Where to Begin…

Hey guys.

I’m sorry for not sooner getting back to writing after our time in Finland with Like Minds Conversation Helsinki. Part of it is that I just don’t know where to begin. So I guess a good place to start is to first thank those who put in much of the hard work, my team:

This is Jonny, James, Rachel, Jon, John, Jason and Claudia. The oldest in the photo is me (26), and the youngest is James (15).

All of these guys are punching well above their age. Jason, for instance, who has worked with me for almost a year now, and on all the Like Minds events thus far, is personally known by everyone of our Like Minds Alumni – a collection of 50 industry leaders like Mel Exon, Olivier Blanchard, Molly Flatt, Maz Nadjm, John Bell and the rest.

I keep on saying, over and over and over that firstly, it’s all about people, and that secondly, one is too small a number to achieve signficiance.

Well here are the guys who are helping Like Minds be significant - most recently by using our international platform to promote the incredible work being done in Helsinki.

That last sentence made an important distinction that you might’ve missed – so I’ll make it clearer: Like Minds is about using an event to promote a community, and not about using a community to promote an event. If one is too small a number to achieve significance (and it is), then you need to partner with the communities around you to build something of shared value to everyone.

It’s far too easy to crucify people on the altar of running the event that was built to serve people in the first place. In other words, the event is made for people, not people for the event.

In building participatory events (or attendee-centered events as they are known), you have to be very prepared in order to make it as easy as possible for your participants to learn, but you never sacrifice their learning at the expense of standards or protocol.

I have lots of things that I want to talk about that I’ve experienced over the last 2 weeks. It’s the amount of stuff that has happened and that I’ve learnt that has literally paralyzed me from communicating it. But – I must get it down. I’ll post some of it at the Like Minds site, and then carry out some deeper analysis on the topics and ideas here that we can then munch over and discuss.

I also want to, again, thank you for your support and encouragement. I felt it everyday that I was there.

Yours,
Scott