Wednesday, September 22, 2010 at 2:57PM Four pages on last weekend's Do Lectures in today's Guardian newspaper. Good article.
The 100 tickets for next year go on sale in 6 weeks.
Do Lectures Saturday, June 19, 2010 at 2:52PM Neat words from Do writer and Doer David Hieatt. If you've not dropped by yet, call in at the Do Village
Hello World.
We live in a world of instant this and that.
Instant soup.
Instant information.
Instant corporations.
Everything now. Everything overnight.
Everyone and everything connected to each other.
But sometimes we have to press the pause button.
We have to take a step back.
We need to remind ourselves that reputations have to be built and have to be built over time.
There are short cuts. And they are tempting.
There are ways to speed things up. But they may make us weaker in the long term.
The Do Lectures is in its 3rd year.
These are our reputation making years.
What is needed now for us is patience and hard work.
Patience that allows The Do Lectures to grow at its own speed.
And hard work to make sure we do everything we can do to make it a University for the 21st Century.
So heads down, sleeves rolled up. We got some work ahead of us.
This is us at the bottom of our mountain.
This is us putting each pixel into our picture.
This is us making our first steps up the reputation mountain, one simple step at a time, one event at a time, one brilliant speaker at a time.
Then in years to come, we will look up and the world’s eyes will be looking through the tent flap. And they will call us this instant overnight success.
And we will look up and say ‘Hello World’.
‘What took you so long?’
Do 2010, Do Lectures, small steps Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 6:32PM If there's one weekend you commit this year for learning and inspiration, make it the Do Lectures. Get your business to pay and we'll invoice them, or save £4 a day, 5 days a week for a year and you'll have the cash in your pocket. The talks are not for profit beacuse we want to share them with the world as well as you. Why bother? Here's some of the feedback from those who attended in 2010:
‘It was like a double shot of fresh air for my brain. Thank you.’
‘Better than TED'
‘It was the most inspiring and abundant event I have ever attended.
‘Thanks again for the super fun times. I have been trying really hard to describe everything to my wife.
What a great week.’
‘A cross between Burning Man, the TED talks and Where The Wild Things Are’.
‘Truly excellent.’
‘Great job and great lectures — I think you all have a very special thing going out there in West Wales"
‘There’s a reason that there is not a 5 star Michelin restaurant that seats over 50 folks. Small is beautiful. Oh yeah…LOVED not getting emails…
‘When I say I loved the Do Lectures, I really mean I fell in love with them. The location, the hosting, the food, attendees and of course the speakers all blended together to form a magical mix.
‘It’s the most important event of its kind..’
‘You gave me the greatest experience and I will remember it forever.’
"It certainly for me was the most inspiring ‘conference’ event thing, (which it clearly isn’t) that I’ve taken part in"
‘A bonfire with soul’
‘It was like putting a hell of a lot of interesting, clever, funny, sparky people in a blender. In a field'
‘A place of storytelling. A place of inspiration.’
‘It has a Genius of Place.’
‘I jumped in a river with some of the smartest, kindest, friendliest people on the planet..’
‘Sotheby’s could learn a lot how to auction axes from these people’
‘The meals taught us that food is not a thing but a relationship. Damn that food was good…’
‘I laughed. I laughed a lot. Fuel for the soul…’
‘Revolutions can start in that pub..’
‘A melting pot of people and ideas. Just an amazing event'
Or you could find something better to do...
Do Lectures Monday, March 22, 2010 at 2:25PM Darina Allen - Ballymaloe cookery school: cookingisfun.ie
Darina Allen is a force of Nature. The thing that I loved about her was when she told me the story that she loved the land where she lived so much and she just had to work out a way to be able to stay there. She set up, the now world famous cooking school, Ballymaloe, and has had here own cooking series and her latest book is: Forgotten Skills of Cooking.
Ed Stafford - currently walking the Amazon: walkingtheamazon.com
Ed Stafford is walking the length of the Amazon river in South America from the source to the sea. As of today, he has been walking for: 698 days. He should be home in time for The Do Lectures. He will tell us what he saw. And what he didn’t.
Jay Rogers - founder of Local Motors: local-motors.com
Jay Rogers is a modern day Henry Ford. He is going to change the car industry. He has created a community company that will spark a revolution in this capital and time intensive industry. He is changing both things with a revolutionary approach to the industry. Can David beat goliath? Can a crowd beat a corporation? Jay believes they can.
Richard Reed - founder of Innocent Drinks: innocentdrinks.co.uk
In the summer of 1998, Richard and two of his friends developed their some smoothie recipes. They bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and sold them from a stall at a little music festival in London.They put up a big sign saying ‘Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?’ and put out a bin saying ‘YES’ and a bin saying ‘NO’ and asked people to put the empty bottle in the right bin. At the end of the weekend the ‘YES’ bin was full so we went in the next day and resigned. The rest is, as they say, history.
Maggie Doyne - founder of the BlinkNow Foundation: blinknow.org
Most people on a gap year are content with just seeing the world. And not to try and change it. But on her return, Maggie decided to start a school in Nepal with the aim to sustain and improve the quality for children of Nepal. She has since started her foundation called BlinkNow Foundation to share her ideas with other young people. Maggie won The prestigious Do Something award in America for all that she has done so far.
David Allen - time management and author of ‘Getting Things Done’:davidco.com
David Allen’s book ‘Getting things done’, has sold 2 million copies all over the world. The premise of the book is simple enough. That a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them externally. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.
Unlike a computer, we can not add more ram to our brains. So we have to free up ram so we can think more. That’s why David’s book is so amazing. That is gives you a system to take all that stuff and get of your head, so you can do more. Brilliant stuff.
Mark Earls - Writer/consultant on Human Behaviour: herd.typepad.com
Mark is the author of the hugely influential book Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature. For many, he’s Britain’s answer to Malcolm Gladwell without the hair.
The way digs underneath our assumptions like forensic detective to get us to re-think our assumptions. As Mark says in his book, we are ‘a super-social ape’. We exist to converse, to chat, to gossip. Whole social movements can be explained by utilising this core theory. A great talent. And an influential thinker for this modern world we live in.
Markus Brehler - founder of Enocean, battery free wireless technology: enocean.com
If we are to cut our carbon emissions by 20% by 2020, where is that 20% going to come from? Markus Brehler, believes his companies world leading patented battery free wireless technology will both help us to use what we are currently using more efficiently but also help us to use less energy by making our buildings more intelligent. And if you think that about 38% of our energy (including transport and industry) is consumed in buildings, distributed among heating, air-conditioning and lighting, we need our homes and our offices to be more intelligent. enocean.com
David Lloyd Owen – Founder of Envisager –The Water Experts.
For the last twenty years, David Lloyd Owen has had a mind like water. His successful consultancy advises companies, institutions and governments on environmental, competitive and political drivers in water and wastewater management markets worldwide. He has written six books on water and wastewater along with hundreds of notes and articles on water, waste management and Clean Tech companies, markets and technologies. From being a environmental pioneer in the City in the 1980s he has spent the last decade in nearby Llangoedmor. His grand ambition (along with one day writing The Great City Novel) is to demonstrate that high class urban water and sanitation services can both be affordable and financeable.
Alex Haw – Converging Art and Architecture, Pioneer
We like to put people in their respective boxes. But there are some people who can’t be put in one. That’s because they are forging a new path. Alex Haw is one of those pioneers. A multi-disciplinary pioneer exploring convergence between art and architecture, space and time: Integration of media technologies, particularly video, with architectural techniques: Operations and collaborations across a range of realms and disciplines, from teaching to music, theatre to film: Long-standing interests in time-based design, ephemeral architecture, luminous phenomena, non-narrative moving image, kinetic space, climatic distortions, artificial landscapes, surveillance and control systems, and provocative critique : Compelled by extremes, edges, and their transgressions.
Peter Segger - compost expert and owner of Blaencamel Farm: blaencamel.com
For 30 years Peter Segger’s award winning 45 acre farm has produced organic vegetables and salads for its customers. Over that time, Peter has learnt to listen to the soil? He has learnt what it needs are, when he can take from the land and when he can’t. He has learnt how to feed the soil so it feeds him and his customers. And he has learnt to do this without fertilizers and at the same time creating a negative carbon footprint, which is a good thing.
Laura Williams - world’s first tidal powered moon clock: alunatime.org
Imagine a breathtaking sculpture that combines cutting edge design and technology with an ancient knowledge of the Earth’s natural rhythms. A monumental timepiece for the planet, a beacon for a sustainable future, reconnecting people with the Moon and tides. Larger than Stonehenge, Aluna’s forty metre wide, five storey high structure is made up of three concentric translucent recycled glass rings. By looking at how each ring is illuminated, you can follow the Moon’s movements, its current phase and the ebb and flow of the tides. This animation of light is called Alunatime. Laura Williams imagined it. And one day, her dream will become a reality.
Dan Seddiqui - 50 jobs in 50 states. Read about him here
After three years on the dole, knocked back from 40 interviews, the 27-year-old’s dreams of becoming a financial analyst were in tatters, the economics graduate decided ‘enough was enough’. He left his home in California and travelled across the US, trying out a job peculiar to each state every week. In just 50 weeks, Dan went from being a down-and-out to an Arizona border patrol agent, a jazz conductor, a TV weatherman and even a Las Vegas wedding planner. He is now writing a book about his adventure and hopes to get a job as aas a dietician.
Brian John - author of ‘The Bluestone Enigma’ and ‘The Angel Mountain Saga’ read about it here.
The mystical bluestones lay scattered on the Preseli hills, the bluestone myth goes something like this: The non-indigenous spotted dolerite bluestones were chosen for their unique characteristics. They originated from a single source, Carn Meini in Pembrokeshire’s Preseli Hills. There is no natural explanation for their presence, glacial transportation being discounted by successive generations of archaeologists. All of this suggests that they must have been hauled from Preseli to Stonehenge by a tremendous human effort, indicating some special mystical, spiritual or therapeutic significance to the source, the stones, or both. Brian John has another theory.
Euan Semple - helping people understand the web: euansemple.com
Euan Semple is one of the few people in the world who can turn the complex world of social networking into something we can all understand. And, at the same time, learn how to get the most from it. He is a one-man digital upgrade option for us all to download. This world is changing fast, but he makes sense of it because he understands that the core basics remain the same: community, learning, interaction. He is a master story-teller who offers a host of practical tales about how this new world can work for humans. Assuming, you are one.
Do Lectures Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 6:51PM Here's a flavour of what's in store for the Do Lectures 2010 participants - an edited version of the intro I gave at the 2009 event. The issues are the same, just a bit more urgent. If there's one event that you attend in the next five years, I'd make it this one. www.dolectures.com
Do Lectures 2009 from Andy Middleton on Vimeo.
