Comment 41230

By Imperial (anonymous) | Posted May 28, 2010 at 14:10:10

Great article Adrian. I agree with the comment about speaking up - the more you do it the more your audience learns to listen and the better you'll get at being the speaker.

I've attended the last two Ec. Summits and I attended the first hour or so of the NextGen part, then I left. I found it formulaic, far too basic, somewhat patronizing that we were at the kids table, and based on 'catchy' bs that is far too often employed when working with 'the future of our city'.

I don't want a freakin custom handprint of my city, or to vote on ideas with my cell phone, I wanted to talk to people about what the reality is of being a young, motivated, entrepreneurial person in this city.

I know the table sessions were intended to do that but we've done all this a dozen times over. Or at least it feels that way to me. I would rather have taken an entire day off work to actually get some traction (to use one of Steph's words). You have a few hundred smart and engaged people in the room and there was really no forum for connecting and getting somethings moved along.

Amongst our communities collective skills, talents, funds and creativity we have the answers to any problem facing us right now. But instead of working together on them we sit down and have people yack at us for hours. Not to say that hearing from great speakers is useless (I'm a TED addict, I'm starting to plan a creative conference) but at some point we need to work together.

I bet we'd all be amazed what issues we could solve if we actually got a huge empty space,
packed it with the same people and did some work together. It's time for doing.

Jeremy

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