SoCap09: The workshops I’d attend, if I could

The long-awaited SoCap 09 conference kicks off  officially tomorrow in San Francisco, with more than 800 registered attendees, 30% more than the year before. I expect it to be a significant event in the social enterprise world–and I wish I could be there.

If I were able to attend, here’s what I’d want to check out:

–The keynote address. It’s being given by Sonal Shah, director of the White House Office of Social Innovation. That’s a new government office recently started to accelerate the impact of nonprofits and (I think) for profits.  I’m looking forward to hearing more specifics about just what the office is going to do, what Shah (and Obama) see as the appropriate role of government in boosting the sector.  There’s also going to be a panel discussion with a number of luminaries, such as Carla Javits, head of REDF and Andrew Wolk, who runs Root Cause.

–Wednesday’s discussion of IRIS and GIIRS. I’ve written about these initiatives before. IRIS is a taxonomy for social enterprise terms and a system for measuring non-financial results; GIIRS is a method for comparing and rating companies, aimed especially at larger institutional investors.   People from Deloitte,  B Lab, Acumen Fund and Rockefeller Foundation will provide more specifics of these potentially ground-breaking methodologies.

–A discussion of supply chain issues. How do you make sure suppliers and all those other parties that make up a supply chain are also singing the same social enterprise tune? I think, at the moment, accomplishing that feat is enormously difficult, so I’m curious to hear about success stories and the challenges companies have faced.

–Cathy Clark.  A well-respected researcher, she heads Columbia University’s Research Institute on Social Entrepreneurship and is a faculty advisor for the Global Social Venture Competition. She’s going to discuss a busines model she’s developing for social entrepreneurs. That’s all I know about the effort, which is still a work in progress.