From February 11-13, Ashoka and The Lemelson Foundation, with support from Microsoft, brought together pioneers and thought leaders in the field of technology and invention for systemic social change. Among them were over 100 Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows, pioneers on the cutting edge of innovation in solar energy, clean water, mobile technology, science education, agriculture, and healthcare, bringing powerful and affordable solutions to many millions of the world’s poorest people and inspiring people around the world to envision solutions to the world’s most pressing social challenges.  Joining them were business and philanthropy leaders, former and current government and public officials, global thought partners, and other innovators from the citizen sector. The goal of this first-of-its-kind event: to build systems that maximize the social impact of technological innovation, and that continually cultivate the world’s next generation of inventor-entrepreneurs forging change around the world, as well as to raise the profile of the field of social change technology and the amazing work being done by these social entrepreneurs.

In order to achieve this last goal Ashoka committed to opening up the event and make a greater use of social media than ever before. As we were planning Tech4Society, the fourth and largest in a series of events as part of the Ashoka-Lemelson partnership to find and support social change inventors and innovators, I was determined that unlike the first three this conference would be fully social media enabled. I wanted it to be an example of “distributed eventing”, where the event is more than just what goes on within the convention center and is instead a platform for interaction and dissemination on a much wider scale. In this I think we succeeded.

In the lead-up to the conference we held a “Blog Your Way to Hyderabad” competition to select the official blogger of the conference. The winner would get an all-expenses trip and all-access pass to the conference and be given the reins of the AshokaTECH blog and Twitter account during the event, to keep the world informed of the conversations, examples and insights being shared. This was a gutsy move on Ashoka’s part, giving an unknown person the responsibility of being the main conduit of information to the world about one of our most important gatherings. In every respect, however, the bloggers competition was a success. We received a number of excellent entries (all of which served to spread the word about the event in the lead-up) and with the help of an outside judging panel of experts chose Elliot Harmon, a full-time blogger with TechSoup, as the winner. This was a fantastic win-win: we secured the services of a professional and experienced blogger and TechSoup was able to send a correspondent to the event, something they never otherwise would have been able to do, doubling the audience and impact of his updates. You can read through all of Elliot’s blog posts from Hyderabad (and the other coverage) here.

During the event the #Tech4Soc hashtag contained a busy stream of observations, quotes and conversation, involving not only those at the event as well as from around world. Video and photos were shared, giving a visual insight into event and some of the presenters.

Not everything went to plan however (it almost never does): a conference call for bloggers featuring two Ashoka Fellows live from the event was defeated by technical difficulties on the day. We also sent a videography team to Hyderabad but were unable to upload their videos in real-time due to the bandwidth limitations on-site (it took five hours to upload this one video for instance). Despite losing the immediacy of uploading from the event itself the videos are still a great document of the event and filled with ideas and information worth sharing.

The final stage of the Tech4Society social media strategy was to share the learnings gained from the event. We did this by hosting a forum on SocialEdge on the topic of “Technology, Invention and Social Change” and devoting the March edition of our monthly #SocEntChat Twitter chats to this same topic. You can read a warp-up of the chat here.

Overall this was another huge step forward for Ashoka in how we utilize social media to increase the impact of our work. Social media helped make Tech4Society a more global event which extended well beyond its geographic location and those able to attend in-person. People from all over the world joined the conversation on Twitter and read in near real-time about the work being presented on the blog. The extensive recording by video has allowed us to further share this work after the event. And the SocialEdge and #SocEntChat discussions allowed us to flesh out and share what we learnt in a conversational environment.

Ultimately, this is the most important thing social media is allowing us to do: shine a better spotlight on the incredible and important work of Ashoka Fellows. As one of my colleagues said in reflecting back on our work in this area, “the world can’t adopt and support what it doesn’t know about.”

This guest post is from Tom Dawkins, Change Manager at Ashoka.