thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

At last years TEDxAkl event one of the best presentations was by Scott Gilmour of “ihaveadream”

I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with Scott before and so when the programme opened at Wesley I took my daughter along for a look. She goes to a decile 10 school not that far away from Wesley but a world away in terms of opportunity and outcomes.

That is – unless some of us help out to change the odds. I have a dream aims to inspire the whole school and related community by helping a whole class.

“Each local “I Have a Dream”® project adopts one entire year level from the founding Primary School. They work with this group of children (“the Dreamers”) and their families year-round from their primary school years through university. Each project has its own unique Project Sponsor(s), its own full time Project Co-ordinator, and its own group of dedicated and committed volunteers.”

“In 2003, the first “I Have a Dream”® project outside of the USA started up at Wesley Primary School in Mt Roskill, a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand.”

Scott presented at #tedxakl ’09 last year – here is the video of that presentation.

I’m helping out on TEDxAkl “ideas worth spreading” 2010 this year. You can get your TEDxAkl tickets over here. No essay required this year.

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I really enjoyed Brett Solomon’s talk at TEDx Sydney 2010. Brett  is the co-founder and Executive Director of Accessnow.org. He takes us on an internet freedom tour. A few surprises here.

I’m wondering if the debate on internet filtering in Australia  had any effect on the election there. What do you all think? If Labour have lost then Senator Conroy is gone but the debate may not be over.

That election took place yesterday but this morning – still to close to call although it looks like Labour has lost and while Seventy six seats are required for victory in the 150 seat Parliament that just may be a too hard.

“Brett Solomon is co-founder and Executive Director of Accessnow.org – a new global movement for digital freedom. Born out of the aftermath of the 2009 Iranian election, Access uses cutting edge technologies to help people living behind the firewall, provides thought leadership on the new frontier of digital rights, and is building a mass global citizens’ movement which advocates for internet freedom.

Brett was Campaign Director at Avaaz.org, a global political web force which has rapidly grown into the largest online activist community in the world at 3.6 million subscribers in all 193 countries. Brett was the first Executive Director of GetUp!, an Australian political organisation of over 300,000 people, worked as Campaign Coordinator at Amnesty and founded Oxfam’s International Youth Parliament.”

from TEDx Sydney speakers

Update: It looks like Tony Abbott might be the new Aussie PM.

If Labour has had a  -5.5% swing against them then they should step aside but we won’t know for a few days or weeks.  The early results may be incorrect but it is not looking good for Labour. What will the Greens do ?

When my daughter was 3 she used to ask what I did for a job. She has a much better idea now but to keep things simple I used to say something like this.

“I talk with people, I take lots of notes. Then some web stuff.”

Fairly often now some of this takes place all at the same time. Live twitter streams from events are now part of the (new) media mix.  Services like Be in the Room can aggregate social media feeds and we can take questions from external observers via the use of hashtags.

Here is recent example (August 4th) from the Unitec Forum for the Future series on Auckland Super City debates. Look at earlier posts on theDomm website for more about that event and/ or follow on twitter @UnitecFTF At the UnitecFTF those who couldn’t be there asked questions via twitter.

This was the 6th forum event so far. More are planned. Noted business commentator and journalist Rod Oram is the chair for the event and Associate Professor & Head of Department Rob Davis deserves full credit for being the catalyst & firestarter on this project.

As this debate took place in a TV studio with lots of outside media present some of this was captured on video. I even got a rare chance to see myself at work because when you are on live streaming it all tends to be a bit of blur in the moment.

The super city changeover for Auckland is an important change and  it deserves better, smarter, more engaging media and new media engagement.

Well done Unitec cast and crew for making a difference.

One of the best jobs I ever had was Research & Analysis Director for a merchant banking company back in the early ’90s. Until then it hadn’t really occurred to me that I could get paid for thinking as work.

My current business tagline is “thinking & planning for marketing success”.

Consequently my wardrobe is mostly t-shirts with think or something similar written on them.

At #wordcampnz 2010 there was a serendipitous moment when I was standing near the screens about to introduce Richard Hollingum from Department of Doing and TEDX Auckland

Richard had up a screen saying I’ve been thinking and I was wearing my favourite REMO t-shirt Think

Kristina DC Hoeppner caught that moment.

“@dialogCRM you made it onto my pic of the day: http://bit.ly/dxGh8e – thanx for all your hard work for prep, the event and now follow-up”

The full set of Wordcampnz 2010 photos by Kristina is on Flickr over here
I blogged about it on behalf of #wordcampnz 2010 over here