Urgent Evoke

A crash course in changing the world.

What do you think of the story so far? Discuss what happened in Episode 3 here.

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i think it will fail if it fails to capitalize on the love of football powered by the windmill...
The recent event can be used to sell the idea around the area,with football as one of the points,among others such as lighting your home,and streets. In terms of security,this would allow the residents to avert surprise visits from the drug dealers by being able to see their arrival.This then would allow them to maybe hide possessions that would normally be taken away otherwise. Or use the lighting psychology, by turning off lights to signal to the dealers residents not home or asleep,which could avoid them the hustles.
I can think of two ways for the EVOKE network to fail: failing to respond at all, or making the situation worse by our actions. I don't think either of those happened here. The way the people gathered to watch the match reminded me of what Jane McGonigal said in her TED talk -- that one function of games is to give us an escape from a reality that's too painful to bear (I paraphrase a little). Maybe watching the matches will raise morale and lift people's spirits. Maybe people will begin to build more windmills -- or take on other, locally-inspired projects -- in between the matches.

Certainly the situation is not worse than before Eureka started. I was also glad to see an acknowledgment of the fact that even with the best of intentions and an apparently foolproof plan, things don't always go the way we want. EVOKE isn't always a Cinderella story. Not every success is an epic win. Some are, but some are incremental, or even backwards steps. That's part of what makes the epic win so powerful: it doesn't happen every time, but there's a chance that it could.
NGO's were all excited to bring solar power to the nomads in Mongolia. The NGO's thought they might use the power for food refrigeration or something "useful." Instead they all power TV's, they don't eat any food that they want to refrigerate anyway. Get more TV's into the Favelas, then you will see more windmills.
I'm new to the site and I must say you have sparked more than a little intrest for me. Darn you Alchemy and I was just about to turn in! Ahhh well, sleep is for mopers not evokers ;)


.... Actually on second thought, I better sleep haha.
The only failure would be to think we would never fail. Referring back to Jane's TED talk, Tokyo was an "epic win" and epic wins are addictive. That was one of the things I am taking away from this: We need to learn to use the energy from an epic win to slingshot us through the bumps and backsliding into the next epic win. Maybe it will be Rio, maybe not. The only real mistake is the one we repeat. Everything else is a learning opportunity.
Ian, this is really super interesting. I mean, what's wrong with using football as a unifier? The Olympics give us a similar ability to overlook lousy things.

Ian Njuguna said:
i think it will fail if it fails to capitalize on the love of football powered by the windmill...
The recent event can be used to sell the idea around the area,with football as one of the points,among others such as lighting your home,and streets. In terms of security,this would allow the residents to avert surprise visits from the drug dealers by being able to see their arrival.This then would allow them to maybe hide possessions that would normally be taken away otherwise. Or use the lighting psychology, by turning off lights to signal to the dealers residents not home or asleep,which could avoid them the hustles.
These people are trying to build a windmill in one day, i think they will be able to build it but not in one day though. In life when you believe that you can do something, you will do it as long as you set your mind to it an d also cimmitting yourself. failing doesn't have a meaning to people who want to achieve their goals.
I think an important part of any social innovation initiative is recognizing failure. A lot of the posts I've seen in response to this question seem to point towards a reluctance to say you've failed. The thing is that we do fail, and that even the best and brightest of us will fail, sometimes spectacularly. I'll say that the EVOKE network in this week's story failed to engage the community and move beyond a handful of projects into power self-sufficiency. This being the goal for the effort, it was a failure.

That being said though, the most important thing is to ask, "what did we learn?" As other commenters have said, there were several possible causes for the failure, including not fully understanding the favella's social dynamics or perhaps neglecting the ability to watch soccer games as a motivation to build up wind capacity. But to deny a failure when it occurs is counterproductive, and, it could be argued, is a key reason that efforts like ours fail on a larger scale, as they don't recognize the smaller problems and deficiencies.
Maybe TV is the answer to development in Rio....
See article from a colleague in Foreign Policy Magazine about TV's social impact.....
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/revolution_in_a_box


Pajohnso said:
NGO's were all excited to bring solar power to the nomads in Mongolia. The NGO's thought they might use the power for food refrigeration or something "useful." Instead they all power TV's, they don't eat any food that they want to refrigerate anyway. Get more TV's into the Favelas, then you will see more windmills.
I'm a little bit concern by our Evoke abillity to do anything else than provide intertainement. Because with more thant 11'000 players, one of us has already found the solution, even if he or she ignore it.

In the virtual evoke world we succeed saving the days in a few tips... there is one parameter that Evoke, do not obviously difined wich is more important than virtual / real device (artifact) creation. Are we ensure tha our actions, and creations, won't be turned for rogue purposes?

I think that Evoke has allready failed one week ago, but nothing is permanant such as the life for all of us. Also we may still do the difference commes to a yes in the weeks to come.
Patricio Buenrostro-Gilhuys said:
I think the EVOKE Network didn´t fail. It made the people in the Favelas happy. It might have failed to acknowledge the local needs and aspirations. Soccer is a very big part in national pride, identity and part of the daily life in Brazil for a lot of people. The Evoke Network should always have as objectives to listen and understand the needs and dreams of locals.

Yes I agree completly. If the local needs and aspirations were better understood then Evoke might have used better arguments. They could have told the locals to build more windmills for powering soccer stadium lights. If you have good arguments that people care about then it might happen! :)
I think a key thought here is in who's eyes did evoke (Eureka) failed. Favelas are happy so building a windmill was not a failure for them, yet Eureka wanted them to develope by building more windmills and thus having electric energy, so from Eureka's point of view it was a failure. Maybe even a backslash since tv can "eat" productive time from the people and keep them distracted from their situation and less willing to make anything to improve it.

I guess the lesson learned here is to understand local needs and work to solve them, not to solve what we think they need.

For a discussion about this in real-life projects: http://www.urgentevoke.com/profiles/blogs/making-a-positive-change-...

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