June 11 was the June #4Change chat.  These monthly online discussions take place via Twitter – participants add to the conversation by tweeting messages and using the tag #4change; this lets people follow the conversation, whether they have a Twitter account or not, by following the tag #4change on search.twitter.com. This month’s topic was Challenges and Competitions for Social Innovation.

You can see the recap of the chat here.

The main 3 questions for this chat were:

1. How can challenges/competitions be used to discover, support, and accelerate social change projects and solutions?
2. What are the different types of competitions and which work best in driving change?
3. How can challenges support collaboration btw projects?

We are pulling together some of the key takeaways and would love to hear from you if you watched or participated, or even if you didn’t (you can read the transcript from the chat and add your thoughts, too!).

Two key takeaways from Morgan and two from me include:

• the potential for future collaboration with other projects should be put into the judging criteria
• competitions can surface stories and causes that might not otherwise get any attention
• when creating a competition or challenge, it is incredibly important to be clear about the context (who is involved, who is targeted, what the ideas will be directed towards, etc.)
• there is a real interest in creating a compendium of competitions and their characteristics (I’ll be helping us wrangle this one and providing more details and opportunities for the community to start creating the compendium soon!)

Share your takeaways, read the transcript, and more!

Read more about #4Change, the Why, How and Who behind the monthly conversation series.

This month’s #4change conversation was around Challenge Competitions for Social Innovation.  Aside from the team here at #4change, we also had some other great folks join us during the chat.

Our 3 questions for this chat were:

1. How can challenges/competitions be used to discover, support, and accelerate social change projects and solutions?
2. What are the different types of competitions and which work best in driving change?
3. How can challenges support collaboration btw projects?

We also discussed a developing a taxonomy of competitions with the following criteria:

1. who votes
   
2. who for
   
3. prize
   
4. geo
   
5. timeline
6. sector
7. criteria (collaboration?)
8. implementation tools

Participants also shared some great links throughout.  Two key takeaways for me were:

• the potential for future collaboration with other projects should be put into the judging criteria
• competitions can surface stories and causes that might not otherwise get any attention

What’s your take?  Feel free to comment below and tweet it out!

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