Salam, Hello, Hola! I'd lke to introduce myself

Hi Guys, Just wanted to check-in, give you guys a few updates, etc.

I am the cofounder and community manager of icecairo. A Green Tech Innovation hub in the heart of Downtown, Cairo. We have been around for about a year and half and are working hard to solve challenges in Egypt by helping young Egyptians build sustainable businesses. So we are indeed part of the very vibrant entrepreneurship ecosystem, but we focus on green tech products. We have a lot of events at the hub around ideation, making & Fab Lab, entrepreneurship, green tech skills building, social innovation, networking, etc. About 100 since we started! We would love for the April event to be held at our space!

It seems like Spot the Future has a whole bunch that aligns with icecairo, most importantly: the need to alleviate poverty and unemployment by creating the atmosphere where young people can hack solutions to challenges in the environment and elsewhere.

Through a concerted team effort, we want to contribute to this platform and highlight a lot of cool initiatives by local change makers in these aforementioned areas. We have a lot stopping by our hub to evolve their ideas with peer to peer feedback and help from expertise floating around our space. They are affected by the global movement of “Doers” but also the necessity to make the changes themselves, because we don’t expect any significant help from segments that other countries may rely on.

They are mostly offline, active on the ground, and really interesting. If they are online, the usual platform of choice in Egypt is Facebook (we just say Face in Egypt), this is obvious choice since Jan25 2011 with a huge boost of users, thus efficient connectivity. I saw Alberto’s post on why not use FB, so this is something we should overcome in our communities here in Egypt.

I’ll be checking out more of the pages/comments…take care for now ya shabab. Salam.

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Exactly that!

Hello Muhammad, welcome. Your story does sound familiar. Here in Western Europe people (especially the young) are told that state provision of public services is struggling to keep up, and they had better provide for themselves. States offer lots of incentives to start companies and to do “innovation”, but they seem keener on creating companies per se than on creating companies as a tool to solve collective problems. People who attack problems directly, like hackers and social innovators, don’t get much attention, and all they have is each other, the three Fs of social innovation: Family, Friends and Fools

So, IceCairo’s contributions are more than welcome. Please do point us in the direction of cool people building their future – no matter how small their projects may seem, or how lonely they are. We are convinced that that’s where the action is.

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