Myoo create is a social capital or crowd sourcing site that allows its users to develop solutions to ‘challenges’ to problems with a sustainability, equity, or environmental focus. A prize is offered for the winning proposal to each challenge. To quote the site’s pitch: ‘Everybody wins! The organisation has found a great solution, the best entrants and participants receive $$$ for their efforts, and we all end up with a happier saner planet.’
Myoo Create is being ‘incubated’ by Adventure Ecology – notable because it is the company behind the ‘Plastiki Expedition’. Platiki is a sailing vessel built from completely recycled materials – predominantly repurposed PET bottles – and sailed from San Francisco to Sydney to raise awareness of the plastic waste in our oceans. That expedition was the latest of many projects led by adventurer and environmental campaigner David de Rothschild who is the head of Adventure Ecology and the youngest heir to Rothschild banking family.
The Adventure Ecology website lists Myoo Create as a shift in direction. They cite the ‘philosophy they live by’ as the ‘Equation of Curiosity ; recognising that nothing’s really more powerful, inspiring and game changing than acting upon dreams, undertaking adventures and telling compelling stories in order to raise awareness of environmental and social issues while driving innovative, real world solutions’. Myoo Create however marks a shift from attempts to raise awareness of environmental issues via the production and staging of expedition events that aimed at catching the attention of the mass media to the now familiar web2.0. What is perhaps less mundane in this rather late ‘2.0 manoeuvre’ is the recognition that Adventure Ecology always hoped to inspire and contribute to a ‘Planet 2.0’ way of living but that at ‘the heart of any movement is a committed community of change-makers driving each other forward’. There is an interesting although confounding mix of venture capital, social capital, and social media rhetoric being employed on this still fresh venture. Underneath all that is an interesting acknowledgement that their is a great deal of ‘social capital’ available to projects that garner popular but not necessarily industrial support.