How to do it
When I started this site, the aim was to encourage better cooperation in the startup scene in the region, and to highlight all the interesting and cool startups that are here and the massive amounts of events going on. I also wanted to make the news coverage in English, in order to be more inclusive and easier for newcomers to the region to find out what is going on. And for outsiders to be able to track what startups are interesting in Copenhagen and it’s surroundings.
Somewhere in the future there were also plans to maybe do more, and to help get the movement for the Nordics and Europe going. Six month after I started, Swedish Startups Space came along, and did an excellent job with covering the Swedish scene, both Stockholm and the rest. And Arctic Startup did a ‘restart’, after having had many years of activity but some recent troubles. And in Denmark Trendsonline, the biggest domestic startup blog, started Trendsonline.co.
So the scene seemed to start to move by itself already.
All of our sites established contact with each-other over time. And we thought that maybe we should do something together. And after watching this talk from the Nordic Next meeting, I was inspired even more – here in Scandinavia we are, per capita, definitely one of the most active startup regions. But we need to be better to communicate that to the outside world.
Increasing ease of communication
The problem was that all of us had started for different reasons, and where located in different parts in Scandinavia. Us here in Copenhagen / southern Sweden, James and Swedish Startup Space in Stockholm, and Greg and the guys in Helsinki and Daniel in Aarhus (and Copenhagen). And all of us where of course super busy (either with doing the news sites as a “hobby”, or by simple running the sites).
I realized that getting a cooperation going that would work and not cause any friction would be hard. So I decided instead that we should do a cooperation that is “one-sided” – it requires only adjustments from one side to do it, and no deeper coordinations. From that came the idea to make this site, and the articles that we write, “open source”. Or rather, when I started to look into it, that articles from here will be Creative Commons.
I have made this into an “Open News Manifest“. It involves these points:
- All content created is under a CC-BY 3.0 license (creative commons), and free for both private or commercial use, as long as it is attributed that it is from us.
- Attribution has to be to the site of original text as a minimum, and is encouraged to be to the author as well, but this is not a requirement.
- The site should embrace user created contributions and enhancements to content.
Arctic Startup
The final tipping point for this to happen was that I talked to Greg and Dimitri from Arctic Startup at Slush about this, and they loved the idea. And then the goal was set – to do this change as quickly during 2013. So with this announcement, they are open to use, re-use and even edit our content on their site as they see fit.
But it is an totally voluntarily connection – they do not have to, and they only need to do it if it suits them.
I believe in this way we can open for the establishment of one great news source for the entire Nordics, and maybe Europe in the long run, while we here at Øresund Startups can focus on doing what is best for this part of Scandinavia – the part that we care the most about. And in this way, their news can cover the Copenhagen area better for outsiders, while startups from here can get more international attention. A win-win-win. Which is always worth doing, in my opinion.
We love feedback and ideas on this concept. We want to do it as good as possible, and if you have suggestions how we should do things better, please let us know!
