TEDxWellington 2021 | Final Call For Speakers & Performers
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#23 November 2020 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
A barrage of stuff to wade through and be delighted / surprised / challenged by.
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The moment Wales went into national two-week ‘firebreak’ Covid lockdown.
Brexit Is Looming | The Emergence Of The New United Celtic Nation.
Why Peru opened Machu Picchu ruins for one tourist.
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This thread of me handing out the TEDxWellington Call for Speakers / Performers cards.
The Rasterbator: enlarge images to multiple pages so you can print and combine them into huge posters.
If you need to chill and with 8 hours of sounds / views from sleeping in a tent when it rains outside.
Top video: Learning and Work Institute’s Annual Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture was presented by the Actor and Campaigner, Michael Sheen. The event was organised in partnership with The Open University in Wales and took place on the 16th November, 2017 (LINK). Full (pdf) transcript here.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Brexit Is Looming | The Emergence Of The New United Celtic Nation
ADDENDUM 12.4.21: Should’ve called it a United Celtic Kingdom (not nation)!
Imagine Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland leaving the UK in a decade, rejoining the EU and becoming a new country: United Celtic Nation.
Today the Prime Minister of the UK said this (btw, Australian-style is code for ‘hard brexit / deal’:
Every crisis is an opportunity in disguise hence the tweet thread I tweetmailed out above.
TEDxWellington 2021 Call For Speakers & Performers Announced | Going Big
Boldly planning a mammoth capital experience.
For the past seven years or so I’ve been dedicating my pro-bono time to the TEDxWellington endeavour and last night we announced our public call for speakers and performers.
This is a not-for-profit venture for the wider community organisers by a wonderful bunch of humans volunteering their precious time to enable local stories go global.
The next event will be the biggest of its kind with 2,000 delegates at the award-winning Michael Fowler Centre, held on 8th May 2021.
What a time to be considering such a grand thing, however, with the ‘team of 5 million’ again pulling together to eliminate community transmission of COVID-19 from our shores, we’re leaning into the hope this will sustain through to next year and beyond.
So if you know anyone in or associated with the Wellington-region who has an idea worth spreading, here’s their chance to get considered for the TEDxWellington 2021 stage:
Creative Welly Episodes Catch-up | Maturing The Format
The passion project progresses.
Above is the latest episode of the little side creative endeavour launched a few months ago in response to the lockdown anxiety we all felt (and many are still feeling around the globe):
Revealed only in retrospect these past couple of years, is a thematic thread through my past projects / experiences of ‘giving people voice’ (which has become my spoken purpose plus evidenced in both my producing and coaching roles).
Creative Welly is a mash-up-manifestation of this and my hunger for curating good people…
After six episodes, I’m reflecting on how important intentional space is, what the mix of curious humans and intersecting disciplines ignites plus how listening is the fastest route in connecting to another person.
Am still trying to get the balance right of tangent following plus the drawing of the connections between those guests invited to participate. Sometimes it just flows, softly and eagerly, other times it requires a more focused attempt…
…then again, that’s the same with every day conversation with folks we all interact with.
Onwards!
Oh and Episode 5 was released a few weeks ago and is equally worth your time also:
All episodes are shot and edited by the wonderfully talented Jono Tucker, Empire Films. An extremely diligent and personable soul who has added a polish to the resulting video which I never could’ve achieved, thank you Jono.
Hosted at Xequals, a centrally based web development agency who provide us with a kick-ass office which totally gets kitted out for the shoot. Thank you Alex Matthews for being so gracious with your space.
#22 October 2020 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
Bounce your way through the following assortment of delightful gathered things.
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My fatherland is struggling as several more Welsh counties to go into coronavirus lockdown.
Ireland may have the answer when it comes to Facebook and data sovereignty.
Who knew how much tourism power Wikipedia has.
Suing the patent office on behalf of AI.
Why I’m taking a break from Creative Leadership NZ this year.
Cocooning in technology for the privileged.
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Here’s a directory of free graphic design resources that you can use for personal or commercial use.
Here is the bible of remote work tools.
A Random Two-Word Phrase Generator for inspiring weird and wonderful ideas / thoughts / names.
Transform any hands-drawn design into a HTML code.
Image credit – Eleri Morgan.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
RemoteTogetherNZ – Register Now | New Curator Role
UPDATE:
A new festival exploring the elements of remote and flexible working, 2-13 November 2020 in Queenstown – let’s be remote together!
In June my friend Trent Yeo calls me with an audacious idea to go some way in addressing the tourism deficit of Queenstown. His pitch was simple: in March 2020 this year, if you had a job you suddenly became part of a global tribe called ‘remote and flexible workers’, lets build out a learning experience around this, attract different humans to the area to explore working from here in the future.
So after some early scoping, tweaks and iterations plus LOTS of conversations, RemoteTogetherNZ was born:
Join us for RemoteTogetherNZ, a festival of professional development, networking opportunities, and wellbeing activities which explore the themes of flexible and remote working in one of the most beautiful places in the world.
The remote world is here to stay and New Zealand has a great opportunity to be a global leader. We are in a privileged position to be able to reflect back on lockdown and despite the challenges it brought, it also revealed humanity, kindness and focus on what was important. If Aotearoa is to lead the world as a global citizen and a regionally progressive nation, then what are we doing with the largest single effort humans spend their waking hours doing – work?
We’re trying to do something which can’t and / or shouldn’t be possible: pull together a world-class, vibrant and compelling, two-week festival, in about 3 months, with over forty different learning opportunities exploring the following themes:
We’ve secured some pots of money from Queenstown Lakes District Council plus Tourism NZ to kick this off and registrations are now open as the programme continues to develop along with the speaker line-up:
Have been working my fingers off curating the current offer and it’s been a wonderful journey of collaboration with such open and good humans:
So if you’re interested in these topics, work in an organisation or business which is still exploring how to react accordingly to this new epoch, someone in charge of redoing policies and strategies, a leader still getting to grips with this different approach to leading etc., register now and snap up the ‘cheap-as-chips-early-bird’ options!
This is going to be fun…
Creative Leadership NZ 2020 | Taking A Break
Slowing down, reflecting on the current landscape and previous events plus being bold in saying no.
Have decided to press pause on this years Creative Leadership NZ conference. The three-time-sold-out experience for visionary humans looking to connect into a creative community to solve contemporary challenges will take a break for 2020 (check out 2019 / 2018 / 2017 event reviews).
The venue was lined up along with speakers and audio visual (AV) services. The idea was to drop the costs to $350 per person to make it accessible as well. Although, as you know I take an unusual approach of paying the speakers well for their contribution, and the ‘hard costs’ remain at whatever price I set it at. Therefore, 140 spots would have to be sold just to break even.
There’s a definite appetite out there for it again although in this current climate of restrictive professional development budgets, not the resources.
As I say: saying ‘no’ is a powerful ‘yes’ to something else.
Ergo, my energies will be devoted elsewhere which will be announced next week… oooh!
#21 September 2020 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs
A jumble of superb digital content and links to spend your good time on.
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How NZ’s law is nowhere near ready for Facial Recognition Technology.
A short ebook online from Cory Doctorow on ‘How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism‘.
If you ever used Siri on your iPhone or Mac this will scare you.
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Borrow a private island in Sweden for one week to work on a creative project.
A list of open source video conferencing tools to use.
Orson Welles’ 1937 radio version of Les Miserables.
An online 3D Book Cover Creator which is very easy to use.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Radio Active C&A Interview | The Origins Of Creative Welly
A 15min radio interview.
Last Saturday got interviewed by the wonderful Mark Westerby on the Radio Active Caffeine & Aspirin show:
Caffeine & Aspirin is Wellington’s weekly arts and culture fix. From 10am-1pm each Saturday tune in and hang out with one of our hosts – Jay Hollows, Mark Westerby, Janan Jedrzejewski, Meredith Robershawe, Brigid Connor and more – as they present a show filled with interviews with makers and shakers from the Wellington arts world, news and views on the culture scene, and a playlist of their personal music faves.
Always fun to react to good questions and we mainly focused on my current side project, Creative Welly.
Sorry about the audio quality as was interviewed via the phone and should’ve used different headphones for sure (lesson noted) plus move away from the windows as it was windy and you can hear the whistles.
Thanks again to Janan and Mark for featuring me and allowing me to share my stories.