Rannie photojunkie gathered 20 couples on 20 couches. What’s the Difference? Simple and beautiful. You may see some familiar faces.
Holm Friebe and Philipp Albers delivered a presentation at LIFT on a topic that’s close to my heart: the future of work, exploring new forms of self-organizing “unorganizations” of creative free agents. Of course, I’ve been thinking about similar issues as I consider how to scale Remarkk! Consulting, so I took particular interest and had a great conversation with the guys over fondue. (which, btw, is the best part of LIFT!)
Friebe’s book, Wir nennen es Arbeit (“We call it work”) is a bestseller in Germany that has been described as “youth economic manifesto”. They organized a conference in Berlin also called Wir nennen es Arbeit Festival-Camp, which looked like tremendous fun and is possible inspiration for a Toronto FreeAgentCamp or Future of Work conference. These guys apparently invented Powerpoint Karaoke (fact check anyone?), and put on events like a poetry slam with sms voting and electro-shock feedback. They are looking to develop coworking spaces to accommodate their starfish adhocracy. This is not your father’s creative agency.
Presentation notes after the jump…
Lifters underground at CERN, originally uploaded by Kooze.
I had a fascinating tour of the Large Hedron Collider at CERN on Saturday. This was one of the last opportunities for members of the public to get inside this amazing, mind-boggling project probing the frontiers of physics and our understanding of the universe before it gets switched on this summer. Something to tell the grandkids.
Our guide Bilge Demirköz is a research fellow at CERN who is searching for evidence of dark matter. She gave a tour through not only the facility, but also across the history of particle physics through 30 Nobel prizes. Her passion for the subject was infectious, as you could sense the excitement of scientific exploration at the frontiers.
Pedro Custodio did a great workshop, an “Online Communities Clinic”. Good material, really solid foundation for thinking about and planning user interactions for online communities. Once the slides are on Slideshare I’ll update this post and embed. (If you want to see them when uploaded, leave a comment on this post.)
My rough notes follow after the jump….
I made a commitment to myself to be a better, more regular blogger. I’m in Europe right now, heading to Geneva next week for the LIFT Conference for my second year. Described as a conference dedicated to exploring the social impact of new technologies, LIFT is fantastic – great sessions, big beautiful brains, fun interactive art and yummy fondue – what’s not to love? I will try to blog from LIFT this year, or you can follow me on Twitter.
I have been following the U.S. democratic primaries pretty closely and I am struck by Barack Obama’s amazing talent to transcend everyday politics and inspire in a way that no leader has done in my lifetime. Obama’s abilities and his unique and transformative potential were well articulated both by small-c conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly and by Caroline Kennedy in this weekend’s NY Times.
His ability to engage the passion of youth and unite it with the wisdom of age inspires me. In my community engagement work, I am attempting a similar kind of engagement and I am learning a lot just by thinking about this task in the context of the emerging Obama moment. If successful, he will be the first President of the Social Web Age.
But you only need to witness the man himself in his moment.
Why do I want to believe? Because we are facing increasingly intractable and difficult problems. The old ideologies are failing us. Government is failing us. Corporations and other large institutions are failing us. I believe that human culture applied through our creative passion will solve the most difficult problems of our age. They are, in fact, the only things that ever have. We have no choice but to unite, collaborate in new ways and harness the creative spark in every individual. It’s not a matter of being idealistic, it’s a matter of survival and the resilience of our communities and society in the face of accelerating change.
Why do we engage young people? Because they have the energy, the passion, the new ideas and the skills to realize them. They also need the wisdom, knowledge and experience of their parents generation.
If Millennials have the passion and ideas, and the Boomers have the power, authority, capital and experience, then the epochal role of Gen-X folks like me is to help broker the relationship between the Millennials and their parents. We are the ones working to build the institutional structures and the inter-generational interfaces of the new millennium. This is my mission and the focus of my consulting work, and I know it describes the role of many of us in our own ways.