As you know, E-Motive´s core mission as promoted by Oxfam Novib is to support Citizens & Social Entrepreneurs who offer innovative local solutions to global social challenges. Until now E-Motive has been centered in face to face exchanges of innovative solutions between South and North, whereas since March this year, we have started a process to really go global with the development of a platform that will enable more automated exchanges around the world.

With the support of Somos Más Europe, the current E-Motive transition is thought in terms of conceiving itself as a ‘service network’ (a network where the services of their members complement, integrate, and add value) and eliminating the differences between North and South.

The need for this is to further support citizen and expert access, and real involvement around innovative solutions, to make innovative ideas available (and alive) digitally and to pilot test cases. The three test cases are coordinated by partners of E-Motive program in the past and they have been chosen to prototype this new stage:

• Empulse Game led by Elos Institute
• Innovate to Empower led by Young in Prison
• Global Queer Muslim Movement led by Common Ground

They will start hosting their communities in June, so bookmark their sites and stay tuned!

It seems only yesterday but it was already in March that we met to design together this process and the team moving it forward, whereas in April we kicked-off the pilot projects with them in The Hague. Since we want to prototype new ways of working together, we worked a lot on the principles of collaboration, that is to say, not only the WHY or towards WHAT we work for, but also the HOW. We decided to use different methodologies in our process, design thinking, agile and art of hosting among others. Other partners collaborating to make this happen with their expertise are University of Utrecht and La Coordinadora.

On 12th May we did our first team review and retrospective and celebrated that we have indeed created this atmosphere of trust working online that we aimed for, as well as a very international team setup. We have already experienced the hiccups of not remembering holidays in other countries and having to adjust and be flexible in our ways of working together. A learning experience in itself! So we are walking the talk...