Bazar.org/MENAchange.org/7erak.org

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The intention was:

To provide for an online tool that helps young activists in the Middle East to pitch and "sell" their (project) ideas in order to get the necessary support.

The course of action was:

Take the plane to Beirut and present our brilliant idea (then it was called Bazar.org) to a mixed group of bloggers/ activists/ young NGO workers from a number of Middle East/ North African Countries, from Bahrein to Casablanca.

The result was:

The idea was completely burned down. The activists made clear they did not like the name Bazar (which has an extremely negative connotation), they did not like the idea: as if they needed funding and money (from the west) for their projects. And they did not like to be confronted with a plan that was targeting them, but not designed by them. However a group of activists wanted to give it a try if we changed the project into something like a facebook for activists, that we then called "MENAchange.org".

The lesson was:

That you need time, energy, talking and working to develop something with the people you want to work with, that you need lots of discussion, endless reocurring phases of "confusions of tongues", especially since the target group of young activists consider themesleves not a group, but a collection of individuals, operating in completely different contexts, with different needs and different "red lines" they have to deal with.

Further:

In the meantime the context changed. While working for three years on MENAchange, Facebook became THE tool for activists to communicate, mobilise. The Arab revolutions erupted: an explosion of new ideas, initiatives, especially among the people we worked with and got to know a lot better while working on MENAchange. While progressing, by the way, we dropped MENAchange and redesigned it into 7erak.org (movement), an approach that has come rather close to the orginal idea of Bazar.org: a place to pitch your ideas in order to get support and learn from one another. But all on a more modest scale than the original Bazar idea.