The garden unique area and the contest results

The results of the garden goes balcony contest were exhibited in the premium furniture area celled, “garden unique”. The aim of the garden unique area is to present design-oriented and modern concepts for the garden and balcony which fulfil the requirements of the luxury segment.

The ideas of the top 10 community winners were shown as huge posters

Most of the submissions and the discussions around the ideas are documented in the idea books, which were also exhibited.

The highlights were of course the prototypes of our three jury prize winners:

Sight by Tim_Kerp

Shade by anonimusarh

go wild in the urban jungle! by furnituresig and yuton

In the “unique hour” the jury prize winners were officially awarded:

jovoto in the garden unique area

Next to the contest area where we had our small jovoto stall. At lot of very interested people visited our stall and had a look at your submissions, we had a lot very inspiring talks with furniture manufactures, designers and architects. But of course also with potential clients. In the picture you can see, Sebastian preparing his next talk.

I’m curious how the things will develop further, we will keep you updated!

People in beta is a celebration of startup culture and this pioneer spirit unique to Berlin. Many of the hot new startups like Gidsy, Amen and Readmill will tell you about their ideas and how they started.

Awesome Foundation Award

The morning will begin with the award ceremony of the awesome foundation: Every other month, a group of trustees (inlcuding jovoto’s Bastian and Nadine) gives out a brown paper bag with 1000,- Euro in cash in it for an awesome project idea. No strings attached! If you have an awesome project you have always wanted to do, please apply here. (Specify Berlin as your chapter)

Betapitch

The day’s highlight is betapitch. Startups do a speed presentation of their business idea to a jury of experienced investors and successful startuppers. The winners get a desk at betahaus for free for a couple of months. It’s a perfect chance to kickstart your idea and make the jump from sideproject to fulltime effort. You can still apply so do it now!

Werewolf Gamez

To relax, you’re invited to visit the jovoto office… it will be kind of dark, kind of spooky… and there will be werewolves on the loose! We read so much about this game the cool kids in Silicon Valley and New York have rediscovered, that we think Berlin needs a refresher course, too. The game is called “Werevolves” and is basically a psychology game of deceit, manipulation and collaboration (hey, something jovotans should be sort of familiar with!). Each player gets assigned a role (citizen, werewolf and some special roles) and then its about figuring out “whodunnit”.

Betajam and Party

Finally, there’s of course going to be a party with beer and music and live bands! Guess what: we have some talented musicians among our team members. Aljoscha and Jaschar will each have their 20minutes of fame (or more) on stage!

This year, our participation is more peripheral, but Bastian and Nadine did make some contributions to SMW11 as part of the advisory board, and of course we ran the lovely “Art: Made by the Crowd” project leading up to the SMW. So, what exactly is going to happen?

Schedule Highlights

Social Media Week is a decentralized event, taking place simultaneously in several cities and with lots of small venues and activities. Topics include social media and politics, crowd-fundig and collaborative consumption, social media analytics and strategy. Check out the full schedule here. All events are free of charge, but may require registration up front!

First off, we recommend (of course!) to stop by the art installation “Praktikum Lab” which is the result of jovoto’s and startnext’s crowd-art experiment.  The installation will be on every day from Monday to Friday at Aufbau Haus, but on Monday, at 7pm, Maya and Yasmina (representing the artists behing the concept), Nadine and Anna (startnext) will introduce the concept and the crowd-generated aspect behind it, at the exhibition venue. Hope to see some of you there!

On Tuesday at about 6pm at Festsaal Kreuzberg , there’s a panel about Community Management. Nadine will attempt her best at telling the audience what it’s like to be a community manager, about the different roles of community management we have established at jovoto and about what the future might bring for community management as an emerging job profile. Also on the Panel are Soundcloud’s David Noel, Nokia’s Surya Santhi and Florian Zühlke of TLGG.

On Thursday at 8pm, Bastian and Nadine are presenting a short intro about the story of the Human Rights Logo at Mashable Salon in Berlin’s Soho House.

On Friday, at last, we’ll enjoy ourselves at a small team BBQ (it also happens to be jovoto’s fourth Birthday!) and at the SMW closing party, at which our dear Jeroen van Boxtel will DJ.

As I said last week jovoto joined the design thinking community for their first community event “better beta“. Design thinking is a method for facilitating human centered innovation and good ideas inside a company (or any project).

She’s a winner:  You_did

As you may recall, we created the better beta logo here at jovoto – an attempt by the organizers of the event to have a community-created conference from the very beginning. To my delight, You_did, (or Judith) who came out with the winning design, could make it to the conference and helped me out during the presentation of the “making of” the better beta logo.

A flash from the past: “Siehaus” and key learnings

The next day was quite busy since I was scheduled to take part as an ‘expert’ in two sessions on “crowdsourcing / virtual collaboration”, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The workshops were structured and moderated by Ahmet Acar who’s a design thinking pro. The aim was to find parallels between the competitive/collaborative ideation process on jovoto and the design thinking process. Can design thinking be transferred into an online environment?

Another nice surprise: One of the participants of the afternoon session turned out to be a jovoto community member whom we haven’t seen in a while,Siehaus, who joined us for Frankfurt Book Fair’s Flying Sparks contest last year. We had a great chat and she told me about a citizen science project that she is currently involved with. It has to do with Berlin’s bird population… and perhaps we will encounter this particular project in an open zone in a few months…

Well, I’m going to have to reflect what I took home from the workshops and discuss it with the rest of the team. But of the top of my head, I guess one of the key learnings was: Design thinkers tend to view the ideation part of a process as “the tip of the iceberg” – most of their work lies in the research, consultation, and reformulation of the challenge brief/question itself.

Startnext Funding Widget

Winning Concept

The concept that ended up as the “winner” is actually a mash-up of different ideas. The basis for it is _Maya’s submission Now Showing How, placed 2nd in the jovoto ranking, but it also includes elements of AnnaNuthaThang’s Confessions Walland Tyby82′s Wishing Wall.

After finalizing the concept, planning (and replanning) the budget, we’re proud to announce Praktikum Lab!

Discover skills you never know you had or lacked. Find out how much fun it is to teach and learn. Wish for a mentor to teach you something you’ve always wanted to know, confess to a skill that you pretend to have but really don’t.

This is going to be fun!! Please help us make this real, chip in 5 bucks or help by letting others know about it.

Pitch Video

This amazing Video was created by the project’s partner 10LAB.tv. Thanks!

The Free Culture Incubator is a series of workshops initiated by Ela Kagel, with the aim to explore the different facets and models that make up ‘free’ culture, ranging from digital rights to open innovation and collaborative consumption.

This session’s topic is:

COLLABORATIVE CREATIVITY
Open Innovation and other Methods to Activate People & Resources

Together with Ela, Dominik & Simon Wind, Jonathan Imme (Until We See New Land), and Ariane Jedlitschka (HAL – Hybrid Art Lab), we will be introducing different models of open innovation and facilitating break-out sessions in which we share experience and develop ideas and guidelines for successful open innovation.

Location: Supermarkt | Brunnenstraße 64, 13355 Berlin |1-6 pm

Participation slots are limited, so please Sign up here!

Graphic recordings by Anna Lena Schiller, created at transmediale '10

The creative contest of MHMK in cooperation with the WWF and jovoto is about to be celebrated appropriately! There was an impressive total of 220 fantastic and inspiring submissions. MHMK invites all participants and those interested to a closing event with exhibition of the most interesting campaign ideas. It will be a chance to meet people and get to know the MHMK. Also, we would like to remind all participating young designers to sign up for the MHMK-Junior Award!

The get together will take place at the MHMK Campus Berlin.

Where and when?
Wednesday, May 4th, 2011, 18:30 – 21:30 Uhr
MHMK Hochschule für Medien und Kommunikation Campus Berlin
M33 Höfe, 2. Gebäude, 1. Stock
Mehringdamm 33
10961 Berlin-Kreuzberg

Until April 27 you can still rate campaign ideas – get going now!

Junior Award and Jury Award updates

Next to the Community Prize Money this contest offers additional awards.

The Junior Award
MHMK is offering individual career coaching (worth €250)., for up to 9 participants!
Registration for the Junior Award still open until May 2nd. Use the registration form or mail to info.b@macromedia.de

The Jury Award
The Jury will select one Grand Prize Winner. Since we’re talking about a Non-Profit organization here, the Prize will be something idealistic rather than monetary. The winner is invited to spend a day at the headquarters of the WWF to meet and discuss with the fisheries-Campaign team. Daniel of the WWF says there will be another surprise coming up… so stay tuned for the announcement at the clsoing event!!

Jack fish Vanua Levu Fiji (c) Brent Stirton Getty Images WWF

Heads up jovotans,

We are starting a new series of online events called “jovoto Flash talks”!

What are Flash Talks?

We call ulta-short presentations (5 minute presentations with a limited number of “slides” Flash
Talks. The concept is being celebrated by designers, architects and other creatives around the
world, different approaches to this format are called Ignite, Pecha Kucha, Lightning Talks, TED
talks, and so forth.

Now, we want to establish our own version of Ultra-short inspiration. The only difference: We’re
not meeting in real life, but online! Each session will have 4 speakers, each a community member
from a different corner of the world! They screencast their presentations live via the internet, and
all other community members can tune in by watching the live stream. This will be very
experimental – but absolutely great fun! 

Edition number one

On Friday the 29th of April at 5PM Berlin time we will kick this series off! The first speakers will be :

• Cipmann from Croatia
• joelo from Germany
• Xavier from Equador
• TBD (interested? Let us know in the comments)

You can follow the livestream of this event via http://www.livestream.com/jovotoflashtalks

Berlin Meetup

Always wanted to know who’s behind that weird username, or who’s that user who always has these brilliant ideas? This is the time to find out, we are organizing a second jovoto community meetup in Berlin!  Meeting up in real life is the perfect opportunity to talk about your experiences, the things that inspire you and collaborate or network with other community members and with us -the jovoto team-. The last meetup tells us that above all its simply great to have a drink with some of your fellow community members. No formalities, just communicate in real life instead of in comments.

So here are the infos.

Thursday the 31th of March

Time: 19.00
Location: Heinz minki
Adress: Schlesischen Tor 3, 10997 Berlin, Kreuzberg (it’s near the Ubahn station Schlesischen Tor)
Facebook Eventpage

For all users that cant make it to Berlin but would be interested to join the meetup virtually, please let us know in the comments below so we can try to set up some virtual seats.