(Other continental or worldwide networks, please contact us)

Minutes from the 2016 conference :

International Annual Conference on CrowdInnovation, CrowdFunding, Smart Finance and Appropriate Technologies for Peace and Sustainable Development
December 12-16, 2016
United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland

Wednesday December 14, 2016
from 14:30 to 18:00

Presentations were in English and French. Debates and questions were organized in English and French.

Crowd Sourced Sciences

Operators of CrowdFunding, Smart Finance and Appropriate Technologies who exchange already at national and continental levels (Europe, America, Asia, Africa, Middle-East...) and who desire to exchange together, and share practices and solutions, at the world level, meet together at the Annual International Conference organized in the United Nations.

Crowd Lending / Crowd Supporting / Crowd Investing / Smart Finance / Appropriate Technologies

Several public or associative organizations that are active in the domain of CrowdFunding, Smart Finance and Appropriate Technologies, federated or organized, at the national level. The main national actors, the federations, and the specific operators, organized presently at the international level, and are called to meet annually at the end of the civil year, at the International Annual Conference on the CrowdFunding, Smart Finance and Appropriate Technologies, at United Nations, in Geneva.

This annual space of sharing results and pooling of skills, allow to the actors of the domain to exchange practices, solutions, ideas, needs.

Your Annual Exchanges Resource

In the following of the national and continental meetings that are organized in each country and continent by the local federation, this International Annual Conference at United Nations allow the actors to implement in consultation, or to inform mutually, of progress and actions they lead during the year, or that they have in project.

The participants at this Conference were:

• Local and regional actors of different countries
• Thematic Actors by disciplines of finance and of crowdfunding
• Regional or national federations
• Thematic Federations, by disciplines of finance and of crowdfunding
• Large Institutions of Finance, Sustainable Development and Economy
• Government departments (Economy, Industry, Finance ...) and international associations of Ministries
• Specialized Journalists (finance, economy, science, environment, education, sustainable development ...)
• UN agencies (UNDP, UNEP ...)

Subjects on the agenda for December 2016 were:

• Standards and references of exchange on Participatory Finance practices between national and international organizations
• National and international Charts of Participatory Finance, examples, projects, ongoing discussions of shares
• Financing Solutions of the actions of Development and New Appropriate Technologies
• Access of citizen actors to the Development of Projects beyond their simple financial contributions
• Administrative Status / legislative / recognition / etc of actors of Smart Finance projects
• The Citizen Participatory Finance, beyond the digital interface
   * Expected Features of web portals of Participatory Finance
• Services for Participatory Finance provided by FabLabs
• Dissemination and Exploitation of the results to the uninvolved Big Public
• Road map for the mutual opening of the data collected

Detailed Program

Discussions between stakeholders of the meeting took place in a round table between speakers and debates with the audience of the Assembly.

Organiser : NGO Objective Sciences International, Geneva
Chairman : Thomas EGLI, President of Objective Sciences International
Moderator : Maxime PALLAIN, Membre of the Swiss syndicate of the CrowdFunding Organisations, CEO Switzerland of Raizers. Raizers is a plateform of crowd investment online, unlisted stocks, active in Switzerland, France and Benelux. This company propose to its crowd-community 2 main products of investment, capital shareholding in SME and and debenture loan in more mature companies or specific sectors like property development : https://www.raizers.com/

14:00 – Opening of the Conference

14:00
Welcoming

14:30 - Introduction

14:30 - 15’
Opening Remarks
Recall of concepts of the International Annual Conference
Thomas EGLI, President of the NGO Objective Sciences International

Section 1 : Panel about technics of Crowd Innovation for Project Development

Open Public Health Policy Making: Collective Intelligence in Health Care Priorities Setting
This research responds to recent calls in the Public Health Policy literature for more formalized, workable and transparent approaches to Health Care Priorities Setting (HCPS), particularly in the wake of the era of open data, crowdsourcing and social media. Traditional “closed” approaches to HCPS have been shown to be costly and biased resulting in suboptimal use of limited public resources for addressing disease through policy, while lacking public legitimacy and often failing to meet the actual needs of the final intended beneficiaries. Consistent with participatory action research in public health, the collective intelligence (CI) approach presented in this paper uses crowdsourcing as the vehicle to unveil public needs directly from citizens, who are motivated to reveal their individual preferences and collectively contribute to elucidate the needs of their community.
Our empirical results show that this approach: (1) proves simple enough for layman citizens to understand and to use to provide useful insight, (2) yields statistically robust health care priorities settings from a population, and (3) offer complementary insights to those derived from government and institutional sources, whose data typically lag a few years and are often disconnected from the actual needs of the final beneficiaries. In conclusion, the open approach explored in this research offers novel strategic input for public health policy making that closely reflects the final beneficiaries’ actual local needs, and collectively unveils a consistent pattern of health care priorities for a given population, in a participatory, cost-effective and timely manner. Open participatory approaches to health policy making could contribute to create new shared value for health industry players, government leaders, and the beneficiary population.
J. Andrei Villarroel, PhD, Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, School of Management Fribourg | HES-SO, www.hefr.ch

Presentation - Andrei Villaroel

20 years of collective intelligence : Tools, tricks and learnings.
In 2017, Addictlab will celebrate twenty years of experimenting with collaborative processes and collective intelligence.
Addictlab.com is a bottom-up and self-managed cultural platform that guests creative thinkers from all disciplines and cultures.
Currently the lab has over 5000 labmembers from over 100 countries and has 4 main activities:

1. Exhibitions & publications : showcasing and accelerating creative talent from all over the world (eg booths at the Milan Design Week and over 35 publications - books or magazines on different topics. Each publication is a collaborative project.
2. The lab sets up its own research - collective intelligence on dedicated topics, such as Urban green, Tourism, Media & Magazines, World 2.0, Eco & sustainability and more.
3. Consultancy: Addictlab has a business unit ‘YourOwnLab’ to help organisations to develop their own ‘creative lab thinking’. YourOwnLab ‘s clients such as Saint Gobain and Renault , helping them install - and more importantly – animate - Fab Labs.
4. Products & tools (Maker space). Addictlab’s maker mentality creates products, tools and prototypes - brainstorming and participatory processes, workshops, objects
   A selection of Addictlab cases and past stories can include:
   Thinking about a new high speed train for Thalys, Fashion Heritage research for Diesel in India, the SowetoLab project, the NY mutation project (9/11) , City lab projects (Kortrijk, Rotterdam)., bringing a South African fashion designer to Europe. And more: designing conferences such as Teaching Mysteries (EU funded), setting up physical and virtual Idea walls (World Bank, EU Green Week), and a collaborative process to create an international charter for Family Mediation .
   Mr Jan VAN MOL, Belgium, is currently based near Geneva, Switzerland, and started a Swiss entity in 2016.. Currently the lab has a temporary space in Etoy showcasing a selection of activities, design ideas and conducting workshops for kids, adults and organisations. www.Addictlab.com

Presentation - Jan Van Mol 1/3

Presentation - Jan Van Mol 2/3

Presentation - Van Mol 3/3

2nd Part : Panel about CrowdFunding situations, helping achievment of Sustainable Development Projects

Brief overview of types of Crowdfunding, Goals and Issues
Maxime PALLAIN, CEO Switzerland of Raizers

The CrowdFunding from the point of view of a Private Bank, Can we reenchant the job of banker ?

Situation of CrowdFunding in China, an incredible development, which have its reasons

Crowdfunding Vs Fundraising
Is crowdfunding just another tool for NGO fundraisers or a real game changing approach to fund common good. Online donations have strong growth while crowdfunding is still poorly used by non-profit organizations compare to social entrepreneurs. If crowdfunding is a priori perceived as growth drivers for donations, and way of recruiting new donors, what real opportunities do the platforms offer to associations and what changes it introduces in fundraising practices are ?
Mr Alexandre AYAD, GiveXpert, Switzerland, www.givexpert.ch

Presentation - Alexandre Ayad

Campagne de crowdfunding: réalisation d’un guide dédié aux entrepreneurs sociaux

Ce guide a été élaboré dans le but d’apporter les outils nécessaires aux porteurs de projet inexperts dans le domaine du crowdfunding afin qu’ils puissent élaborer une campagne de collecte de fonds de manière efficace et adéquate. Ce guide leur permettra donc de lancer une campagne de financement participatif ayant davantage de possibilités de réussite.
Ingrid ROJAS, Haute Ecole de Gestion de Genève, Suisse

Presentation - Ingrid Rojas

WeChair: an independent academic chair crowdfunding platform

Public universities are increasingly being subject to budget cuts and restrictions. Consequently academic education programs see their faculty staffs shrink while having to deliver the same training to their
students. Likewise, opening new areas of research and education is often unthinkable under such budgetary constraints. While the model of public funding has definitely worked well in the past, public universities are at risk. More recently, public private partnerships (PPP) have led to privately funded chairs that are hard to obtain and often ultimately rely on public funding after several years.
The Internet and its participative properties have opened new avenues in how we collectively deal with some problems by leveraging the crowd for science, causes, finance, etc. More specifically crowdfunding gave rise to a whole economy allowing projects to emerge with the support of a large base of people. Building on this momentum and considering the budgetary constraints public universities are facing, we think it is time to leverage the 4P model (Public Private People Partnership) in supporting a sustainable public research and education model.
WeChair aims at launching the first independent global platform for crowdfunding academic chairs. Following the same approaches found in many crowdfunding initiatives such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo, our claim is that research and education now need to follow the same path by engaging people and organizations alike in supporting open and sustainable quality education and research. WeChair will host campaigns to raise the required funding to support targeted chairs covering a professor position, a research assistant (PhD candidate) and a budget for expenses. Once the campaign reaches a given threshold, the chair is negotiated with the target university and the campaign lasts as a “sliding window” of funding for as long as the campaign is supported. Campaigns can be targeted towards specific researchers showing a precise research and teaching plan or more generally as an opening in an area.
Mr Nicolas SCARINGELLA, WeChair, Switzerland, www.WeChair.org / Mr Vincent PIGNON, Président du Syndicat suisse des Organismes de CrowdFunding, Adjoint Scientifique à la Haute Ecole de Gestion de Genève (Haute Ecole Spécialisée), Gérant de We Can Fund

Presentation - Nicolas Scaringella

Beyond Crowdfunding
Patrick Vieljeux, founder and CEO of Causedirect, will share his views on the crowdfunding industry and explain why crowdfunding has become a commodity and why it must reinvent itself to keep its attractiveness as an alternative funding instrument.
The presentation will be interactive. Together we will identify the different hurdles NGOs are currently facing when it comes to fundraising and try to find some solutions.
As part of the discussion, Patrick will present Causedirect, a social engagement platform for corporations and higher education institutions around the globe. He will highlight what Causedirect has done to overcome these hurdles and how it has used the latest technologies to facilitate community involvement and transform corporate mindsets.
M. Patrick Vieljeux, Switzerland, Founder & CEO, Cause Direct, www.causedirect.org

Presentation - Patrick Vieljeux

Crowdfunding Science

Everybody loves new science and technology. But why can only scientists and engineers be part of the fun of discovering or inventing new stuff ? Because science is difficult, dangerous and expensive. Or is it really ? Could crowdfunding be a new way of supporting exceptional people who have an idea and need some money to test it ? Science and innovation do not always require big investments. They require solutions and people who communicate them to society. This presentation will explore the potential of crowdfunding to support future citizen driven discoveries.
Mr Luc Henry, Hackuarium, Switzerland, www.hackuarium.ch

Presentation - Luc Henry