Elton Rivas was feeling pretty good.
The closing ceremony for Berlin’s first One Spark crowdfunding festival had just ended.
Creators were celebrating their wins and dreaming about their futures.
The number of attendees for the two-day event had far exceeded expectations.
All were signs of validation that the One Spark concept could succeed outside Jacksonville.
And then it got even better.
Rivas overheard a Berlin tech founder describing the city’s startup scene, saying it could be a bit arrogant and hard to break through. One Spark, he said, was warm and welcoming.
The man’s next eight words made Rivas smile: “We need more One Spark in our lives.”
Another of many validation signs the One Spark folks received in Berlin.
“You can’t even describe the sense of pride and sense of accomplishment that brings,” Rivas said Sunday from Berlin.
For just shy of five months, teams from Jacksonville and Berlin worked together on a much more scaled-down, intimate event than the one here. The two-day festival brought in more than 5,000 people, Rivas said. (Comparatively, attendance for the five-day event in Jacksonville in April was 260,000.)
Joe Sampson, executive director of Jacksonville’s One Spark, expects to borrow elements of that intimate nature for April’s expanded six-day festival in Downtown.
He called the Berlin event “almost surreal,” featuring an interesting blend of projects, an amazing venue and an international audience that embraced everything about One Spark.
“I had to pinch myself a couple of times,” he said.
The mix of projects included an odorless outdoor toilet, furniture made of cardboard that can be folded up and shipped when a person moves and a smartphone app that lets diabetics know if their insulin is in danger of spoiling or needs to be refrigerated.
The juried winners from the five categories will present their projects in Jacksonville in April.
Both Sampson and Rivas were thrilled with the level of engagement in Berlin, from those who knew about the event in advance and those who came upon it happenstance.
Rivas recounted sitting inside the venue, watching people pass by who’d stop and look at the One Spark banners and the crowd. They’d then park their bikes and go inside and participate. It happened time and time again.
A huge validation of the One Spark concept, Rivas said.
The success in Berlin is helping Rivas and others understand the impact that One Spark can have around the world. Because the event had been over less than 24 hours, Rivas couldn’t definitively say if One Spark would return to Berlin.
But, he said, “There is a significant amount of interest to make sure another event happens in Berlin. All signs point to it.”
As the team heads back to Jacksonville, its mission will be to focus on building One Spark into a year-round experience here.
And if doubts start to creep in, they have plenty of validation points from Berlin to fall back on.”
“You look for those individual moments that matter, keep them near and dear to continue to press forward,” Rivas said.
For him, those eight words from a stranger — “We need more One Spark in our lives” — are a great place to start.
@editormarilyn
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