New brilliant things found at the #ton40 conference
I have two very dear friends of mine that lives in Enschede in the Netherlands – Ton Zylstra and Elmine Wijnia. People who has supported my work and ideas for years on end – and people whom I look to when it comes to learning new stuff and figuring out things about myself and the internet. Thursday my husband and I drove from Denmark to the Netherlands to attend #Ton40 – or Ton’s 40th birthday – which is two/three days filled with cool people and learnings. Yesterday was one of the highlights – the birthday un-conference (in BarCamp style) on ” working on stuff that matters” – (or as I would say “epic shit”). This is some of the key findings I took away from the conference.
picture by Elmine =)
– Creating stuff instead of publishing stuff is gaining momentum.
There was a bunch of FabLab people at the un-conference – which is a great movement of people “learning by creating and making stuff” instead of only reading stuff – I totally dig that people learn better with their hands and a creative experience. For me writing a blog and publishing stuff online is a creative experience, but again I would say that you could take it further into “maker-mode”. A total inspiration today was Siert Wijnia and his homemade 3D printer where we saw a whistle produced over the course of the day. When he asked who wanted the whistle – I yelled “I” grabbed it and will make it reside in Coworkingboat Pan that we are increasingly turning into a state-of-the-art-tech-boat when it comes to functionalities – so an oversized whistle is perfect for her =)
- How to post stuff that matters to you , even if you’re into the blogging/ social media thing.
Some people don’t tap into the whole “personal branding” thing surrounding blogs and social media these days, they feel that’s a lot to make up to, maybe because they don’t feel the need to express themselves and making their mind publically as other people do. I think a real find for me taking away from yesterday is that you have to make people like this aware of that they don’t need to create something extra to publish stuff. Like fx. a developer who really wants to share his stuff online but he can’t get himself to write blogs about code – I can understand why, because coding is actually “doing the work” and blog-writing is “writing about doing the work”. So if you can make an ecosystem of recording what you do – while you do it, instead of afterwards (code with a camera on a helmet for all I care=) I think you’ve nailed a big part of it. Other people who aren’t into looking silly (I am for sure=) could do a screencast and edit it afterwards. Anyway think real-time recording instead of publishing stuff later =)
- How to rethink and reuse innovation and creativity
I did a session on rethinking and reusing innovation and creativity and all the talk about the abundance that everybody talks about we’re supposed to have in our lives. We are abundant – especially in stuff. If you look on the pacific ocean garbage patch – we’re really abundant in plastic – so much that we can afford to have it flowing around in our oceans. We need to find a way to reuse these wasted materials and add value to it again. I think this part of the global chain of production is key to figuring out how we will go from a post-industrial society into putting the silent revolution into action. Now I think it’s something we need to do proactively (again the coworkingboat is a good example of reusing something that was going to be waste otherwise). We need to find (or make) the resources in our local neighbourhood that has a use for waste and can make it into something new – and keep on reusing it. I know that material-wise there’s a long way to go still – but we ARE getting there people! I’m a total optimist about the future, but we need to put innovation and creativity into action and actually do stuff instead of padding our own backs because we write about the changes. To some extend it makes them real – but there’s a huge gap from thought to action – a gap we need to be aware of, and a gap we need to fill with our own proactivity to changing things.
#ton40 was brilliant – so many new ideas and so many awesome people =)
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Thanks, Henrietta!
I can only see one tweet with that hashtag, but your reflections gave me a glimpse into what I was missing.