Spreading Ideas at Ignite

Last week most the eCO₂Labs team headed down to a Oxford St. for Ignite Sydney. I (Soren) gave a talk "How Indie developers will save the planet" available on the IgniteShow. This is just one event in Ignite Week, which ran last week in over 60 cities around the world. Each Ignite event has around one dozen speakers talking for 5 minutes using 20 slides that rotate automatically every 15 seconds.

I had to learn how to focus. I spent about 30 hours preparing. I started over three times! I can only imagine the how many long hours the Ignite organisers put in. It is a massive effort. In many ways it is similar to TED, except that it is much more distributed, the format is tighter and normal people — not just super people, like Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee, both mentioned in my talk — can get their ideas out there. Ignite is about parallel processing ideas and packaging those ideas so that they resonates locally.

Yet can then be catapulted around the global, like a haikugami airplane. While I love blogging, with a talk you can make an emotional as well as rational connection. You can more effectively build common experience through stories.

Why are events like this important? We don't have much time to transition to a sustainable future. Fortunately, a locally-grounded global culture is emerging that gets us beyond the prisoners dilemma we are in. Building a global culture requires creating common experience and spreading ideas. I saw that happening at Ignite.