My name is Florin Ghinda and I am 33 years old. I am the founder of an informative portal with positive Romanian news (mainly Romanian language).
Mumbai, 2006. The strong smell of Indian culture is a powerful image for a foreigner. The colors in the streets are music for my soul and I was fascinated be the charming chaos around me…I was working in Mumbai for 5 months. I was a HR consultant strong motivated to work in an exotic culture and to learn about this country.
In the same time I was not happy with the fact that while I was reading news about home, Romania, most of them were negative. Apparently Romania was described as the worst place in the world with lack of hope. The Romanian press was probably reflected the reality from our country. But I was sure that is not the WHOLE reality.
My India was different. I saw smiling people on the street, while the country still has a lot of challenges: diseases, terror, poverty and some other difficulties. However, India was full of energy and ready to show to the entire world that they want to play a major role.
The positive attitude in the Indian culture was like a storm for me. I realize that we have plenty of positive exemplas and arguments for Romania. I realize that almost everything is connected with attitude, the Positive attitude.
It was simple. I wanted a place – online – with positive information about Romania, a platform for people, projects and initiatives with positive impact in our country. After 6 years I know that it was a good idea and I know that is plenty of work to do.
thank you for sharing your story with us! It immediately made me think about two organisations - one in Italy and one in Brazil - which are setting up pretty much an indentical project. The Italian one is called Buonenotizie.it, the Brazilian AsBoasNovas.com.
I know from speaking to Silvio, founder of Buonenotizie, that he found his journey very hard, and very difficult to persude people to support his project. Although now he has just achieved a huge goal - he won a competition on social innovation sponsored by Telecom Italy - it took him years to get there.
Was this the same for you? What difficulties did you encounter in your path and what helped you achieve your goals?
Well, Florin: actually I am just back from an OECD conference about Social Cohesion in a shitfing world. Look at slide 3 in this presentation: Costa Rica has a higher degree of satisfaction than OECD countries. It seems we are quite good at being unhappy, even if the going is relatively good!
@albertomz: good work! This is exactly the kind of interaction I’d like to see on Edgeryders. I wonder whether Silvio and BoasNovas would be interested to join this conversation?
Good point Alberto. I’ll certainly ask Silvio from Buonenotizie. I don’t know the Brazilians directly, but they are members of Hub Sao Paulo, so will try!
In June 2011, he made the cover of L’Express magazine with his ‘111 reasons to be optimist for France’ (and by the way, one of them was the open data movement in France).