You haven’t seen a blog post from me for about three weeks because I’ve been on what I felt was a well deserved holiday in New Zealand. Had a good time thanks :)
While I was on holiday Steve Hopkins dropped me a line to invite me, along with a few other well known Aussie social media types, to attend Future Summit 2009 in Melbourne. This is a summit that attempts to provide “a forum for Australia’s leaders to participate in discussing key issues and challenges for the future.” Given my interest in social media, technology, and my increasing interest in clean technology as part of solutions to climate change, it was an opportunity I didn’t want to pass up.
Darren Rowse (Problogger), Bronwen Clune (Norg Media), Duncan Riley (The Inquisitr)
The Future Summit is connected to the World Economic Forum through the Australian Davos Connection. The WEF has recently invited social media makers to participate too. Inviting well known bloggers and twitterers to such forums is an attempt to help open the ideas discussed up to the outside world via the web. I think this is a worthy goal, as these sorts of events have been heavily criticised in the past for being exclusive exercises for top power brokers in society.
From my point of view, it was also a great chance to get together for a few days with some of the other people heavily involved in social media in this country. It’s a big country and many of us don’t actually get to meet in person very often, although we communicate online constantly. Even in this age of hyper-connectivity, nothing beats meeting in person.
Part of the social media team at Future Summit 2009
It’s debatable whether or not these summits result in much action from all the talk, but it’s certainly a compelling idea for people to get together to talk about where we are heading as a country, and as a world. My head has been buzzing with ideas sparked by many conversations over the past few days. In this way, I’d have to say the event was pretty constructive, if others are feeling that same buzz.
With the main theme being “Priorities for Australia in the Crisis and Beyond”, there was always going to be a lot of talk about the global financial crisis (GFC). I’d have to say that much of the talk was of the recent past and current situation, rather than about solutions and future directions. Many financial experts didn’t seem to want to speculate on the future very much, or offer many ideas about how to proceed from here. Take what you will from that.
As expected, there was also quite a lot of talk about climate change and its impact on people, the planet and the economy. There were of course still certain people who only talked of Australia’s great mineral resources opportunities ahead, without any mention of climate change. However, I did attend various sessions about the future greening of the Australian economy, which included talk of innovative clean technologies and how Australia could be a leader in this area if it wanted to be. I found some of the thinking in these sessions both exciting and frustrating. It seems that entrepreneurs want to move ahead but aren’t getting the support they could get, especially from government. Having said that, there did seem to be a great deal of interest in new clean technologies and how best to move them forward. This was encouraging.
All in all it was well worth attending. I hope that people who were not in attendance were able to pick up on at least some of the ideas discussed at the summit via Twitter, various blog posts and video that will be shared online from the event. Some great questions were posed from twitter to some of the sessions, in fact some that caught the participants off guard and had them scrambling for answers. This was great to see. I’d like to see the social media presence at such forums around the world continues to grow, how about you?
