After two days of an over-stuffed, mind-numbing agenda full of heady topics and full-tilt hobnobbing, roughly a third of the group returns for a day with the agenda collectively created by the participants.  This process, called Open Space, was expertly facilitated by Jerry Michalski, and the session draws out the topics people want to discuss.  From tightly huddled six-person intensives to ranging 40-person explorations, the day exemplifies the open source spirit of the community, a yin to the bustling yang of the previous 48 hours.  The next three photos are images of the wall of topics that got discussed.  Since each person had already presented their idea by standing up on a stage and speaking to the topic for something like 45 seconds, you’ll just get a snapshot of each discussion.  For the full benefit, well, you had to be there.  Nonetheless, this should provide a peek into what’s on the mind of the most collaborative third of the thought leaders at the edge of impact investing.

What does this make you think?

Triple Pundit reported on a different angle of this intersection at SXSWi, and called it the “Big Green Disconnect” between tech and sustainability communities, saying “the few green related panels were under attended and often rudimentary,” suggesting that each community is talking a different language.  Our friend and advisor Bill Shutkin had a similar, less politic rant over dinner a few weeks back, along the lines of “do we really need another Twitter app while our energy and financial systems are in crisis?.” Both comparisons were predated by Silicon Valley tech guru Tim O’Reilly’s call in 2008 to “work on something that matters,” where he beat a drum of “create more value than you extract.”

So, now the meme has been released, and some cool kids in technology (largely a comfortable-if-not-affluent crowd from a global perspective) think social entrepreneurship is the next big thing.  Mostly, this is good.  Right?

Well… a great piece in the NY Times on March 14th reported a story that pointed to an important trend — when inundated with snow, the Washington Post was not using Twitter, YouTube or Foursquare, but rather Ushahidi, an IT platform built in Kenya, to map road blockages and resource availability during the disruptive storm.

The article points out, “Ushahidi comes from another world [than Silicon Valley], in which entrepreneurship is born of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less, rather than on selling you new and improved stuff.  Because Ushahidi originated in crisis, no one tried to patent and monopolize it.  Because Kenya is poor, with computer systems out of the reach of many, Ushahidi made its system work on cellphones.  Because Ushahidi had no venture-capital backing, it used open-source software and was thus free to let others remix its tool for new projects.”

The Washington Post serves an important lesson to the Austin-Boulder-SF-Cambridge crowd of digi-do-gooders and green lemmings at SXSW.  Even thought an important tide is tipping in the consciousness of the web-tools crowd, practical results still seem far off.  And in the (currently somewhat less) well-financed hubs all trying to “the next Silicon Valley,” e-mails about new conferences, magazines and other gathering points for this new intersection are traveling the web today.  The space will surely evolve, but today, the bottom line remains pretty much single in the tech community.

As Triple Pundit points out, much of the progressive IT community is still pretty slow to get even the second layer of complexity in the massive puzzle of global human sustainability, even as they drink the free green beer at a SXSW party called “Good Capitalist.”  In the meantime, the ability to actually get things done is created by people who have a pressing, immediate need for the transformation of data and information into the knowledge and understanding that can affect practical decision-making.  As the back-to-back DC blizzards (a climate anomaly, at least) pressed the city into micro-catastrophe, tools borne out of crisis trumped tools born out of opportunity.

Even though sustainability thinkers like Shutkin debate the value of “sky is falling” framing for the presentation of a new social innovation, we think there’s more Nairobi (necessity is the mother of invention) and less Sunnyvale, CA (wouldn’t if be cool if…) in creating social-purpose IT.  The consciousness shift will be complete when technological innovators realize that the balance is not between making profits and serving people, but between earth’s resources serving 3 billion people or 9 billion.  Until that shift happens, we’ll still be chipping ice off the icebergs for our drinks at the next party.

During what any humble, reflexively sarcastic entrepreneur would think of as a week with no other good interview candidates, we got an email from Teju Ravilochan, co-founder of Unreasonable, asking if we’d be game for the experience.

The results turn out pretty well, it seems (you might need to turn the volume up, or else the onboard speakers on this aging computer are loosing their umpf).

Would love your feedback.

Today, the re-named Sustainable Ventures meetup is consistently gathering between forty and fifty change agents (which we expect to grow) every two weeks in Denver and Boulder for an exchange of ideas, advice and learning that benefits everyone in the room.  From non-profit staffers to clean-tech execs, and including investors, advisors and entrepreneurs, the sessions are providing a venue for advanced discussions about how to run a sustainable venture, regardless of sector.

More relevant than my perspective is the feedback from members that sheds light on the experience.  When asked “why should others join this meetup group?”, Ashoka Fellow Lynn Price said, “To engage with individuals who dare to do what they think should be done – in a spirit of unselfish and supportive collaboration.”  Kent McBride, founder and CEO of the Make The Difference Network adds, “if you want to be around people who intentionally use business to improve the quality of life on the planet, then this is the meetup for you.”

More specifically, the meetup provides a chance for entrepreneurs to tap into the collective wisdom of the community.  Half the meetup is dedicated to solving problems for four entrepreneurs — from concept-stage ventures to positive cash-flow businesses — who ask for advice on their biggest challenges.  Members then break into four groups who advise the entrepreneurs in what amounts to a collective intelligence swarm review of the business.

These sessions have drawn rave reviews.  Kendall Thiessen, an intellectual property lawyer who presented his new business concept, wrote “I enjoyed the format and got valuable input on some ideas that I am trying to develop. I would highly recommend this group to entrepreneurs and change agents of all kinds.”

After these swarm reviews end, we gather again as a group to hear innovative and provocative perspectives from experienced, front-line entrepreneurs, who talk honestly about the practical challenges in living triple-bottom-line management principles.  Recently, our speakers have included:

• Bill Shutkin, the prototypical social entrepreneur that has seen more than 20 years of the evolution of the field.  Shutkin’s experience as a lecturer, and his expansive knowledge of the field kept the group buzzing well beyond our proposed ending time.  As member Karl Dakin commented, “I much enjoyed Bill’s historical observation that social enterprises need more business discipline,” echoing several other raves about his talk.
• Ryan Martens, the venture-funded IT CTO who is gaining practical benefits and direct cost savings from his participation as a B-Corporation.  Martens’ open kimono discussion of how he has integrated 3BL values into running his company helped entrepreneurs understand the practical challenges and trade-offs in raising money into an aspirational sustainable company.  Member Katherine Wardell wrote, “Ryan at Rally Software … is creating a consciousness and putting practices in place toward building a sustainable corporation which more and more corporations will find themselves moving toward.”
• Rebecca Saltman, the serial social entrepreneur, and change-maker bringing Ashoka’s Change Your City campaign to Denver.  Rebecca not only provided a sneak-preview of the wide range of activities that Change Your City will undertake, but provided everyone an opportunity to get involved in the movement before it becomes front-page news. Zenia Tata, a serial social entrepreneur, and former executive director of International Development Enterprises reports, “Excellent meeting. Nice to be part of such a dynamic group. Great presentation on Change Your City….exciting times ahead for Denver.”

More amazing speakers are signing on every day — Bill Shutkin threatens a encore performance — and other surprises remain in store as the community expands and the practice area continues to deepen.

Meetup member Noah Blessey sums up the experience in his response, “I really enjoyed my first Sustainable Ventures Meetup. This is a whole new world to me. I’m looking to transition into a creative, dynamic, innovative and socially minded career so it was great to: A.) get me thinking in these terms B.) listen to what other members of the Denver Metro community are doing along these lines and C.) collaborate through our smaller group discussion. I found I had some resources to offer others in the group and more in common with other members than I thought when I first got there.”

The organizers and supporters of the Sustainable Ventures Meetup all look forward to your participation in Denver and Boulder this spring, and beyond.

1. Why are we getting together to create another meetup?
2. What are we going to try to accomplish together?
3. What is the language of sustainable enterprise, and how can we ensure we have a similar frame of reference as we move forward?

We organized the session to allow participants to engage with one another, and not simply be “talked at” by another guru.  This led to a diverse and wide-ranging discussion about what sustainable enterprise is really about, and how we want to engage an authentic and participatory discussion in our community.

We acknowledge that this meta meetup — a networked discussion of how the group will comport itself going forward — is not everyone’s cup of tea.  We hope it’s clear that this session was not representative of what we expect to accomplish, but rather a critical alignment of community viewpoints to allow the meetup to better serve the community of leaders who seek to create more sustainable enterprise in the Front Range of Colorado.

Setting that qualification aside, here are the group’s answers to the three questions poised above:

1. What is the language of sustainable enterprise, and how can we ensure a similar frame of reference as we move forward?

This is a confusing marketplace of ideas and concepts that were each born somewhere else.  Everyone has one foot in this new, emerging space, and another foot firmly planted in some adjacent field.  These adjacent fields include academia, traditional for-profit business, traditional non-profit philanthropy, non-traditional for-profit business (including sectors like cleantech, LOHAS, organic food), corporate social responsibility (CSR), government and potentially other sectors, as well.

Each one of those fields has its own values and lexicon, and while CSR and social entrepreneurism could be mistaken for one another, in fact they are quite different.  In a separate blog post, we will begin to unpack the language of sustainable enterprise and change agency.  In the long run, we’ll contribute to comprehensive maps of the new ecology, but neither of those can be fully captured here.

For now, we are going to say that a sustainable enterprise:

• could be either a for-profit business, a non-profit philanthropy or some other type of hybrid organization
• measures its success in a combination of financial, social and environmental impact
• is thoughtful and aware of the impact that spending habits have on community
• respects the integrity of human rights
• balances collaboration with competition
• balances quality with quantity
• is changing, and learning how to get better at what it does
• may be imperfect, and may not be implementing policies that capture the entire spirit of sustainability

2. What are we going to try to accomplish together?

We want the Front Range of Colorado — defined as the population corridor bounded by Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, and including Denver, Boulder and surrounding communities, which inscribes the majority of the state’s population — to have an increasing percentage of organizations become sustainable enterprise.  Specifically:

• amplify sustainable enterprise practices
• have more new organizations get started with sustainability in their DNA
• connect leaders of these organizations in learning networks
• discuss the challenges of running an organization in a trusted community of peers
• support a community within which we want to raise families and nourish future generations

3. Why are we getting together to create another meetup?

Because no one else is hosting this discussion.  Because we all want to learn and collaborate about building sustainable enterprise.  Because we believe that all enterprises — for-profit as well as non-profit — are a part of a bigger aspect of the human ecology that includes community, society, and human and other life, and that enterprise needs to contribute to that larger cycle, and not simply extract profits from it.  Because we know this is fundamentally a community exercise.

So come join us.  The next event is being hosted in Denver (previous events were in Boulder), timed to coincide with the lunch break at the Angel Capital Summit, which takes place on November 17th, at the Colorado Convention Center.  We will review of the sustainability practices with Jennifer Orgolini, Sustainability Steward for New Belgium Brewing Company, one of Colorado’s highly evolved sustainable enterprises, which produces one of our favorite products, Fat Tire Ale.  In December, we will announce an ongoing schedule of events in Denver and Boulder for 2010.

Here’s the summary:

In a new report, Sustainable Economic Development, nuPOLIS partner James Nixon details the comprehensive approaches that that cities and regions are using to build sustainable green economies. The paper, developed for the newly launched nonprofit Urban Sustainability Associates consulting service, addresses what sustainable economic development is, why it matters, and how it is similar to and different from traditional economic development. It presents a set of sustainable economic development initiatives and programs for cities/regions, with descriptions of each initiative and program, along with possible delivery partners.

The heart of Nixon’s paper presents eight distinct Sustainable Economy Initiatives:

1. Cleantech Business Cluster: Encouragement of a cluster of businesses offering green products and services, such as energy, water, and/or resource efficiency; renewable energy; alternative transportation; and pollution/waste prevention and recycling.

2. Green Business: Improvement of the environmental and financial performance of existing firms.

3. Sustainable Real Estate Development: Promotion of walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income, transit-oriented real estate development – both infill and new communities.

4. Green Investment: Initiation of green investment vehicles to invest in green and clean tech businesses and sustainable real estate developments.

5. Green Jobs: Launch or strengthening of a system for green job development with green skills training training, career pathways, and green entrepreneurship to provide the workforce needed by green and clean tech businesses.

6. Green and Cleantech Business Attraction and Retention: Promotion of the city/region as an optimal place for green and clean tech businesses to start-up, locate, expand, and grow over the long term.

7. Green Underserved Communities: Connection of green and clean tech businesses and sustainable real estate developments led by people of color, women, and underserved communities with the appropriate business acceleration services and engagement of low- and moderate-income employees and residents in saving money through ecological efficiency.

8. Sustainability Community Engagement: Engagement of city/regional residents in understanding sustainability, participating in the process of building a sustainable economy, and making green purchasing decisions.

A total of 26 programs are described for implementing these initiatives.

The paper concludes with a discussion of how cities/regions can choose from the Sustainable Economy Initiatives and the Green Programs to create their own Sustainable Economic Development Strategies.

• Company Stage
  • 7 cash-flow-positive
  • 23  revenue but not cash-flow-positive
  • 28 pre-revenue
  • 2 concept

• Sector (with some grouping):
  • IT
    • 15  digital media & internet
    • 7 software
  • GreenTech
    • 12 clean-tech
    • 4 energy
  • Technology
    • 9 health care and life sciences
    • 1 nanotech
  • Consumer
    • 6 CPG
    • 2 food and beverage
    • 4 service
  • Social Entrepreneur
    • 2 for-profit exclusively social ventures
    • 4 earned-income non-profits
  • Other
    • 1 financing
    • 1 telco
    • 1 real estate

In addition to the four spots traditionally retained for earned-income non-profits, and two projects that are exclusively and specifically for-profit social ventures, several of the clean-tech companies, as well as a mix of the other companies have performance metrics in place around sustainability issues, which would qualify them as sustainable ventures, even in they may not fall in the more tightly defined social entrepreneurship category.

We anticipate being able to promote a track of sustainable ventures that represents approximately 10% of the overall deal flow in the finals of the Angel Capital Summit, upcoming on November 17th.

If you have experience in assessing company viability, as an investor or someone representing them, and have an interest in sustainable business, please contact us directly to join the 100+ person deal screening network.

First post is about the GSSE at CSU, an awesome program that I strongly endorse.  If you’d be so kind, please head over and write a quick comment, to raise the profile of the sustainable enterprise in Colorado on their radar.

Here’s a summary of what to expect, straight from the Meetup description:

PURPOSE
The purpose of this meetup is to provide a place to discuss the specifics of funding, creating and running a sustainable social enterprise. This emerging sector, which spans the for-profit and non-profit worlds, is still taking shape, and there is no silver bullet solution for people who want to create socially- and environmentally-impactful organizations that can stand the test of time. So we need to create the framework in which we operate.

PROCESS
In addition to the typical aspects of a meetup — introductions, community announcements and a general give-and-take atmosphere — we expect to split each meetup into two sessions.

First Session — Metrics
Nothing can be managed if it cannot first be measured. While I’m suspicious of this bromide on a visceral level, it seems to stand the test of time.

Together, we will review different metrics and frameworks, including but not limited to Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Global Impact Investing Rating System (GIIRS) and related Investment Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS), Global Footprint, Blended Value, Genuine Progress Indicators (GPI), Whole Systems Risk Management (WSRM) and more.

We will invite thought leaders in the sustainability metrics space to join us each month for interactive dialog about their specific area of expertise.

Second Session — Behind The Scenes
We will invite organizational leaders who are operating within triple-bottom-line and/or sustainable principles to show us how they measure their performance. We expect this open dialog will both benefit the presenter, as well as the group, moving our collective practice forward.

WHO SHOULD COME?
We expect a mix of people to join us, including angel investors, fund managers, entrepreneurs, non-profit executives, thought leaders and the media, as well as anyone else who want to learn about running a transformative organization.

People from the Cleantech, Web 2.0, LOHAS, Non-Profit, Bio-Tech, Media and other related and unrelated fields will all share and gain new perspectives on this challenge.

With their recent partnership with Business Catapult, SGN is connected to the national entrepreneurial community.  This fall, they are connecting entrepreneurs in their network who are seeking external capital to the Angel Capital Summit, with a focus on the sustainable enterprise track.

SGN also has the unique distinction of being the first node in the broader w1sd0m network.  Like buying the first fax machine, this status has little social benefit in the beginning, and as the w1sd0m network grows, their contribution to our evolution and roots in the Big Green Apple will pay huge and mutual dividends.

During the relaunch, SGN retains their popular online radio show, where Business Catapult CEO Dave O’Brien and I have been repeat guests.  In today’s show, we talked about the Angel Capital Summit, w1sd0m and building networks of sustainable enterprise in New York and around the world.