Interesting Vancouver

Went to the first of what will likely be more “Interesting Vancouver”
events Friday night at the Vancouver Rowing Club.

It was a good showing, with 152 in attendance, for a local version on an
event that's brought people together all over, London, Amsterdam, New York,
South.

Kudos to event planner extraordinaire Brett MacFarlane and the volunteers
who helped make it happen.

There were 15 speakers, discussing topics of interest for anywhere from 3
minutes to 20. The common thread of storytelling, creativity, and the use of
multi-media to connect with the audience and their interesting topics made
this a feast for the eyes and ears.

It was interesting to see the high degree of comfort, articulation, literacy,
expertise and spontaneity of most of the speakers. Topics included:

- local, found food - local sustainability and adventure in feeding self and
others
- living X, working Y - travel and adventure living and working abroad
- community culture
- mash media and storytelling
- literacy rights and statistics
- museums in the lower mainland
- life and fearlessness in the Downtown Eastside
- cloudscape comic collective
- givemeaning.com- $5 philanthropy, following dreams, passion and creativity
- climate change policy - why we should all care about it. Interesting show of
support for the disliked carbon tax.
- shades of green living - here's to the middle, where shift hits the fan and
leads to runaway climate change
- Ballard fuel cell racing - zero emission car racing in the Utah salt flats
- socialactions.com - social entrepreneurialism
- science literacy - truth and facts about biodiversity
- brief history of great places, leading to Vancouver as the next great place

Some Random thoughts jotted down:

Public space, voice and information and knowledge sharing
Multi and social media, Runaway Social Change,
Multi-culturalism, diversity, blending and acceptance
Inspiration, change agents, artists, shared creativity
Connecting dots , local and global, personal stories and meaning-making,
theirs and ours
Small steps to BIG change, Perspective, Memes.

It was also cool for audience members to be offered the chance to
contribute their own thoughts, pictures, or what have you to add to
the mix. It's always great to have more opportunities to be Interesting
in Vancouver and learn about other interesting people.

To see it all for yourself, go here:

For streaming live on Ustream (archived on Vimeo) and the Flickr Group

Miss 604 also live blogged here and has more in depth coverage about each speaker.