February 25, 2011
Last week, as Russell Brown notes, is almost another country. Remember? Hone Harawera and Whitcoulls were front-page news.
And two weeks ago…well, that’s a far far away foreign country, like Egypt.
The weekend of 11-13 February was Kiwi Foo in Warkworth. As with the previous years when I’ve been lucky enough to be invited and attend it was a great mixture of interesting people and thought provoking discussion and presentations about as eclectic a range of topics as you could imagine.
Inspired by the original Foo Camp in the US we decided to organise an Ignite event to kick things off on the Friday night. This saw nine of the attendees speaking for five minutes each on a topic of their choice, with 20 slides each displayed for 15 seconds. As you’d expect there was a real mixture - from redundancy to lovemaps to triathlons and ultramarathons (“the new golf”).
Actually, only eight of the speakers spoke to a topic of their choice - David Slack, the final speaker on the night, did his talk impromptu using slides I’d selected at random from the other earlier speakers, which was a lot of fun.
I uploaded the videos last weekend, hoping to publish this early last week. While it seems strange in the circumstances, I thought I’d go ahead and post them anyway. Even though there are lots of people very close struggling with basic needs, perhaps these will be a short distraction from some of the other things that are more front of mind.
Unfortunately there were some problems with the audio on the video, meaning we only have recordings of five of the nine.
Here are a couple of my favourites:
The first 8 years of Chopper - Dave Frampton
(p.s. Dave’s mum is one of the amazing survival stories from Christchurch over the last week)
Computer Science Unplugged - Tim Bell
Thank you to everybody who agreed to speak, including a few who were stepping up to public speaking for the first time - I thought you all did an amazing job.