Last week, I hopped on a train from my home a little north of London and headed up to Oxford for four days at the annual Skoll World Forum, a melting pot for the nonprofit and social enterprise sectors that sprawls out of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, where it’s officially held, and into the surrounding pubs and conference rooms.
Skoll is not a conference about the established world order in development. I didn’t encounter any delegates from any of the big bilateral funders such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.K.’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. I met only one delegate from any U.N. agency and only one from any of the large established international nongovernmental organizations.
This was a conference for the people trying to change the order — those closer to the community than the system. The 1,500 official delegates are outnumbered by those who have come without tickets to chat to one another on the edges of the conference. Events inside the main hall were outnumbered by the official side events, and those events in turn are outnumbered by the unofficial side events.