.org/ ), Legal Hackers ( https://legalhackers.org/ ), Reporting 3.0 ( https://www.r3-0.org/ ).
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We have working relationships with NZ Government agencies, Universities in New Zealand, Australia, UK and Māori organisations. We have already been active in promoting Cardano to these groups since 2017.
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We intend to develop the Cardano Venture Activation Centre material and our supporting tools over a period of time as a DAO and with the help of the community and the Cardano Foundation. We will leverage material already being developed by the Cardano Community, standardising formats as needed. Where applicable material will be licensed creative commons and use an appropriate open-source license.
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The initial funding will only cover the production of programme branding, legalise, chapter guidelines and code of conduct, website and content, initial scenarios and case studies (including supporting videos), and entry-level workshops on 'What is Cardano', and hands-on how to use it.
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To fully develop a comprehensive programme of material and tools we will be seeking further funding from the community, setting up a DAO, and obtaining support from the Cardano Foundation. To bootstrap things, we will be leveraging our existing experience, knowledge, resources, and relationships.
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Experience: The full team is many thousand. However, the principal team members responsible for helping to shepherd the programme development in the early days have experience in mainstream media publication, teaching, and finance/blockchain and legal technology. This is in addition to experience gained running Venture Centre.
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Jo Allum: Impact Entrepreneur, Communication / Information Systems Designer. Creative Director of multiple title launches in UK and for Murdoch operations in Australia. CoFounder / Director – Venture Centre, Council Member – New Zealand Open Source Society and Society for Cooperative Housing New Zealand, Cofounder – Legal Hackers NZ, Director – Yojo Communication Design. ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/joallum/ )
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Robert O'Brien: Distributed Systems Software Engineer (Financial systems) and Entrepreneur. Co-Founded three start-ups in Financial Data Analytics, International Trade Payments, and Impact Investing. Co-Organises LegalHackers NZ, and advises Venture Centre. ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertobrien-ai/ )
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Pascale Hyboud-Peron: Impact Entrepreneur, Facilitator, Operations Director and 20+ year high-school teacher introduced self-directed digital learning tools to NZ high-schools. CoFounder / Director – Venture Centre, Facilitator – Young Enterprise Scheme (Tauranga), Startup Weekends (Nationally), Trustee of the Global Entrepreneurship Network NZ Chapter. ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascalehyboudperon/ )
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Background: In the seven years running Venture Centre we have felt the pain of not fitting into mainstream economic models. We focus on maximising collaborative value through coopertition (cooperative competition). We run on the sniff of an oily rag. It is difficult to account for the "invisible economy" that makes everything happen.
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The entrepreneurs who participate in Venture Centre's community, working on challenges, creating impact for people and planet, locally, regionally and nationally, find it hard to raise finance when seeking blended returns. Legal requirements, legacy governance and vested interests burden these entrepreneurs with unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles and limit resource distribution. And this is in one of the least corrupt countries in the world and ranked No.1 for ease of doing business ( https://www.companiesoffice.govt.nz/insights-and-articles/nz-ranks-first-for-ease-of-doing-business-for-the-fourth-year/ ).
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We see Blockchains, Assets (Tokens), Smart-Contracts, DeFi, and Cardano as a very valuable tool to solving many of the challenges we've faced and enabling our community of impact entrepreneurs to test and implement their solutions.
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In May 2014 Venture Centre was officially launched and set out on a journey to be a leading prefigurative example of how to develop community-centred and led innovation and regional economic development. We opened a community-oriented coworking space Basestation, a shared place for people and communities to work together and learn from each other. On opening night we hosted the biggest provincial startup weekend to date. One hundred and seventy-five people were participating in a marathon fifty-four-hour sprint of learning, focusing on startup tools and processes — people from all walks of life, cultures, ages and stages.
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Five years later we hosted our sixth Startup Weekend where participants focused on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We've developed and hosted STEMfest, an event bringing five thousand parents and children, hackers (creative problem solvers) and experts together to celebrate science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
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Today this community-led innovation and Venture Activation hub cultivated by Venture Centre has relationships with over six thousand people. We've helped one hundred and fifty socially-focused technology entrepreneurs to startup (or scale-up) — ventures emerging from the collaborative environment. They are (or aim) to move beyond the status quo and have a positive impact on our future. Each month there are thirty to sixty events that foster collaboration. One thousand five hundred people working together form the active core.
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Deliverables: include the development of the programme material along with refinement from prototype deployment and testing.
Programme branding and initial guidelines;

• Legalise to protect the programme format, Cardano brand and mission;
• Chapter guidelines and Code of Conduct development
• Programme and Local Chapter Website Template (as Hugo Template) and global programme content;
• Two Initial scenarios and case studies (including supporting videos);
• Entry-level workshops on 'What is Cardano', and hands-on setup and use;
• Initial sensemaking, requirements development and UX exploration for "Invisible Economy" Wallet and backend analytics tools.

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