Digital Pioneers and OpenBusiness Partnership

Amsterdam/London, 3 November 2006. The Digital Pioneers Programme and OpenBusiness.cc are announcing the start of a partnership to foster the bi-directional exchange of open business models between the Netherlands and the international level. The collaborative aim is to increase the success of internet based projects producing social innovations.OpenBusiness.cc works internationally to support innovative open business models emerging on the internet. Its scope ranges from websites using open source principles – such as distributed collaboration – to a general motivation to grow the commons.Principles and mechanisms supported through this partnership include the entrepreneurial use of Creative Commons licenses, participatory software architectures, or other methods to facilitate peer-to-peer based interactions. In the spirit of free and open source software most of these services are started by entrepreneurs driven by social motivations rather than purely profit orientated motives.

Internationalizing the Success of Digital Pioneers

The Digital Pioneers Programme, based in the Netherlands, has supported 117 projects. It is a unique initiative for small-scale society based internet initiatives. The programme has awarded grants of up to 25,000 Euro to stimulate professionalization and sustainability of these projects.After 2 years, 86% of the projects have been a success and encompass everything from free community wifi, sensor based sound-pollution networks, access to music sharing to individual radio stations for children.

Key Activities: Growing the Business Commons

OpenBusiness will promote success stories and social business models from the Digital Pioneers Programme internationally. The Digital Pioneers Programme will, in turn, solicit calls for participation/partners to replicate successful open businesses from around the globe in the Netherlands. The first exchange within this framework will open on 15 December 2006. In today’s world many of the projects which OpenBusiness or Digital Pioneers have encountered, could work in Amsterdam, as well as in London or Budapest. The aim of our cooperation will be to support the exchange of ideas and expertise between countries and foster social innovation using the internet.

We plan in the next stage to provide access to a mixture of grant funding, Venture Capitalist investment and relevant technology expertise.
_____________________________________________________________________________For further information, pls visit www.digitalpioneers.org or www.openbusiness.cc or contact Syb Groeneveld (Digital Pioneer Programme) at sg@kl.nl or Christian Ahlert (OpenBusiness) ca@openbusiness.cc