Image

Archive for hip hop

Innovation and Participation

I'm inspired and encouraged by an article in Fast Company called "The Creator Of TED Aims To Reinvent Conferences Once Again". The author, Warren Berger, describes a creative turn-around for TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, who is designing a new kind of conference that will be “like a dinner party with a hundred of the world’s greatest minds having a conversation, two at a time.”

It sounds amazing, and I'm excited to see new creative thinking emerge about the ways we can gather online. Here's what Wurman's website says about the conference:

WWW.WWW will be a gathering of the greatest, most interesting & curious minds in the world engaged in immersive & improvised conversation. It will celebrate the 21st century while drawing attention to the new patterns & convergences affecting our health & that of our planet.

This attention to pattern and convergence sounds like it's right up our alley at the World Café, and perhaps what's most interesting to me is the app they are developing to "harvest" the event:

"The app will be a new modality, perhaps equal to the pivotal changes that have emerged in how we interact with information and each other. It will not merely archive presentations, as is currently the practice, but will offer a unique way to navigate, learn and understand information based on ones own personal journey and vast online resources."

Now all they need is interaction with their "audience"… That to me is the real revolution and innovation happening in the world of conferences. Imagine the possibilities if there was a way for people to really participate in the conversation at this event! Give me a call at weDialogue, Mr Wurman, and we'll set something up.

By the way, the Shift Network is getting wise to the value of audience participation and is bringing me in to host a World Cafe for their online Enlightened Business Summit with Chip Conley, on November 10th. This is actually a fabulous week-long series of free online sessions featuring people like Daniel Goleman, Daniel Pink and … me! 🙂 Come join us!

Hip Hop Poem About the Election

written by Aaron Jafferis

My father was African, my mother American.
I have brothers blue-black, and cousins with fairer skin
who pale in comparison to Sarah Palin.
Like blues, my family trees roots shoot
deep through the earth, but only in America
could my parents have given birth to me.
Conceived when cultures
collided and made love, previously divided states
(of mind) united and gave blood and life.
Husband and wife split the difference between
hope and change, between cope and pain,
and even though they split, all of it their hope and pain
still fit in their sons open brain
and over time became his/my over-arching aim:
give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,
give me liberty from war, lift, lift the underclasses,
and if this economy looks fundamentally strong,
your fundamentals are wrong
or youre looking through muddy glasses,
or your fundamental heads are stuck up your metaphorical…

Ask me who I am, and I will tell you true:
my name is not Barack, though this is his story too.
My name is hip hop. Its my history Im telling you:

My father was African, my mother American.
I have brothers blue-black, and cousins with fairer skin
who pale in comparison to Sarah Palin, who isnt
the only illustration of true-blooded Americanism.
Like blues, I am he whose family trees
roots shoot deep through the earth,
but only America could have given birth to me.
I was given the gift of speech, and I use it
to outreach and uplift the youth, and if you
wanna use me as a servant to you in order to form
a more perfect union, then do…organize

and do mobilize and open eyes to truth and show that lies
misled the poor and led to war and broken lives.
Do give the tools to cope and rise,
and as the movement grows in size
and breaks the ropes that hope defies,
and as the youth vote multiplies,
well break the race right open wide,
wide open eyes will vote
and take this nation by surprise. Surprise!

I am the native son, the bought and traded one,
the sometimes hated drum talking of change to come,
I am the underrated, the wonder-if-hell-make-it one,
the character-assassinated but still not jaded son,
even though over time I become the front-page-aided one,
the allegedly overrated, celebrity-associated one,
some people thought I blew up and went pop-
ular, grew up and then dropped the urban
working class who, from first to last, I have worked
to bring from last to first, and if you think my values
are in trouble…your (thought) bubble is burst.
I still cast my lot with the tired, the poor,
the huddled masses. Give me liberty from war,
lift, lift the underclasses, and if this economy
looks fundamentally strong, your fundamentals are wrong
or youre lookin through muddy glasses,
or your fundamental heads are stuck up your metaphorical…

As for us:
if hip hop is the entrance to what is in store
lit hot from the embers of what came before,
if Barack is the belief that God demands more
than a war in Iraq and abandoning the poor,
if America can stare itself in the face and be sure
we want to end poverty, and end endless war,
then we are the ones we have been waiting for.
You are the ones you have been waiting for.

Your name is…My name is…
Our name is…
Our name is America, our very existence, a miracle.
We survived insistent attempts to make our lives unbearable.
Dehumanize us, brutalize and downsize divide us,
still we rise through the work of the multitudes inside us.
Though generations have lived and died,
we pride ourselves on our youth
and keep our eyes on the prize of that self-evident truth
that we know is not a lie even though Americas broke:
Our birthright is equality. Our inheritance is hope.
Our name is America, and you better be ready,
cause on the 4th of November, we are going to vote.