#61 February 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

(A good reminder, via What’s Your Gift?)

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“Google, especially, has relied on the open web RSS protocol to gain so much market share and influence, but continues to engage in behavior that exploits the open web at the expense of its users. As a result, Google has single-handedly contributed to the reason many users who once relied on RSS feeds have stopped using them.”

How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds – Open RSS

“Don’t be distracted by criticism. Remember, the only taste of success some people have is when they take a bite out of you.” Zig Ziglar

99 Great Quotes That Will Help You Handle Criticism | Inc.com

“When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard, as shown by widespread theta/alpha connectivity coherence patterns between network hubs and nodes in parietal and central brain regions. Existing literature indicates that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning.”

Frontiers | Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom

“Put simply, the numbers don’t add up. Data from Patreon and Substack suggests the average conversion rate from follower to paying fan is about 5%. This means a creator would need a total fanbase of 20,000 followers to yield 1,000 paying supporters. And building a core fanbase of 20,000 engaged followers is extremely difficult in today’s crowded creative landscape.”

The creator economy can’t rely on Patreon. — Joan Westenberg

“A Vicar asks his congregation in the valleys the question “What would you do if Jesus returned tomorrow?”. A voice in the flock pipes up; “Move Barry John to inside-centre”!”

From the comment section of Barry John was ‘the King, a magician, my friend’ – Sir Gareth Edwards – BBC Sport

“Much furor has been raised in recent months over the unauthorized scraping of the web to train AI models; OpenAI even thanked the faceless “millions of people” who created the data to train GPT-3 in its paper describing the model. But when it comes to data willingly shared with Facebook and Meta, that Faustian bargain was struck long ago.”

Zuckerberg Boasts He Will Be AI God King Because We Already Gave Him All Our Data

WATCH

EXPLORE

This minimal, customisable typing online tool / test.

Check out the quietest places in the world’s loudest cities.

A nice Terminal-level workaround for applications hiding under the MacBook Pro notch.

Free ‘innovation’ posters for exploration / sharing / discussion (via Innovation illustrated – by Dave Gray).

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#60 January 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

(via The 1944 CIA guide to sabotaging meetings — Authentic Comms Strategic Consultancy)

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

READ

“I can get through this.” / 2. “I’m not going to let myself be a victim.” / 3. “Life is hard.” / 4. “This, too, shall pass.” / 5. “What can I learn from this?” / 6. “I need some time.” / 7. “I still have things to be grateful for.” / 8. “It is what it is.” / 9. “I’m letting this go.”

Harvard psychologist: If you use any of these 9 phrases every day, ‘you’re more emotionally resilient than most’

“The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today unveiled its new Street Level Surveillance hub, a standalone website featuring expanded and updated content on various technologies that law enforcement agencies commonly use to invade Americans’ privacy.“

(via Street Level Surveillance)

“The possible consequences of a changing concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate, rates of photosynthesis, and rates of equilibration with carbonate of the oceans may ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization,” Epstein, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology (or Caltech), wrote to the group in November 1954.

Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis.”

‘Smoking gun proof’: fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show | Fossil fuels | The Guardian

“The act of entering an airport starts with the removal of personal sovereignty. If you linger at a curb, you will be ticketed. If your bag is overweight, you are screwed. Inside, you are scanned, told explicitly what you can and cannot take with you, and people must submit or be punished. Often surly people are yelling at you about your laptops, shoes, and belts. It is now also taken for granted that if you wish to consume anything at an airport, it will cost 2-3X what it does in the wild.”

The Oppressive Culture of Air Travel

“One significant anniversary in 2023 passed almost without mention. In May 1923, the Welsh women’s peace petition was initiated – a plea from the women of Wales to the women of the US, urging the US to take its place in the newly formed League of Nations and encouraging its full participation in the permanent court of international justice, which had come into being in 1922. The text refers to American-Welsh cooperation in the 19th century, and welcomes the steps taken after the first world war to control the arms trade and tackle what we now call human trafficking and the movement of illegal drugs.”

Remember the tenacity of 400,000 Welsh women a century ago. Then use your power to shape events today | Rowan Williams | The Guardian

WATCH

EXPLORE

Watch YouTube without the ads via YewTu.be.

This list of 50 types of Science Fiction is interesting.

Nearly 300 (unicode) arrows. Which are your fav(s)…?

4131 free icons for your games & other creative projects via game-icons.net.

This open source app: GitHub – MrKai77/Loop: MacOS window management made elegant.

At templatemaker.nl, you can create and download custom sized papercraft and packaging templates for free!

Play around with this Text to Speech & AI Voice Generator – ElevenLabs to see how far this technology has come.

A specific problem which I’ve been having with my Mac solved with this open source app: Blue Snooze: Sleeping Mac = Bluetooth off.

At Techcopes, you can access a variety of font generator tools to customize and enhance your text in different styles for different social media platforms.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

Creative Leadership NZ 2017 | Reflections & Insights

Starting a creative leadership movement in NZ.

Last week, the (sold out) inaugural Creative Leadership NZ conference brought together 14 speakers / facilitators and 150 attendees for:

Two days of ideas / insights into inspiring and managing the creative process / people which leads to innovation.

The event took about four and half months to organise and featured 6x keynotes, 5x different workshops, 4x idea-bombs, and 1x jazz trio (for the first day), plus 3x two-hour masterclasses which were repeated (for the second day).

In an attempt to learn out loud here are my takeaways:

Stats

As you can see from above we had a healthy gender representation of females. 15% of attendees were from outside of Wellington and overall there was representation from 70 cross-sector organisations (judging by email addresses):

Paying Folks

Just like at Speaking with Purpose 2017 earlier this year, nearly every one of the speakers / facilitators got remunerated in some way (some wouldn’t / couldn’t take payment). Everyone also got a plus one for the event to gift on as they pleased.

Thank you Aithan, CoLiberate (Bop, Jody, Sarah), Elysa, Emilie, Gareth, Gus, Mark, Nick, Pavani, Ruth, Victoria for being so generous in your time and for sharing your wisdom.

Gus Balbontin
Investor – Founder – Advisor

Former Executive Director at Lonely Planet, Co-founder of SneakySurf, Director at Roshambo, Entrepreneur in Residence at Vic Uni.

Bop Murdoch / Sarah Tuck / Jody Burrell
CoLiberate

Creators of Wellington’s first Gym for mental wellbeing, the CoLiberate team are leaders in personal and professional mindhealth.

Victoria Spackman
Director Te Auaha

Making safe spaces for creative types to flourish at Te Auaha – New Zealand Institute of Creativity.

Pavani Rao Boddapati
CG Supervisor at Weta Digital

Pavani has over 12 years of experience in visual effects for film and has worked on numerous projects including Avatar, Planet of the Apes and The Hobbit trilogy.

Emilie Fetscher
MC / Design Strategist

Collaborator in residence for design-focused leaders and currently consumed as an accidental entrepreneur at StrataMap.

Aithan Shapira, MFA PhD
Founder + Leadership Strategist

Founder @ Making to Think. Lecturer @ MIT Sloan. Aithan builds leaders’ creative instincts using time- and science-tested techniques from the arts to expand perceptions and accelerate solutions.

Elysa Fenenbock
Designer-in-residence at Google

At Google she facilitates human-centered design processes & spearheads social impact programs. In Creative Nomad Project, she leads global organizations to foster creativity in education & sustainable impact. Also lectures at Stanford d.school.

DK
Producer / Speaker / Advisor

TEDxWellington licensee. Producer of many events. Speaker coach. Creative Welly founder. Arts Marketing Academy Mentor.

Nick Kapica
Designer

Design Lead at Wellington City Council. Passionate about people, design and the urban environment. Looks after brand and pushes design deep into council.

Gareth Parry
Designer

Gareth Parry is a partner in PwC’s Experience Centre. Gareth has experience in architecture, learning design, digital advertising, infography, human centered design, and event creation.

Ruth Keiry
Designer

Ruth Keiry runs PwC’s Wellington Sandbox. She’s framed, designed, and facilitated dozens of collaborative spaces.

Mark Bradford
BeWeDō® practitioner

Founder of BeWeDō® + Senior Lecturer at Massey University, School of Design. #BeWeDō is a unique motion-led creative leadership experience.

Finances

This was privately funded venture (even though many were approached for sponsorship / support) and delivered under the Creative Welly initiative.

The only external financial support came from the US Embassy and Australian High Commission who provided funds to cover most of the overseas expenses for Aithan, Elysa and Gus.

Other support came from Wellington Chocolate Factory who offered some gift packs for the speakers / facilitators plus our wonderful venue hosts The Roxy Cinema for a little discount for returning and booking the whole place out for two days.

The event cost $55k to run although I achieved the goal of just about doubling the profit of the Speaking with Purpose 2017 event.

Extra Costs

The ‘Creative Care Packs’ included: a printed brochure / agenda (with poster of creative leadership quotes on back), name badge, post-it notes, spare paper, Airline 210 medium black pen plus a bar of custom made chocolate for sustenance. These were given out to all attendees upon arrival and cost approx $3k.

There were items which wasn’t first budgeted for including fees for the jazz trio and the extra chairs to ensure preferred execution of the workshop experience, plus added material costs for the masterclasses / workshops.

Additional extras included nearly $2.5k on external lighting and sound / mics (to improve the experience) as well as paying my pal Emilie Fetscher for her MCing duties.

DIY (Kind Of) Rules

A few services were traded and registrations swapped against programme / brochure design plus the photos and main video on the top of this post.

Again, I didn’t use a ticketing service and invoiced everyone individually to both save on ticketing fees (as every ticketing provider holds on to the monies until after the event) whilst also creating the working capital needed for pay for venues and other costs.

The other things I personally undertook were:

  • design, content and copy for the website
  • all email newsletters and attendees communication
  • venue discussions, deliberations, decisions etc
  • all speaker and event curation
  • badge design (see below)

I also crafted extra content for promotion. These little ‘visual pearls’ were insights into what each speaker / facilitator will be bringing to the conference (example):

Here are all the Twitter versions: Aithan, Coliberate, DK, Elysa, Gareth, Gus, Mark, Nick, Ruth, Victoria.

Marketing & Sales

I tried to engage support in this area and spoke to half a dozen people in Wellington. Two didn’t respond, another three were busy and one agency priced themselves way above what was briefed.

Had some lovely support from several organisations in featuring the event and opportunity through their social channels.

One thing I did this time was spend time talking to gatekeepers within of organisations: business development, head of marketing, team leaders, CEOs etc. Those who are considering the larger impact of their brand plus who have direct access to monies.

From this I gained there’s not a lot of consideration given to leadership development and / or budgets set aside for professional development. Maybe something to remedy by highlighting the opportunity earlier in the year for future budgetary considerations.

Learnings

Three big takeaways from this event are:

  • Variety is key—the mix of 20min keynotes interlaces with 5min ‘idea-bombs’ ensured the event had pace and diversity of subjects / voice. More choice was available through the workshops which were a mix of physical, hands-on plus in-depth and participatory. A strategy which paid off and which was reflected in the positive feedback received;
  • Sales support is needed—as a builder and curator I want to continue to craft incredible events. The deficit I have is in my interest in pursuing sales. The need to find a sales partner with ethical core values (get in touch if that’s you and can prove it) will be something to develop;
  • Sponsorship—additional funding would grow the conference and reach of participants (from outside the region). Some of this funding would go into the marketing plus fund the sales support and the rest into sharpening up other elements.

Future

Encouraging and nurturing creative literacies plus leadership talent here in Wellington is part of the larger Creative Welly initiative, however, conversations are already starting with other regions in the country who have expressed an interest in hosting future events.

Connections are also already being made with potential sponsors for next years event as this is definitely something I’d like to replicate if the city and attendee base is willing.

Related post: Speaking with Purpose 2017 | Reflections On Running A Successful Conference
Published

Three Little Words Which Spark Creativity | Foundational Thinking Of Creatives

i don't know neil degrasse tyson

Every creative act starts with an act of vulnerability evidenced by three little words:

I.
Don’t.
Know.

Many state the above as line in the sand, a closing down of conversation, a refusal to explore further.

Others get excited, and lean forwards, hungry for adventure, ready to fail forwards.

These are the creatives!

Whether it be composing an orchestral piece in 10minutes from nothing:

Collaborating on a dance piece when you can’t speak each others language:

Drawing blind to spark an abstract drawing piece:

…this is the imaginative mindset at work.

When mixed with curated ideas and experience plus audacity and mad curiousity, its forms the most delicious path to potential.

Whether you’re starting a business, leading a team, beginning at a new organisation, figuring out the next steps in life, or shaping a city-wide initiative to infuse a city with creative literacies

…saying “I don’t know” more often is a rallying cry to creative action.

Published