Today I spoke at the Critical Horizons Regional Futures conference held in Bunbury, Western Australia,which “examines emerging global trends and how they might affect regional communities in the South West Region of Western Australia”. It is fantastic that a non-urban region runs a regular event to examine its future. It is clear that the attendees from across business and government had a keen appetite to explore the future and what they need to do to create a prosperous region in years to come.
The regional economy is still largely driven by mining and to a lesser extent agriculture (including the delightful Margaret River wines). It is experiencing many issues common to regional areas, including the loss of younger people to cities. However it has a particular context in its location. Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the world, and Perth is the most isolated city in the world. Bunbury is over 2 hours drive away from Perth. It took me 10 hours door-to-door to get here from Sydney – by far the longest it has taken me to get to a speaking gig in Australia.
The region’s geographic isolation means the topic of my keynote here, Power to the People: Thriving in a Hyperconnected Society, is immensely relevant. I discussed the overwhelming trend of how a connected world is shifting power from institutions to individuals. However I also covered the implications for regions of the emerging global talent economy. Crowdsourcing tools on one level provide access to extraordinary talent that can be harnessed in ways limited only by imagination. Yet a connected world also provides opportunities to provide services, both in existing domains, and especially in managing projects.
To the extent that they are useful (usual disclaimer: my slides are created to accompany my speeches, not to be viewed on their own) here are my slides for my keynote (minus the Flash animations).
New flyer on keynote speaking work
By Ross DawsonWe recently updated our flyer on my keynote speaking work, highlighting that I am speaking primarily as a futurist these days, adding in a few extra cities I’ve spoken in since the last edition, and a few other tweaks.
The flyer is embedded below, you can download it here, or let us know if you’d like print copies. Head over to my speaker website for more detailed speaking topics. :-)
Ross Dawson: Keynote Speaker | Futurist | Strategy Advisor
New perspectives on crowdsourcing at Creative Sydney
By Ross DawsonOn Saturday I spoke at Creative Sydney’s Crowds + Collaboration event. I had just been invited to on Thursday to fill in for a speaker who couldn’t make it, but it was pretty easy to do given last week we launched our Crowdsourcing Landscape and I gave two keynotes largely about crowdsourcing (to Cisco and at a regional futures conference in WA). As such I addressed the topic The Future is Crowdsourcing, largely supported by the Crowdsourcing Landscape, as you can see at the bottom of this post.
The other speakers were excellent. In particular the story of Detours and Destinations was extremely inspiring. Highly disadvanted youth were given the opportunity to spend time at the Sydney Opera House creating their own performance. One of their many creations is below.
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The Creative Sydney 10×10 Project – uncovering the best of Sydney talent
By Ross DawsonCreative Sydney has just launched its 10×10 Project. The website says:
I am honored to be one of the 10 creative catalysts selected. Our task was to nominate who we think is doing fantastic work in Sydney. It’s a very special group – you can see their profiles on the front page of the 10×10 Project website. There is also a brief review of the 10 creative leaders by Campaign Brief.
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Keynote at Critical Horizons regional futures conference: the potential of a connected world
By Ross DawsonToday I spoke at the Critical Horizons Regional Futures conference held in Bunbury, Western Australia,which “examines emerging global trends and how they might affect regional communities in the South West Region of Western Australia”. It is fantastic that a non-urban region runs a regular event to examine its future. It is clear that the attendees from across business and government had a keen appetite to explore the future and what they need to do to create a prosperous region in years to come.
The regional economy is still largely driven by mining and to a lesser extent agriculture (including the delightful Margaret River wines). It is experiencing many issues common to regional areas, including the loss of younger people to cities. However it has a particular context in its location. Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the world, and Perth is the most isolated city in the world. Bunbury is over 2 hours drive away from Perth. It took me 10 hours door-to-door to get here from Sydney – by far the longest it has taken me to get to a speaking gig in Australia.
The region’s geographic isolation means the topic of my keynote here, Power to the People: Thriving in a Hyperconnected Society, is immensely relevant. I discussed the overwhelming trend of how a connected world is shifting power from institutions to individuals. However I also covered the implications for regions of the emerging global talent economy. Crowdsourcing tools on one level provide access to extraordinary talent that can be harnessed in ways limited only by imagination. Yet a connected world also provides opportunities to provide services, both in existing domains, and especially in managing projects.
To the extent that they are useful (usual disclaimer: my slides are created to accompany my speeches, not to be viewed on their own) here are my slides for my keynote (minus the Flash animations).
Keynote at Cisco Insight 2010: Innovation beyond boundaries and the role of knowledge-based relationships
By Ross DawsonEarlier this week I gave a keynote speech to Cisco Insight 2010, the conference for its top-tier partners, with the title Innovation Beyond Boundaries. I’ve always thought it anomalous that I had never done any work for Cisco, given its messages such as the Human Network are so aligned with mine, so I’m glad that connection has been made.
While I spent much of my presentation looking at some of the more interesting implications of a hyperconnected world, suitable for an audience well used to these ideas, I also explored the critical role of knowledge-based relationships in effectively innovating beyond boundaries.
The spectrum of relationship styles
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Launch of Crowdsourcing Landscape and Getting Results from Crowdsourcing community
By Ross DawsonHere is our Crowdsourcing Landscape, now officially launched after sneak previews to the audiences of the Getting Results from Crowdsourcing event on Monday and Cisco Insight 2010 on Tuesday.
Click on the image to see a high-resolution version
The landscape provides a kick-off and focus to our new community, Getting Results from Crowdsourcing (www.crowdsourcingresults.com). Go and check it out!
The site is fairly basic so far (forgive anything not finished yet). However we’ll soon set up a wiki of crowdsourcing platforms, introduce discussions on many specific topics in the crowdsourcing space, and try to really bring this to life. We’re also looking for contributions, so go to the Contribute page and put your hand up if you’re interested.
For now we’re keen to get the site going, so please add a comment or participate in the discussions!
Audience blog and Twitter reflections on Getting Results from Crowdsourcing event
By Ross DawsonLast night was the Getting Results from Crowdsourcing event run by The Insight Exchange, the first in its SME Technology Forum Series. It was a fabulous night.
Tony Hollingsworth and Luke Harvey-Palmer leading their Expert Roundtables at the event
I’ll reflect more on the event and ideas raised later, but I thought I’d capture some of the blog and Twitter reflections on the event .
I believe this is a topic for our times. The future is crowdsourcing. It is the manifestation of the old idea of collective intelligence. The global brain has arrived.
We captured some videos of the keynote panel presentations and discussion – we’ll try to get them up before long. It was an awesome discussion – many really interesting points were raised. Back later on those stories.
First, just some of the response from attendees.
Lesley Barry (at least I presume that’s who @LifeStuffiKnow is) wrote a great review of the event starting with:
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Six Radical Visions for the Future of Health (including Self-Serve Pharma)
By Ross DawsonToday I gave the closing presentation at the National Medicine Symposium, rounding out deep discussion over several days on how to get better use of medicines. I developed six radical ideas that could be part of the future of health. The intention was to be provocative rather than rigorous, generating new ways of thinking about how healthcare may evolve.
Here are brief summaries of the six visions I presented:
1. Complete data.
Image source: Toto
The amount of information that we have about the health of an individual could become comprensive, generating terabytes of data from just one person. Bathrooms that monitor not just what we excrete but also analyze our skin color and tone as we look in the mirror are just the beginning. Images and sensors could record everything we eat and all medicines we take, providing far better analysis on the effectiveness of drugs. Odor is a highly data-intensive yet effective way to identify maladies. We could build virtually complete data sets of our health on a second by second basis.
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How to raise money from crowds: 11 crowdfunding platforms and examples
By Ross DawsonCrowdfunding is one of the more interesting (and important) neologisms of the last few years. It takes the idea of crowdsourcing (getting services delivered by crowds) and applies it to raising money.
In a later post I will write about the implications of the rise of crowdfunding for venture capital and other early stage funding sources. Here I will just cover some examples of crowdfunding, many of them in creative domains.
Kickstarter is a well developed creative crowdfunding platform, covering films, music, games, theatre, technology and far more. It uses the common all-or-nothing model, so projects are only funded if they raise their target funds in a defined period. It does not offer equity in the ventures, but project creators can provide specific rewards for funders. Kickstarter gained attention when the new open source competitor to Facebook, Diaspora*, sought $10,000 and has already raised over $180,000 before the funding period is over.
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Will self-sustaining military robots feed on corpses?
By Ross DawsonThere’s always a story behind the story.
The Economist magazine this week points to an online story with the headline: Vegetarian robots: Munching machines – Robots that forage for fuel and run on steam power.
I was most interested in the description given of robots that sustained themselves by searching for fuel, but I also wondered why it specified ‘vegetarian’ robots. So I searched for EATR (the acronym for the robots) and found a great story about how the original story was that the robots could eat biomass, including dead human bodies. This video tells the story.
In short, Fox News released a story with the headline: Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies.
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