Join us for the next Social Innovation BarCamp in Sydney. It’s free registration so sign up now and participate in a day of ideas, conversation and creative thinking.
Again we’ll be crowdsourcing ideas for creating new business models for social good and building up our community network of changemakers.
Like our previous Social Innovation BarCamps this one will provide a place for facilitated conversations (details of the session format here) where anyone can share:
This is your chance to get your ideas out into the open amongst a friendly crowd, as one of the participants said after our last BarCamp:
“thanks #sibsyd, without the barcamp I would never had courage to actually talk about my ‘silly’ idea with somebody else let alone pursue it.”
In spite of having to stay in online contact with work last Saturday I still made it to BarCamp # 5 in Sydney. It was a great day and the new venue – the Australian Technology Park Innovation Centre – was ideal (if slightly chilly in the Atrium).
Again I am struck by how much progress we have made in building a real community amongst geeks, start-up people, entrepreneurs, technologists, thinkers, activists and web folks in Sydney. Community & collaboration based events like this bring us all together to share ideas and enthusiasm.
We are getting to the stage where many of us know each other both online and in real life. Between @STUB tweetups, Silicon Beach Sydney drinks and BarCamp the sense of familiarity and friendly community has definitely grown.
A really nice feature of the day was the number of families who attended & the very cool kids who presented sessions. The sessions branched out from pure technology or business focus to include whimsy such as origami and paper aeroplane creation. Check out the pictures below.
I really came away from BarCamp energised and enthusiastic about the future of technology in Australia. Funnily enough I also won a prize (a nice bottle of scotch) for something too (there’s a long story about that – but too long to go into here).
BarCamp is an ad-hoc unconference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment”. BarCamp is an intense community event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees. Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to participate.
According to Jodie Miners, one of the un-organisers, there’s over 170 people registered to attend, lots of great sponsors and a great new venue.
Apparently Jodie’s planning a talk on her current passion, Google Wave, & is hoping that a bunch of people will get together to do a super session on Google Wave.
I’m thinking of doing something about Twitter Apps – the good, bad & indifferent or maybe something else (depends how I feel).
This is 5th BarCamp Sydney & the un-organising committee has tagged this one as the Recession Edition or “the BarCamp we had to have” (paraphrasing Keating from 1990).
One innovation that I’m really keen on for this Barcamp is the Think Tank room. The Think Tank room is a small room with no projector and no tech – just enough room for a small group of people discussing ideas. And what better ideas to discuss than ideas about the future. For some more background on this idea check out the Barcamp Sydney blog.
The Christmas season is so busy. For me, this includes End of Course testing for my students. Today I am swamped!! As I was driving home, something hit me like a ton of bricks. I wanted to just emotionally explode. Why now, as I was driving down the road, ready to be home? The pain that comes with the holidays is unpredictable. A meltdown can come at anytime and for no apparent reason other than the one underlining reality: Christmas is not always a happy time. Those memories that should bring joy while thinking of Christmases past can trigger depression.
We will not be governed by our thoughts: we will govern them. We will take every thought captive. When the sad thoughts come, we will choose not to dwell there. Sure they will come, but we decide whether we allow them to stay and set up camp or kick them to the curb.
“…I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He (the Spirit of the Lord) asked me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ I said, ‘O Sovereign Lord, you alone know.’ Then he said to me, ’Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.’ So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. Then he said to me,’ Prophesy to the breath…’ So as I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.”
As I left the hospital on December 23, 2003 after our last night’s visit, I prayed harder than I’d ever prayed before. Daddy had been through a day of risky procedures. I prayed for supernatural healing. Being a person that has been healed, there was not a cell in my body that did not believe that God could heal and sometimes chooses to do just that. I pleaded with God for Him to do things only He could do. I bargained with Him, asking Him to restore my daddy, but give me back the arthritis that He has taken away from me. I told him that all I wanted for Christmas was my dad. That night I laid it all out before God, believing that He could do mighty things. When we went for our first visit of the next morning on Christmas Eve, we learned that the ventilator had been turned off. Prior to this, dad had been unsuccessful in becoming completely independent of the ventilator. I believed that God was already working our Christmas miracle. I said to dad, “No more tears, dad; now we are going to laugh. Today I want to see a smile. God is going to turn the weeping into laughing.” Stroke patients are typically very emotional, and daddy had cried almost nonstop since his stroke. We had definitely not seen any smiles. At the next visit four hours later, a church friend stepped on to say hello. And when he did, daddy smiled. We were ecstatic. And I said, “See, I knew we would get a smile today!” At the next visit, he laughed, the laugh that restored our hope. I got my Christmas miracle, even if that laugh was all I got. But as I write this on Christmas Day, I am holding on to a hope, a hope that God is working a mighty miracle. And Christmas is all about hope.