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To all questions, the answer is community. Co-creating futures through a collective intelligence game

By UNDP Peru Accelerator Labs

20 de Marzo de 2021

 

Exactly a year ago (March 2020), the first lockdown and state of emergency began in Peru. Today it’s been a year since we’ve been in transition, learning, unlearning, and re-learning; adapting to changes, and finding opportunities that lead us to a new and improved normality.

To launch the UNDP Accelerator Lab in Peru, considering the local context and  global uncertainty, we brought together changemakers from all over the country to foster, inspire and empower them. It was a constructive and dynamic event with key actors that became at the same time a learning experience, a refreshing networking space, and an opportunity to carry out a collective intelligence experiment that reflected the voice of the social innovation ecosystem in the country.

 

 

This way the launch of the Accelerator Lab became an experiment for our first frontier challenge. Our collective intelligence game allowed us to bring together a network of young changemakers and leading actors in the social innovation ecosystem in Peru, start building a national database with more than 350 solutions to be reviewed, and gather and visualize the expectations for 2030 Peru from +250 participants. 

Futuro Ahora (The Future is Now)

Under the assumption that we cannot sit back and wait for the future but we must co-create it based on shared ideas today, we designed a game-method to encourage the generation of ideas and scenarios for desirable futures, taking the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the starting point. 

Futuro Ahora (The Future is Now) is the brand and name given to the portfolio of experiments that the Lab is carrying out with young changemakers: a playful methodology but also a platform for interaction and capacity building. It is an easily scalable format that aggregates knowledge each time it is played.

 

 

Futuro Ahora: The first gathering

Mobilizing the troops 

First, we held in-depth interviews and meetings with changemakers (both “juniors” and “seniors”) and different members from the social innovation ecosystem in order to collect ideas, solutions and recommendations. Of course we also invited them to participate in our launch event as part of our learning experience with their networks and organizations. 

Likewise, we gathered pre-existing communities and networks of changemakers by engaging their leaders and unusual partners to gain their support and amplify the call through a “member get member” strategy. It is important to note that we ensured diversity among participants, with special emphasis on decentralizing participation including young people from most regions in the country, women and indigenous youth. However, the application process itself was another source of learnings about young changemakers, their context and solutions to the issues that impact their communities, which could eventually be replicated for other geographies or even other countries within the Accelerator Labs network. 

*Some great surprises: CoolK, I'mappin, Radio RADAR*

Next, we enriched the list of participants with specialists from UNDP, volunteers from UNV, private and public sector intrapreneurs, academia (leading university professors and students), strategic partners, and UNDP strategic allies.

This was complemented by an attractive and dynamic graphic identity to launch a website and share the initiative through word of mouth: https://futuroahora.pnud.org.pe/

 

The digital experience 

  • Warm up musical: Stimulating cultural content (Chintatá, Cusco, Perú).

  • Agile talk: An international guest. A short dose of inspiration about the power of the game (Edgard Gouveia, Brazil). 

  • Collective intelligence game:  A method for citizen co-creation of desirable futures to provide insights and prioritize challenges. We divided the 250 attendees into 17 teams using Zoom's breakout rooms and pre-designed game boards in MURAL. Attendees poured their ideas onto these boards guided by trained facilitators (labbers and members of Enseña Peru) and experts in the field, to co-design the future of Peru based on the SDGs.

    3, 2, 1: To the board!

    > Let's play the future, now!

IF YOU ARE A CHANGEMAKER within your group of friends or family, your neighborhood, your university, your community, your business, your town, your government, an international cooperation agency, or at home…we want to meet you. Email us at acclab.pe@undp.org.