Portal:Social entrepreneurship/About

NB: The resources shared here on this portal are intended to help people find learning resources related social entrepreneurship and potentially to seed collaboration in developing such learning resources here on Wikiversity or elsewhere.
Feel free to edit, improve and extend the material, and even to take over this portal - the originators have moved on to other things.

Origins

The World Bank Institute (WBI) in collaboration with the Meraka Institute and other partners started a project to seed the establishment of a network of universities focused on student community outreach and social entrepreneurship.

The resources shared here represent a possible curriculum framework which may be edited and used by anyone and extended.

The broad vision is:

Enabling communities to enhance their quality of life sustainably while facilitating student learning on social entrepreneurship

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What is Social Entrepreneurship?

Initial focus and aspirations

The initial focus is on South African institutions but the process is open and welcomes international collaboration.

The intention is to inspire co-development of curriculum materials on social entrepreneurship and facilitate knowledge sharing among students and educators in this field.

The portal also serves as a hub for collaboration among academic staff and students across institutions, social entrepreneurs, NGOs, government departments, and other organisations towards effective social entrepreneurship.

As developing communities become connected, they too may communicate: expressing needs and offerings - sharing knowledge for the benefit of all.

Some principles

In the interests of inclusivity, and in accordance with the South African Policy on Free and Open Source Software, the initiative takes a strong stand on using free/libre and open source software tools for knowledge generation and sharing, and the learning resources produced are released under a license compatible with the libre knowledge definition and the free cultural works definition.

Work done

So far we have established a wiki-based portal with a framework for curriculum development:

• Portal:Social_entrepreneurship/Curriculum

and some work was done in 2009 to pilot this wiki approach to education and a gaming framework.

The primary focus in 2009 is to grow the network of educators, students, institutions and other parties from the public, private and civil society sectors engaged with the initiative, and to catalyse collaborative development of learning resources.

Status

In essence, the project moved foward towards the aforementioned gaming framework (EVOKE) which is currently (2014) being replicated in Latin American countries.

The wiki approach on Wikiversity/WikiEducator did not take off. The reasons for this were not fully explored but may have included Institutions preferring (perhaps as a matter of policy) to use their own ICT infrastructures rather than having everything publically editable by anyone, where this was not the case, some potential participants may have been put off by having to learn a new system for collaborative content development (MediaWiki); insufficient resources to put due effort into community building, etc..

Present and future

Although the original project has moved on, the resources produced here on Wikiversity remain available for anyone to use, edit, enhance, share, ....

With this brief background, you are hereby invited to take this further - build community and participate in sharing knowledge which will contribute significantly to quality of life and sustainable development.

The front page of the portal

• Portal:Social_entrepreneurship

includes a link explaining how to get involved

• Portal:Social_entrepreneurship/networking/How_to_get_involved

Footnotes

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Historical Notes