Aide-Memoire

Here’s Dr Timothy Sharp – who’s also known as Dr Happy – from the Happiness Institute talking about the Future Summit and why he took time out to attend.

Here’s Daniel Almagor from Engineers without Borders talking about why he thinks the Future Summit is important to help us “engineer a better world”:

Here’s Tim Harcourt, Chief Economist with Austrade (who’s also known as the Airport Economist), talking about why the Future Summit was on his agenda:

Here is Jen Harwood from Champions of Australian Business talking about why she took time out to attend the Future Summit:

It turns out Jen’s also good buddies with a friend of mine, the incredibly well-connected, Iggy Pintado – indeed it’s a shockingly small world

Here’s a short video with another person I met at the Future Summit 09 in Melbourne. This is Alex Jones, who is Chairman of the Deafness Forum of Australia, he’s talking to us in Auslan (Australian Sign Language). Alex raises the really important issue of access for all. After all, what’s a great future if we call can’t share in it?

What he’s saying is:

“Hi, I’m Alex Jones – chairman of the Deafness Forum of Australia. This organisation is the peak body for the deafness sector. We advocate and lobby for the rights of Deaf, hearing impaired, Deafblind people – to improve their lives in Australia. I’m here at the summit to contribute a huge factor on ‘access issues’ across all areas of the megatrends raised in this Summit. Access for all is the reason I’m here. Cheerios.”

I was really lucky to be able to attend the Australian Davos Connection’s Future Summit 2009 in Melbourne earlier this week.

When I walked into the venue it was a bit intimidating, so many serious looking people in suits. And from the attendee list I knew that many of them were CEOs, senior Public Servants, politicians, senior Defence personnel, journalists and writers. It was a pretty impressive crowd.

Then I started to get curious about these people, who were they, why were they here, why did they think that this conference was important? So I grabbed the camera and started to ask people those three questions on video.

The videos are gradually being uploaded onto YouTube.  Here’s one from Tony Press, Director of the Australian Antarctic Division, talking about climate change:

It was inspiring to hear these stories and to know that people really do care about creating a better future. The big question that arose for me is:

What can I do today that will make tomorrow better?

Here at the Future Summit 2009 in Melbourne – interesting attendees (lots of people in suits though

You can check out the Flickr photos and videos & see the twitter stream on Twemes

~ next week I’m off to the Future Summit in Melbourne on 18-19 May.

The theme for 2009 is Priorities for Australia in the Crisis and Beyond, and there is a really diverse line-up of speakers (pdf list here).

This conference is run by ADC (Australian Davos Connection) & brings together leaders from business, government, the public sector, academia and the broader community to improve their understanding of key issues affecting Australia.

I’m getting excited because it sounds like we’ll be addressing some interesting issues. It should be fun as some buddies are also heading down to the Future Summit.

You can expect to see a bit of tweeting under the hash tag #futuresummit & some official kind of tweets from @futuresummit.

Some of the Twitter folks heading along include: @liubinskas, @bronwen, @duncanriley, @mspecht, @eskimo_sparky, @rosshill, @jjprojects, with @stevehopkins as the conference community manager.

There are currently unconfirmed rumours of a pre #futuresummit tweetup in Melbourne on Sunday 17th.