GOComm: Results and Milestones

Striving to set a platform for cooperation between different stakeholders in the field of Communication for Development, Ørecomm launched a pilot project GOComm a year ago. And now we are excited to set new goals for it.

It’s been a prolific and an eventful year for GOComm and now, when reviewing what has been done, we are glad to see the potential of Øresund region to become a hub for Communication for Development. The main challenge is to link various actors and make them cooperate. Academics provide valuable data, which is not always used for practical implementation. Social entrepreneurs have brilliant ideas, yet might not seek consultancy from researchers thus lacking data for running their projects. The same stands for NGOs and governmental bodies. GOCOmm is meant to connect these hubs of knowledge and practice in the region and globally.

At the beginning of 2014 we started cooperation with Copenhagen-based start-up E-Gro. Now it has expanded to include the NGOs ADRA and IMS as well as the start-up company Emerging Cooking Solutions. Our work is focused on 4 key areas: good governance, humanitarian information and communication: and finally health communication and food security. These are key areas within development cooperation where cooperation, co-creation and the strategic use of new media and communication carries huge potential.

Reflecting back on the year, founder and CEO of E-Gro Jacob vahr Svenningsen says that the most problematic is to bring entrepreneurial experience into academia and vice versa – to translate academic jargon to the companies. Learning from each other and exchanging data during the first year gave good results, which lead us into an exciting second phase of GOComm.

So what is coming next?

We aim at strengthening validity and visibility of C4D, expanding the job market and ensuring a fruitful cooperation between the stakeholders. We plan to achieve it by organizing a start-up weekend; workshops and minihacks; networking ‘happytalism nights’ and debates at the academic quarter. Moreover, we will launch so called ‘fail fairs’ where the bravest in the field can present their ideas that might not have worked; yet served as good examples of taking risks and experimenting.

With our well-established tradition we will organize the next Ørecomm festival in 2016 as a celebration of merging practice with theory for solving C4D cases. The festival in 2014 proved to be a successful platform for researchers and entrepreneurs to meet and cooperate and we are looking forward to the new highlights and further accomplishments.

“ComDev is as important for development as tangible investments in economic growth and infrastructure,” says Jacob vahr Svenningsen. Yet its’ importance is still to be realized. By wedding business and academia we hope to achieve this goal.

After 2014 was a pilot-year for GoComm, supported by EU’s Interreg-project, Ørecomm has very recently submitted a larger application for a 3-year project to unfold the mentioned activities. If this application is successful, activities will start in the summer of 2015.