What follows is a guest post from Andrew Blanda, which he initially posted on his own blog. Andrew followed along with what was happening at Future Summit by engaging with those twitter users who were present at the actual event. I found he’s debrief below illuminating when considering the future of events and how this discourse can live within those not physically present at the event.  

May 20, 2009

Yesterday, I was a remote participant in the Future Summit held in Melbourne on 18th & 19th May 2009. I participated through Twitter, by interacting with attendees at the event, responding to questions & posting comments to various twitterers attending the various sessions on the program.

To me, it felt like I received a condensed, highly concentrated (as in I received the core nuggets of each presentation as it happened) presentation without the fluff. Do I feel like I participated? Absolutely yes! Through posing questions to the attendees and having questions and comments retweeted helped me better understand what was being presented and also to get a feel for the mood of the audience.

Things I liked:

• I got a good feel for what was presented
• I could ask questions
• I threw in some of my own comments (which were commented on by others)
• I had a number of my posts re-tweeted to a wider audience
• I picked up a number of new followers (which seems to be the holy grail of Twitter [to some people!])
• Having the Twitter back-channel provide on-the-spot comments from the sessions
  

Things I missed:

• The ‘hubbub’ that occurs in audiences when something contentious, alarming or incorrect is mentioned
• The camaraderie of the audience who shared some of my thoughts/comments – it would have been great to be there and interact with others

Things I inferred/picked up from the comments being made by the attendees:

• For one of the sessions, the panel kept asking/answering their own questions, not allowing the session to be participative!
• From the tweet messages, the wrap-up from Julie Bishop seemed to lose the audience and not really achieving it’s intention (of bringing everything together to a close)
• There seemed to be no actions/action plan we could see/walk away with
• Ultimately, I felt like I had been participated in this event, probably more due to the retweeting and interactions with other tweeters.I may even have opened up a can of worms with this comment I made:

It sure is a waste gathering people together to hear the panel talk amongst themselves! Save the CO2 and webcast it 

Who’s to know that next time they don’t just have it as a webcast, or a combination of webcast & live sessions – Twitter certainly helped me get a feel for things in real time!

I’d like to thank @SamMutimer, @mspecht, @kcarruthers, @geehall1, @amoyal, @nathanhulls + others for all retweeting my posts/asking questions! 

A final thought on Andrews post. We will be endevouring to stream some parts of the Summit live next year, pending how feasibile this is.

During Future Summit, we asked a number of questions for you of different folks that we’re walking around. Here is our first post back with these answers. Below, find answers to the questions you had for Chief Economist of Austrade (And Airport Economist) Tim Harcourt.

Next week at Future Summit we will be interviewing Chief Economist of AusTrade Tim Harcourt, CEO of Deloitte Digital Pete Williams and former Vice President of Uganda, H.E. Dr. Speciosa Wandira and we will be asking your questions!

Simply leave a question in the comments below and we will upload the video interview when we complete at Future Summit.

So who exactly are we (you!) interviewing?

H.E. Dr. Speciosa Wandira

Dr. Wandira served as Uganda’s Vice President from 1994 until 2003. When she was elected, she became the first and only woman in Africa to hold such a position. Since then, a great deal of her time and energy goes into advocating for affirmative action for women and other marginalized groups, including the elderly and disabled. She points out: “My mission is to see the emancipation of rural women through functional skills development and access to micro-financing to ensure internally generated improvement.” She currently serves on the board of The Hunger Project for Women, which you can read more about on the blog or their twitter.

Tim Harcourt

Tim Harcourt is the chief economist of the Australian Trade Commission (Austrade). As chief economist Tim analyses the global economy to help Australian exporters and helps Austrade devise its own international business strategies. A prolific author and globetrotter, Tim has visited over 40 countries in the past four years alone. He is also the author of the best-selling business book The Airport Economist.  Tim is also on twitter.

Pete Williams

Pete is CEO of Deloitte Digital, which is a new business that delivers professional services online.  Prior to his role in Deloitte Digital, Pete was CEO of Australia’s largest web development firm, Eclipse. He is recognised as a global thought leader on Innovation and Use of Web technologies.  A Chartered Accountant by background Pete moved into the Web space in 1993.  He has a unique perspective on how business can profit from using web technology.  Pete blogs and tweets and is heavily involved in the effort to rebuild Flowerdale after the black Sunday fires.

Leave us a comment below to ask a question and we’ll ask it of the relevant person above.

I everyone. Just a quick one today. There has been a heap of great conversation taking place on twitter which is making us all very excited here at Future Summit HQ for the big event on Monday.

If you are coming along to Future Summit on Monday and Tuesday, we would love hear from you. If you could post a comment below with your blog link and/or twitter account so that people not lucky enough to be attending this year can follow along with your stuff as the Summit progresses. I’ll comment below so you can see what I’m talking about.

Thanks everyone! Looking forward to the big event soon.

We have been very lucky this year to have the presence of some of the most influential twitter users in Australia assemble at Future Summit early next week. We also are very excited to announce that the largest twitter-er in Australia, Darren Rowse from www.problogger.net will be Guest Tweeting for our very own www.twitter.com/futuresummit account!

If you follow us at www.twitter.com/futuresummit you will be able to follow along as Darren shares his thoughts about the Monday sessions with you. You will also be able to ask questions of the speakers through Darren and the other twitter users replying to the @futuresummit account.

So who are the these influential twitter users who are coming along?

Darren Rowse
Company/Website: Problogger
WHO?: Probably the most notable and famous of Australian’s bloggers.
WHERE: http://twitter.com/problogger

John Johnston
Company/Website Jjprojects
WHO?: Social Media Manager, Global Team at Earth Hour
HERE: http://twitter.com/jjprojects

Bronwen Clune
Company/Website: Norg
WHO?: Bronwen is the founder and CEO of www.norg.com.au and is a media guru.
WHERE: http://twitter.com/bronwen

Michael Specht
Company/Website www.inspecht.com.au
WHO?: HR Technology, Recruiting & Enterprise 2.0 Consultant
HERE: http://twitter.com/mspecht

Markus Hafner (Eskimo_Sparky)
Company/Website: Happener.com
WHO?: Online Recruiter & business grower
HERE: http://twitter.com/eskimo_sparky

Ross Hill
Company/Website: Yabble / Deloitte Digital / The Hive Co-Founder
WHO?: internet entrepreneur and general social media expert.
HERE: http://twitter.com/rosshill

Duncan Riley
Company/Website: Inquisitr
WHO?: Editor, The Inquisitr, CEO Nichenet.
HERE: http://twitter.com/duncanriley

Kate Carruthers
Company/Website: Digital Business Group Pty Ltd
WHO?: Kate is a respected online collaboration, social computing, digital media consultant who knows her stuff.
WHERE: http://twitter.com/kcarruthers

Mick Liubinskas
Company/Website: www.pollenizer.com
WHO?: Mick is a web business engineer who makes web products happen.
WHERE: http://twitter.com/liubinskas

It will be great fun to spend some time with these folks in Melbourne this weekend, something I’m personally really looking forward to. They will all be tweeting from Future Summit through-out the two day, which you can follow along on search.twitter.com. If you’re on twitter, let us know below what your user name is and we’ll follow you.

P.S Thanks to my friend www.twitter.com/lucio_ribeiro for some of the the text above. His descriptions of some of the folk above we’re so good I decided to borrow them again!

I was walking down Bourke Street on Friday afternoon, going to meet up with Steve Sammartino for lunch and a discussion about starting businesses which are rigged for social good as well as profit when I bumped into the kids below.

As you can see, they we’re giving their all for charity, the Red Cross in this instance, and we’re not backwards in coming forward in letting the heaving throng of passer-byes know that giving them their spare cash was the most important thing they could achieve all day. There we’re several thoughts that came to me as I was digesting what I had just filmed.

Today’s children bring all of themselves to the task at hand

The guys we’re on the street because their school, Melbourne High, run an initiative each year which sees the entire year 10 student body hit the streets to raise money for a given charity. They could have very easily stood back, held their cans on the corner and basically just let people pass them by without intruding too much. The thing is, these kids we’re proactive in pushing people from their normal stupor and encouraging them to give them cash. Not forcing them, just offering some extra value for people to enjoy when they made a donation.

They didn’t just become part of the scene, but brought all of themselves to the task in full. Each student had their own creative take on how they could best achieve the task – there we’re more students all the way along Bourke St and each had their own unique way of getting my attention and alerting me to the need to help the Red Cross. How fantastic that each student could take a given task, such as “raising money,’ and independently come to their own decision about the best way to achieve an outcome. 

Children today are comfortable to be filmed being themselves

Before I captured the guys on camera, I asked them if a donation would allow me to film them dancing and they wouldn’t mind me uploading it to YouTube and this blog. Immediately, the answer was a resounding yes. They immediately understood what that meant, understood the risks and also (crucially) the opportunity. There has been a heap of negative press about how today’s youth can use video in unconstructive ways. Whilst this is true in some cases, it’s a symptom of the need kids feel to be (just a little bit) famous. They have grown up in a celebrity focused (obsessed?) society and these are the results. Importantly, however, they understand how to manage that and their own personal brand when online. Much more so than their parents have or will.

The impact this has on our future

So what does this mean? Steve Johnson suggests in his book, Emergence that we are moving to a place where we create our own unique content which self organises itself online based on the organic linking that takes place between friends and other related content. Kevin Kelly’s talk at TED about the next 5000 days of the internet has some fantastic ideas which engage this very idea.

In reference to the media industry “Turning on your television will be like logging on to the Web today: an infinite collection of links will beckon you – if not through the front door, then at least a few doors down the chain. Today’s breakaway Nielsen hits have half the audience and reach of The Cosby Show or M*A*S*H – and only two-thirds of Americans are even wired for cable”

Steve Johnson, Emergence.

Imagine what this will mean for the way we not only organise our lives, but the way we interact as organisations, communities and a society. People will be feeding content from the ground up which we will be simply linked and connected to via a huge number of other, relevant links. There will be limited top-down hierarchy and more relevance placed on the number of connections and links people are involved in. How will we interact as a society when this happens? What are your thoughts about the future of our social structures and norms? If today I can film a kid dancing on the street, what can I look forward to tomorrow?

There will be a session at Future Summit called Technology – Essential Growth Multiplier, which will engage with some of these topics. Is anyone interested in asking some questions for us to raise during the Q&A of this session?  

A powerful business model that has emerged on the web is opening up your product or service to allow others to do the innovating for you.  Examples abound, Facebook and the iPhone, have had over 50,000 applications each developed for them by people outside their organisations. Amazon, Google, eBay and YouTube have for years provided access to developers to take their data or content and use it how they see fit. Scroll down to the bottom of the page on any of these sites and you will see a link for “Developers” or sometimes “API” (Application Programming Interface). An example of an innovation from an API is a demonstration site we developed in Deloitte’s Innovation Program is http://www.vizzl.com which provides a visual search interface over Amazon, eBay and YouTube and deployed the same interface in Facebook called “Friendly Search”. 

In effect this business model leverages lessons learn’t from the Open Source Movement and the concept of “Crowdsourcing”.  I often say to people developing new products or services that they need to adopt the concept of “porosity”, or make your product porous so others can take things and add to them.  Clay Shirky, the US internet luminary, talks about “Failing for Free”.  Effectively many of the applications developed will not set the world on fire but some take off and are picked up by millions of users.  We also see this with iPhone apps and Games. If you can get 50,000 adaptations to your product for free you will out innovate your competitors.

We have seen this model move into the physical product world with organisations like Lego building the “Mindstorms Developer Community” or http://www.threadless.com where TShirt designs are submitted, Threadless users then rate them and if the ratings receive a high level of ratings, the design is put into production and the designer is paid $12,500.  Effectively you get you product designs and market research for free and only produce products that will sell.

The R and D community working on the principle of the smartest guys are probably outside use a website called www.innocentive.com to post major R and D challenges with a bounty and provide the capacity for people around the world to solve their most pressing challenges.

To make it work:

 -          Think about where you can “let go of control”

-          Design your product or service to be porous and facilitate participation through online tools such

-          Think about the incentive, sometimes the “cool” factor is enough but ability to generate income is also a strong crowd puller

-          Think about where you can source the right crowd

Some Australian companies that have adopted the model include Atlassian and Red Ballon Days.

Welcome to the new Future Summit blog. This is an exciting time in the history of our nation and, more importantly, our society here in Australia. As many of you will know, Future Summit has been held since 2004 and is being held again in Melbourne on the 18th and 19th of May. Exciting because, even as we continue to contemplate how this Global Financial Crisis and other current world events will play out for us on Australian shores, there is a torrent of positive dialogue taking place within our communities about the different ways we can go about creating a better future together. I’m sure you have felt this too. This leads us to why we have begun blogging.

What will we use the Future Summit blog for?

1)      Discussing key topics:We plan to invite a small number of guest writers to the blog to provide different insights and thoughts about our country and its future. We are currently in the process of inviting these bloggers along. Let us know who you would appreciate hearing from by leaving a comment below.

2)      Keeping you in the loop about Future Summit: There will be official posts pertaining to Future Summit and the latest information and news from the event itself. This will include debriefs and summaries of discussions at the event, information about how you can come along, reminders about when key dates are and other timely pieces of information.

3)      Providing a voice: We plan to open the Future Summit blog up to those who might like to post their content to the blog here. There will be more information on how to go about this a bit later on (after the upcoming event!) but please stay tuned.

How can you get involved?

By clicking on the buttons in the right-column you can subscribe to receive the posts from the blog either sent to your email address or to your RSS reader. Once this is done, you can then comment on any post you like by clicking on ‘comments’ link at the bottom of each post. You can also discuss posting some of your relevant blog posts here at the Future Summit blog by contacting steve.hopkins at ausdavos.org.

We look forward to chatting to you more as we go. Please let us know if you have any ideas about how the Future Summit blog might be used. We are all ears J Until then, this is us, signing off for the first time.