After various mails, calls and a couple of meetings, I’m happy to announce that we have reached an agreement that I think is a win-win-win for everyone involved.

On request of the organizers, I have slightly modified my earlier post which was a hard critique of Wayra. In this way, the facts will remain recorded for posterity but not the awkward feeling between the actors involved. In this post about the conclusion of the whole matter, it’s time to reflect upon the lessons learned for all the three parties. Of what good is making a mistake if you don’t learn from it?

First of all, the event comes back to being called iWeekend University Madrid. A small triumph for iWeekend and a triumph of the truth.

The organizers have admitted their mistake of not informing iWeekend that they intended to do another similar event and then doing a copy paste of iWeekend University Madrid to call it Wayra Weekend. I met up with them last week to understand the reasons behind this behavior. We are now more aligned and now they feel a part of the iWeekend community and understand better than before the philosophy of iWeekend.

Earlier this week, I had a one-to-one meeting with Gary Stewart, director of Wayra Spain, in the office of Wayra. I know him since a few years now, since he was an entrepreneur in Barcelona. He admitted that things were not done properly but at the same time didn’t take any responsibility for the matter. There I disagree with him: anything that happens under the name of Wayra in Spain is his responsibility and not owning up to it is simply avoiding responsibility.

Inspite of our differences, we have agreed to cooperate and collaborate. They have committed to not creating unnecessary competition to iWeekend while they focus on their core business which is to give acceleration to projects that they consider interesting. On our part, iWeekend is open to collaborating with any initiative that helps entrepreneurs make their ideas happen.

Here are a few conclusions that I have derived from this whole episode to improve iWeekend:

• We have to improve the communication with our organizers and ensure that they understand the philosophy of iWeekend : it is an initiative that belongs to the community and the organizers themselves, who usually are participants of some previous event, are the best representatives and ambassadors of the brand.

• We have to create an integral package that is much more attractive to the organizers so that they don’t feel that they haven’t received enough support. To keep spreading the spirit of iWeekend, we have to create a unique value proposition that includes our brand, our know-how translated to processes, tools and our community.

• We have not been able to send “official representatives” to all our events for lack of resources or because many events coincide at the same time. We need to create a network of mentors and facilitators that allows us to create more value for the organizers and for the entrepreneurs who participate in our events.

We need resources to create this system and maintain it. Hope that inspite of the difficult times, we will be able to raise the resources required to keep promoting the culture of entrepreneurship and keep making ideas happen.

This case has a happy ending for the moment. But I believe that such things are more common especially in the new economy of ideas, concepts and knowledge. Here’s an interesting article on the topic if you would like to delve deeper in the subject: http://alexiskold.wordpress.com/2008/09/28/patent-crisis-and-the-age-of-open-source-ideas/

In November 2011, we organized an iWeekend University event in the installations of Wayra in Madrid. They also sponsored the event by paying for the food. It was a runaway success.

Now, 5 months later, Wayra announces Wayra Weekend, a copy of iWeekend University. It is being organized by the same group of young people and the most shocking thing is that they are calling the previous event of iWeekend University as “the previous edition of Wayra Weekend”. Not only that, they are also using the video of iWeekend University and have done a shameless copy-paste of the legal terms and conditions and the agenda of our event in Madrid. Even the image and the photos are from our event. Due to this reason, it has been called in twitter (in Spanish) “an epic copy-paste by Wayra of iWeekend”. We didn’t have any news of this event until we saw it online.

iWeekend University Home v/s Wayra Weekend Home

V/S

Compare the below snapshots from Wayra Weekend with the content in our website of iWeekend University Madrid :

http://iweekend.org/uni/madrid/

http://iweekend.org/uni/madrid/2011/11/26/proyectos-seleccionados/

Clearly, Wayra is aware of all this and is allowing all this to happen. Can entrepreneurs trust in a company that shamelessly plagiarizes a project like iWeekend, born out of the community of entrepreneurs? No entrepreneur should present his/her idea to an accelerator/incubator whose values and principles are based on a shaky foundation. Something that is ethically wrong cannot be good for entrepreneurs or the society in general.

This message comes from an entrepreneur who has lived and is living the struggle of scaling up his project. Clearly, there is a lack of real support for entrepreneurs in Spain. If we continue like this, we will continue getting what we have got until now. The least we need are good examples.

So answering the question of what is iWeekend, here’s the best reply: iWeekend is an event dedicated to making ideas happen. A weekend full of ideas, inspiration, innovation and impact.

We have just completed this year’s events. The last month has been intense, with a total of 12 iWeekends in 3 different continents that brought together over 500 entrepreneurs to launch a total of 32 projects.

Thanks to all participants, entrepreneurs, mentors, partners, sponsors and organizers who make it all happen.

We will be back in 2011 with more of iWeekend and keep improving and innovating to fulfill our mission: promote the culture of entrepreneurship in new technologies and help entrepreneurs get started in a record time. We hope to inspire more talented people to take the entrepreneurial path and more companies and institutions to support us in our mission.

We wish you a 2011 filled with moments of happiness and success.