Karien Bezuidenhout

Biography

Karien Bezuidenhout is the Chief Operating Officer at the Shuttleworth Foundation. She focusses on maintaining a strategic and operational overview of the interests of the Foundation, working closely with the Fellows in advancing openness, access and collaboration. Together they drive social and policy innovation through critical dialogue and practical interventions.

Karien holds a masters degree in Futures Studies from the University of Stellenbosch Business School and has also studied at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town. She is a Stockholm Challenge juror.

Skoll Foundation Application Feedback

• Skoll Foundation Proposal - 2012

"Aaron,

I found it very interesting to read in your own words how you see the project, what the most important points are and where you'd like to go from here. Generally I think it makes for a compelling story that deserves supports.

Some specific points:

Question 2: Interesting that you frame this in a "developed countries" context. I like that you are not only thinking about the classic "poor people in developing countries" scenario. I think it works in this application. It may be good to develop the message for both developed and developing contexts for the broader GVCS communication.

Question 5: - You use GVCS here, but you haven't defined it in the preceding text, so readers may not know you mean Global Village Construction Set. - I would lead with volunteer collaboration resulting in real designs AND real machines being built, plus independent replication. They ask for impact beyond the number of items produced, plus I think it is more interesting to show impactful through getting people productively working together and choosing to spend their time working towards this shared goal than just the outputs you've produced.

Question 7: - I would lead with the "open nature" paragraph, providing others with the access and freedom to be creative and optimize their use of the ideas. (As a general point: I see there being two models of going to scale: connect in and connect out. In connect in, you create the conditions, opportunities and freedoms for others to come to you and replicate what you have done. In connect out, you go out and encourage, help and motivate people to replicate what you have done, often making them part of your organisation and supporting them with more than just ideas. The GVCS will employ both of these types of strategies.) - "Cooperative fabrication facilities... is another idea..." - I think listing this as "another idea" brings doubt ti the ideas mentioned before it. It makes it sound as if you have a bag of ideas and any one of them could work. Either be firm and say we will do/try x, or say we have a number of idea, including x. - Training mobile trainers - I personally do not like the idea of "training the trainer", a common concept in development, as I have never seen it work effectively. I am happy to be convinced otherwise, but I would recommend training people to do it for themselves, rather than train others, and the learning will spread from others seeing them do it.

Question 9: - You could have brought the reasoning closer to the 2 things Skoll does that very few other funders do: unrestricted and core support. The GVCS is at the cusp of scaling its operations. To do that effectively, it needs core funding to build the core team and operating principles around which the global distributed enterprise will grow. This support being unrestricted will enable the GVCS core to, within your key strategy for expanding your work, be agile, adapt and seize opportunities as your network grows.

I hope this is helpful. I'd welcome some feedback from your side if you'd like. It helps develop the narrative around the GVCS and bring me up to speed on the team's thinking.

Kind regards,

Karien"