[Menai-LUG] Social Enterprise

[John Fraser Williams]

Andy Davies has asked me to post this to the Menai LUG.

Hi everyone,

Well, it's been a little while I know but finally my locally famous
dynamism has kicked in and I have a meet up report for you all. The
Belle Vue was quiet on the Thursday we arranged to meet up. Present
was the dark trinity of me, Richard Ablitt and the estimable John
Fraser Williams. We chatted about this and that, including how access
to IT equipment is important in improving educational attainment and
what we can do to improve access for those who can't really afford it.

Social enterprise can help and who better than we 'enthusiasts' to get
one going. If you or anyone you know have business administration
skills or experience of setting up a social enterprise or applying for
funding I would love to hear from you / them.

Please regard this as a RFC. All views welcome.

Regards,

Andy
Llanberis

Let's see if we can develop some momentum!

All the best,

John Fraser Williams

[Richard Smedley]

Post by John Fraser Williams
Social enterprise can help and who better than we 'enthusiasts' to get
one going. If you or anyone you know have business administration
skills or experience of setting up a social enterprise or applying for
funding I would love to hear from you / them.

Hi,

I'm running or starting four social enterprises around Free Software,
Web, & social media at the moment. I'm investigating a new one
to shift several not-too-old servers, desktops, & PCs into the
third sector.

In particular, I'm looking for the following people
for various ideas:

trainers - particularly skilled with difficult categories
CFO type - ruthless hand on the cashflow
networkers - have you lots of low friends in high places?
well-off - prepared to put up a little starting capital?
hacker - quick 'n' dirty coding in Ruby, Perl, Python, or sh.
Coder - elegant code in Lisp, squeak, or Python

Happy to talk more.

Pob hwyl,

- Richard

PS Anyone in Liverpool on Weds evenings in the next three months?
Come to: http://www.goodgnus.org/small-steps/ at FACT.

[Richard Smedley]

Post by Richard Smedley
trainers - particularly skilled with difficult categories

Difficult technology or difficult trainees? I used to teach Design & Tech for
age 11 to 18 in a variety of schools from a remand home in Shepherd's Bush to
a C of E High School full of little angels. What are you looking for?

If one of the projects can get off the ground, it
would involve training up offenders and neets [1]
to be techies. Refurbing PCs with *nix.

This is the project needing most input from others,
and I'm not in a position to push too much for it
atm, so always looking for other interested
parties.

- Richard

PS Pls keep both LUGs cc'd in replies. I'm sure
Kevin won't mind approving posts through to
Menai ;)

[1] neets = no education employment or training.
iow a legacy of government policy of recent decades :-/

[Richard Smedley]

A totally honest question - why is this a third sector enterprise
rather than a proper for profit project?
The only advantage I see with going down the NGO route is to do with
tax and funding

Hello Oli,

I think you have a misconception about Social Enterprise.
Social enterprises are profit-making businesses that
exist for the good of community and return a triple
bottom line of financial, social & ecological accounts.

*All" businesses should be like this - and if you have read
The Companies Act (2006), then you'll know that limited
companies are gradually being pushed this way ;-)

Successful businesses have huge power for good or bad.
While Nestl? has killed many thousands of babies in
S America, and been consistantly censured in the UN,
others show a different path...

The Eden project built unfeasibly large domes in the
middle of nowhere (something the government-backed
projects failed to do at Doncaster, and struggled to
keep open at Wales Botanic Garden), and brought
?800 million intot he N Cornwall economy in its
first 10 years - more than all the EU regional
funding to help the entire South East in that period.

- surely, if you set the company up correctly, you are
going to make a profit and you can use that money in any way you wish.
With a good accountant, you wouldn't be paying tax anyway!

Of course business *owners* can choose how to spend
the money - in private businesses. The shareholders of
Unilever don't seem too bothered, however.

The point is *accountability* - and a general culture
of going in to wok to make things better, not just
to make more money.

I ask because open source has such a strong business potential to it
(Red Hat, Ubuntu, MySQL to name a few)

& IBM, HP, Canonical, ...

that I don't understand why it
needs to be hidden in the charity basket.

It's nothing to do with charity. SEs are about *enterprise*
not handouts. They have to be sustainable businesses.

Its something that has been bugging me for a while!

Clearly ;-)

In summary SEs are not "not-for-profit", they're
"more-than-just-profit".

Regards,

- Richard

[Kevin Donnelly]

A totally honest question - why is this a third sector enterprise
rather than a proper for profit project?

The "third sector" has a variety of flavours, which the first and second
sectors (private and public) have had an unholy alliance for many years in
covering up, for their own vested interests. It runs from small charities or
community groups, through larger trading fund-type groups, to first-sector
type businesses in all but name, with a wider remit than purely monetary
bottom line (social enterprises) - most co-ops and credit unions would come
in here, and I would even count The Co-op and perhaps John Lewis and similar
groups as third sector rather than first sector. We are encouraged to think
of the third sector as the "voluntary sector" (Mrs Jones in the Oxfam shop),
because it suits larger PLCs and local and central government not to have too
many questions asked about their own business models. I think after the
recent economic fiasco that there will be a recalibration towards more
attention to the social and environmental impacts of the greed-based,
scratch-my-back model ... :-)