So, I’ve been hearing voices on focusing on refugees and (community driven) health care. I’d like to make an extra suggestion: urban mobility infrastructure.
The speaker, Jaime Ortiz, who - no shit - is the inventor of car-free-sundays, talks about the big mistakes the ‘sunny nations’ have been making in looking up to Copenhagen and Amsterdam and trying to copy their models into their own very different contexts.
I don’t know if it will be for a topic or session, but I’m thinking to propose something along the lines of failing to think local: the mistakes in replicating global models in local settings and communities.
Guys, let’s not have topics at all. Let’s have just individual sessions.
Reason: as always, when you say “we are going to discuss learning from failure in topics A, B and C” you are going to miss out on a fantastic story and opportunity that, unfortunately, was about topic Z. So I propose:
we classify sessions by activity, not by topic. Example of actvities: hackathon tracks (4-12 people, small room, need at least one full day, whiteboards and tables); talks (20-100 people, medium or large room, PA, need 20-60 minutes, chairs); workshops etc.
we seed topics by convincing people we care about to submit sessions. For example, we will shine a spotlight on failures in care because @markomanka and the OpenCare group will make something happen; we will shine another one on development because we will ask Giulio for a talk, etc. We can shine more or less light on topics by doing more or less social media outreach based on the talks/sessions we care about. So people interested in, say, care will still hear about us and know we will be talking about care, but we do not rule out the possibility that some great person might come out of the woodwork with the best session in LOTE5 from a direction we are not looking into.
Exception: if a client wants to sponsor a full track on some topic, we are in principle prepared to discuss it.
“Failure” is broad, we need specific contexts within which we are exploring failure for the event to be interesting enough to draw real support and engagement as a foundation for future, follow up work. So the core team does need focus- a small number of key topics/threads that we personally are interested in driving and becoming deeply knowledgeable about… and that we think we can build strategic partnerships around.