#500Historias: learning to think creative and collectively

The current Latin American educational system does not provide opportunities to develop creativity in writing.

We surveyed and it turned out that 10% of teenagers would love to be the author of a book, written by themselves.

That same educational system does not provide opportunities to make decisions, to reflectively evaluate, to investigate, to contrast with others, that is, it denies the possibility of developing collective intelligence.

The 21st century requires skills that are not in our curricula: learning to solve complex problems, to work as a team, to create collectively, to understand others, to discuss differences generating consensus.

#500Historias is the web tool for Latin American entrepreneurial teachers who lead young people to fulfill their desire to write books, every year.

• At each school: An 8-week online creative writing workshop, delivered to 10 teen writers by a teacher.
• Every 5 schools: a book written by their youth, edited by a professional writer.
• Every 50 Schools: An online reading and writing tournament, where each young writer plays as a team with 10 reading friends.

At the end of the 8-week writing workshop, the evaluation of the texts is in charge of the same young writers who play for a month to read as many texts as they can, each one inviting 10 fellow readers to team up, in a video-game multiuser, an app that works both on cell phones and on web browsers, which gamifies the experience of reading, evaluating and adding points.

The evaluation criteria are:

• Likeability: how much you like the text.
• Quality: how well written it is.
• Credibility: it has documentation that justifies that what has been said is a real fact.
• Originality: it is an unprecedented event or the way it is told is unusual.
• Relevance: what value does it have for readers to have read this text.

This tournament becomes a collective, consensual decision-making tool that selects the top 5% of texts to name their writers ambassadors, sending them to a week-long creative writing bootcamp, where they share, learn, and ultimately They return to their schools and cities, recounting the experience.

The entire tournament is what we call DACI, an acronym for Digitally Augmented Collective Intelligence.

Our project #500Historias in 10 points:

1. #500Historias is an app, a website: 500Historias.com
2. used by a group of female teachers as change agents
3. Innovate on digitally augmented collective intelligence
4. with students from 13 to 17 years old,
5. organizing them in circles of young writers (creators)
6. that taken advantage of by storytelling and gamification,
7. They become influencers who create communities.
8. where creativity, collaboration, empathy and critical thinking are encouraged,
9. uniting all the youth,
10. Blur any type of discrimination based on nationality, social class, gender, race or sexual, political or religious orientation.

In our theory of change, the social impact hypotheses are deduced from the causal chain that we describe in these 10 points.

We started 2019, taking advantage of the 500th anniversary of Panama City, and we connected 202 young writers in 24 schools.

We were forced to pause in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic.

In 2022 we returned with strengthened capacities and carried out 2 editions: 463 texts written by young writers, in 8 cities throughout Central America: David in Panama, San José in Costa Rica, Managua, Tegucigalpa, San Salvador, Guatemala City and Santo Domingo in the Republic Dominican.

By 2023, the plan is to grow by networking 200 entrepreneurial teachers (one per school), with the editorial help of 40 renowned writers, in the same 8 cities, for 2,000 young writers (13 to 17 years old), who will write " Inclusive Chronicles", in 4 categories: Original Peoples, Afro-descendants, Migrants and People with Disabilities.

The impact to measure:
• Empowered teachers, what differential educational tools did you acquire? To whom are they transmitted? Change in the educational model?
• Writing students, how have you increased your research, writing, and critical thinking skills? soft skills?
• Young readers and evaluators of the chronicles, readings carried out? Increased reading habits? evaluations carried out? critical thinking? collaborative work?
• Reading public in general, differential in the perception of discrimination? books bought?

Octavio Rodríguez Vergara is the "solo founder" of #500Historias.

He is a Computer Engineer with postgraduate studies in Philosophy, Organizational Development and Development Planning, and specialization courses in Marketing, Finance and Innovation. Promoter of entrepreneurship and activist in favor of open source, open knowledge, change in education, collective intelligence, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. 

Octavio is CEO and founder of ConectALDEA, a software factory specialized in education and incubator for educational transformation projects like: Concolón (School of Panamanian Chroniclers), EducALDEA (Mathematics Academy), AldeARTE (Academy of Arts for young people), and #500Historias.

TEAM:

Right now #500Historias have a full-time highly competitive crew that we call "the kernel":

1) Octavio Rodriguez, CEO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oc...
2) Daniel Dominguez, Director of Communications: https://www.linkedin.com/in/da...
3) Rui Santos, CTO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rm...
4) Karen Bernal, Editorial Director: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ka...
5)    Jacqueline Russo, Education Director

Also #500Historias have partial-time experts:
6) Juan Carlos Otero, Expert Education Consultant: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ju...
7) Adriana Mata, Impact Consultant:  linkedin.com/in/adrianamata
8) Carlos Ruiz, Expert Business Consultant: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ca...

They lead the rest of the team: programmers, educators, editors, photographers, etc.

As we understand it, what this challenge seeks as an objective is very similar to what we want to do with #500Historias.

The Digitally Augmented Collective Intelligence (DACI) that we want to build with #500Historias is a tool that requires an operations manual, some rules of participation.

We chose to start this training with the young people, using an educational transformation framework that we call #LlaveMaestra, as the “key that opens all doors” that are the Entrepreneurial Teachers of each school.

The virality of this model of educational transformation is given by the existing connection networks between Latin American Teachers, and by the interest of young people in getting and telling the stories that they are most passionate about.

Year after year, the student contest will stimulate the practice of peer evaluation, selection of verifiable information, the best exposed text, creating the ability to make collective decisions that explore, provide feedback and filter thousands of ideas in crowdsourcing, to get the better, more polished, and more consensual.

Choosing which problems to put in this thinking machine (DACI) is a first problem that DACI itself can solve.

With the DACI working, there is an opportunity to evolve from the model of representative republican democracy to a model of liquid democracy, networked democracy, democracy of interconnected conscious citizens.

The solution to the most serious problems on the planet are changes in habit that come from the change in consciousness of human beings, who are, in most cases, the creators of these problems.

Three innovative elements:

• The constitution of an Inter-Contributing Autopoietic Network, a cluster of enterprising teachers as change agents who work interconnected. A fractal structure that works the same small as big, where 50 schools interact, exchange, publish, reward and celebrate at the NODE level, giving the winners a chance to go to national and international competitions of the same type, which work with the same logic, connecting with the other NODES.
• The On-Line "learning by doing" writing workshop, multi-age, collaborative, with the intervention of an external professional writer as editor, which leads to the production of a publication-level text, feeding the chronicles website of each school , and that unites the circle of writers with 10 circles of readers, one for each young writer, multiplying the reading that is assumed as a team game, a "mind-sport", in an Online Reading and Writing Tournament. It ends with the publication of a real book for every 5 schools, which is purchased by the school communities themselves.

 The creation of a Digitally Augmented Collective Intelligence system, using the collective evaluation among peers of the quality of the chronicles as a means for memetics, installing the custom among young people of selecting the best idea among all, acting in an environment playful (practical, innocuous), where the proposals are made and evaluated by everyone, playing with the same rules of respect for diversity, which promotes the birth of a new liquid democracy, a networked democracy.

#500Historias is repeated annually.

It was born in 2019 where we successfully tested the calls for teachers and students, the contest, the evaluations, the prizes and the production of the book.

• 201 writings
• 24 schools
• 7000 evaluations of the texts
• 1 city

We were interrupted in 2020 and 2021 by the pandemic. 

We relaunch in 2022:

• 463 writings
• 44 schools
• 66000 evaluations of the texts
• 8 cities from 7 countries

The plan for 2023:

• 2000 writings
• 200 schools
• 200,000 evaluations of the texts
• 8 cities from 7 countries

We grow virally, one teacher calls another to sign up and summons others, since each school community brings with it the editorial crowdfunding that is the basis for paying for the effort made by everyone in as many schools as they sign up, in 19 Latin American countries.

We triple annually. We will reach 5,500,000 young people in 2029 in the 19 Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas.

We impact:

• Education, with a new model based on project/challenge/curiosity.
• Creative writing and research, expanding the genre "chronicle" which is non-fiction written in a literary format.
• The knowledge of history, which will be collected and told from the point of view of young people, who will read among themselves.
• Comprehensive reading with the games of the reading-writing tournament that will require understanding the texts to answer the riddles.
• The culture of reading, with the reading clubs, which will remain installed to read for pleasure throughout the year.
• The inequities, by mixing young people from different social classes, from different schools, to play by the same rules, accessible to all, regardless of social origin, and eliminating all forms of discrimination from the root: age, gender, sexual orientation, race or nationality.

The impact measurement, done every year, is an essential part of the proposed model.

The Convenio Andrés Bello (CAB) is an Ibero-American intergovernmental organization for educational and cultural integration.

Seeing the potential of #500Historias, CAB has offered to provide us with consultancy for the external and independent measurement of the educational and social impact, in the next edition of #500Historias.

We want to measure the increase in reading comprehension and youth skills within and outside of the program. In addition, we will measure the social, educational, touristic, ecological and cultural impact, and the development of 21st century skills, especially creativity, empathy, collaboration and critical thinking.

As an autopoietic movement, the results of the impact measurements of each year will be key to the launch of the following editions in subsequent years.

Our theory of change has two lines defined in Activities, Results and Impacts, and measured in the short, medium and long term:

1.- Leadership and empowerment of Teachers Entrepreneurs as Agents of Change in Central America:

Activities:
• Call for public and private school teachers using personalized viral invitations among teachers who already know each other.
• Training given to teachers in "Educational Transformation using Project-based Learning, Challenge, Collaborative, Gamified and Critical Thinking to facilitate Creativity Workshops among Youth" with theory and practice.
• Ongoing training program for teachers so that they recognize themselves and behave as entrepreneurs.

Results:
• Network of enterprising teachers who choose each other.
• Income from extracurricular activity and accreditation in training for the development of their careers.

Impacts:
• Short term impact:
--• Teacher training at no-cost for schools.

• Medium term impact:
--• Strengthening of the cohesion between teachers in different schools.
--• Increased reputation of each teacher in the school.
--• Transmission of pedagogical knowledge between teachers of the same school.
--• Transmission of knowledge and behaviors in entrepreneurship.

• Long-term impact:
--• Revaluation of the role of the teacher within society.
--• Increase in the culture of female entrepreneurship in society.
--• Cloning of the methodology towards other areas of creativity using our educational transformation framework #LlaveMaestra in its 6 general areas (with its 12 academies):

-------- #500historias, Circles of Young Communicators, Writing and Illustration Academies
-------- #500ideas, Circles of Young Innovators, Academies of Technology and Architecture
-------- #500vidas, Circles of Young Ecologists, Academies of Environmentalism and Agriculture
-------- #500artes, Circles of Young Artists, Film and Theater Academies
-------- #500canciones, Circles or Young Musician, Music and Dance Academies
-------- #500saberes, Circles of Young Scientists, Academies of Sciences and Philosophy

2.- Development of collaborative critical thinking and XXI Century soft skills in Central American adolescents:

Activities:
• Call for merits for the "Circle of the 10 best Young Writers" in each school.
• 8-week Chronicle Writing Workshop.
• Constitution of 10 “Circles of 10 Young Readers” in each school summoned and directed by each one of the young writers.

Results:
• 10 excellent chronicles written and exposed to a contest on a chronicles website of each school.
• 10 teams of 10 young readers led by a young writer, who compete in the monthly ON-LINE Reading-Writing Tournament, each reading and evaluating an average of 100 chronicles.

Impacts:
• Short term impact:
--• Each chronicle is read and evaluated by at least 100 young readers.

• Medium term impact:
--• Strengthening of reading, writing, understanding, and critical thinking skills throughout the school.

• Long-term impact:
--• Development of the ability to select the best idea in crowdsourcing, iterating them into play, working on them collaboratively, to imagine a better possible future and work to build it collaboratively.
--• Elimination of any discrimination between young people based on social class, age, gender, sexual orientation, race or nationality.
--• Development of entrepreneurial attitude and behavior, knowing the value creation cycle based on their creativity in collective effort and its monetization.

Technologies for the organization, traditional or ancestral:

• Teamwork in a star organization (non-pyramidal), where each Circle (one teacher and 10 young writers), is grouped first in Nucleus (5 circles) and then in Node (10 nuclei) constitutes a RAIA (Spanish's acronym for Autopoietic Inter-Contributing Networks),
• Organization based on Network and Fractal,
• With the same principle of Blockchain, where in each link a copy of the knowledge of the entire network is produced, in a consensual manner and distributed in various nodes of a network.

Technologies in Sharing Economies:

• We work as an Open Source Software Factory (sofltware libre),
• The chronicles are published under Creative Commons licencies,
• crowdsourcing,
• and crowdfunding.

Technologies in Gamification:

• data mining,
• artificial intelligence,
• machine learning,
• Virtual Reality,
• Augmented Reality,
• Geolocation.

Printing Technologies:

• Digital production systems for Print-on-demand books,
• Book delivery to schools using Locker Vending Machine (R.I.L.L. Spanish's acronym for Literature Book Exchange Robot)

Pedagogical Technologies (methodologies)

• Project-based, Challenge-based and Curiosity-based learning.
• Peer and collaborative learning.
• Learning in Creativity and Empathy.

#500Historias models a world without inequities or discrimination.

Instead of making an educational project that is "only for vulnerable or discriminated populations", our proposal is to make a project accessible to all, that allows mixing, multi-age, multi-school, multi-country, that normalizes diversity and that shows that it is possible to compare the best chronicles written by young people of any race, social class, sexual orientation, gender or nationality.

Inclusion is in our DNA.

Value offer:

• For young writers: Training in writing, collective, gamified, being the leader of a circle of readers and being the author of a book.
• For Parents proud to read and share the stories written by their children.
• For Teachers: extra income from after-school work, training in project/challenge/curiosity based education methodologies, increased reputation and leadership inside and outside their school.

Market Segment (Customers):

• Students who like to write
• Parents and school community
• Teachers with vocation

Relationship with clients:

• School Chronicles website
• Media (news) and social networks
• Support for student writers by a professional editor
• Teacher support by education experts

Costs:

• Technological infrastructure and instructional designs
• Human team for processes (instructional designers, programmers, teachers, editors, photographers, designers, printers, event managers, etc.)
• Marketing and event management

Sources of income:

• B2C: crowdfunding in schools
• B2B: advertising to companies
• B2G: multilaterals and governments pay for technologies for education

Sales channels:

• Whatsapp network between the teachers
• Institutional networks of sponsoring companies
• Social networks and media
• 500historias.com website

Key Partners:

• One teacher in each school
• ConectALDEA: technology company for educational transformation
• VCs focused on social impact
• SICA Sistema de Integración Centroamericano (https://www.sica.int/)

Key Activities:

• Gamified educational platform development
• Teacher training program
• annual student contest

Key Resources:

• Technological platform
• Qualified Publishers Network
• institutional alliances

The monetary base of our Business Model is Crowdfunding in school communities:

• B2C: We monetize mainly from PARENTS, who buy workshops and books for their children, access to the tournament and tickets to the awards ceremony.
• B2B: Also COMPANIES, which invest in advertising.
• B2G: And the MULTILATERALS that want to improve education.

We collect an average of US$300 per year for each young writer like this:
• The writing workshop costs the parents of the young writer as a tutoring: US$6 an hour x 16 hours. Some parents who can afford more collaborate with other parents in financial difficulty.
• Each young writer summons 10 friends to the OnLine Reading-Writing Tournament that requires a registration fee of US$6 per reader.
• Each book costs US$12.50, and 120 books are sold per school per year.
• A third of the price of the books is contributed by a company that receives in exchange the complete back cover of the book and the prologue, with the opportunity to offer a message to the youth, written by the President of said company.

We estimate to distribute the income as follows:
• 18% to pay teachers and editors,
• 11% to feed the growth of the network,
• 21% on hardware, software and printing
• And we leave 12% as a return for schools in technological services for education.
• Remaining 38% of profit before taxes, which we will reinvest in the project until reaching maturity in volume of schools.

Until now we have received material support from the City of Knowledge Foundation, the Panama City Hall, AWS Amazon Web Services and the company ESRI Panama.

We have raised funds 3 times from private investors, totaling US$170K

We have also sold books to bookstores and individuals.