Getting serious about sand-mining in Sierra Leone

Tourism revival threatened by massive sand-mining
© Tommy Trenchard/IRIN

The last few months we’ve seen an escalation in the number of trucks and people digging sand on our neighboring beach in Sierra Leone.

Last week the Government decided that it would endorse this activity but limited to only day-light hours 6 days a week!

Short-term jobs for the youth Vs long-term lost $ from tourism and coastal resources including fisheries, water, wood and development should be an easy decision to make. It doesn’t seem to be, however, as the pressure and political promise for job creation is huge.

Our strategy, along with local partners, to stop this absurdly ironic activity of destroying something so valuable too so many – is:

1. To present the case to stop-sand mining to as many community, political and business stakeholders as possible.

2. To find a local partner that can do a coastal environmental and economic assessment to show how many $  are being lost; explore other job opportunities for the youth; and to help find other areas that can provide a substitute to salty beach sand to build roads with.

3. To raise awareness locally and internationally of the issue > please Sign the petition which we will deliver to the President and hassle your embassy in SL.

4. To keep thinking of creative solutions. To not give up.

Already there is a great set of info, images and stories around what’s going on:

• Tommy Trenchard sums up the challenge well and his amazing images on the BBC.
• Eimer Peters, Tribewanted’s Community Development Officer at John Obey, explains the economics of sand-mining and life at the beach.

Follow progress of the campaign on facebook.

Let me know if you think you can help.

Tenki O!

Ben

Construction brings with it increasing demand for sand, an essential building material, and much of this sand is coming from the country’s beautiful beaches. Tommy Trenchard/BBC

Back in Salone: A carnival election, team development, & the fight to stop sand mining

Tribewanted co-founder Michel Sho Sawyer voted in MP in Freetown for APC

The international headlines are almost inevitable with Sierra Leone: ‘shock as blood-diamond-war-torn country manages to build a road / vote in peace / attract investment / make it through to the weekend’ etc…

The expected pre-requisite ‘war-ravished’ tag is clearly a hard one to shake. But in a week where Syria, the DRC and other Middle Eastern & African states become less secure, Sierra Leone’s security and potential has taken a not so small step forward.

I hadn’t been back for a year – a few months later than I had hoped – and had a lot to try and squeeze into 12 days, but sometimes a time constraint, even on the beach, is a good thing.

A passion for politics

The election last week was the third vote since the war ended 12 years ago and the first one that has been ‘self-organised.’ On arrival into Freetown we got stuck in the final Sierra Leone People Party’s (SLPP) rally – the main opposition to the governing APC. A green sea of campaigners, dancers, ‘devils’ and whistle-blowers engulfed us we tried to make a break for the beach. Election day in John Obey at the new community centre was quiet and patient as men and women of all ages queued in hot sun to finger print the ballot boxes. APC and the re-election of Ernest Bai Koroma was the popular choice at the ‘exit-polls’ at this outpost. And so it seemed win John Obey and win the election as the results were announced – not that night – but 8 days later to jubilation in Freetown and beyond. Let’s see what this new political hope brings.

Stop the ‘san san’

One thing we hope the government brings fast is new job opportunities for the youth of John Obey who currently are spending most of their time digging sand from our neighboroughing beach for trucks in town. This is a big battle and one that any future sustainability development in the area – be it tourism or other resource – must be won, and soon. We’re doing our bit to fight it, as our Community Development volunteer Eimer Peters explains. 

Team Development

At Tribewanted the focus is on the 25-strong team’s development. Which to start with means introducing a full disciplinary process for staff, including verbal and written warnings. So far it seems to be having the necessary impact as it is implemented by our now General Manager Ibrahim Fatorma. Alongside this we are working on increasing the training at John Obey – lessons and workshops range from understanding what employment, contracts and budgets are and how to build a good team. Each employee has a ‘progress card’ reviewing his or her work and sets goals for the areas and skills they would like to develop. This all sounds run of the mill but remember most of these guys didn’t go to school (minimal literacy) and grew up during the war (lack of role models) – so any structure in their lives is a new concept and takes time to settle.

Meet the John Obey team I spent the last two weeks with.

There has been lots of other progress on maintenance jobs (water wells, solar house, beach huts etc…), organisation structure and community relations but as with all things in Salone – it’s very much ‘small small.’

One thing that does constantly change is the natural environment at the beach – we ‘busted the river’ last week to prevent flooding in the village – last week alone I saw a cameleon, crocodile, monkey, big storms, wild rivers, vast trees and a million ants. For food, sunlight, noise and colour, life on this West African beach is hard to beat.

Ben’s message from the beach

sierraleone.tribewanted.com

Climbing into the cloud: 5 things I’ve learnt building the new Tribewanted platform.

I’ve spent a decent chunk of the last year working on and off and on the new online platform for Tribewanted. My business partner and I decided almost two years ago that based on all the feedback we’d had from 5 years of prototyping crowd-funding and building sustainable communities that – despite the numerous challenges – we wanted to push ahead and grow the model. But we did need to ‘pivot’ as you say in start-up speak. Our financial model was not sustainable – it had been too reliable on eco-tourism markets to remote areas of the world (Northern Fiji, Sierra Leone…) – we needed a social business model that was more robust, reliable and much less fickle.

Our reflections and investigations led us back pretty much to where Tribewanted had started in 2006: crowd-funding and co-operatives. Except back then we didn’t call it that or structure it that way. Anyway, these trends – the waves – have steadily begun to swell to greater heights whilst we’ve been busy on the beach. So it was clear to us that if the vision to build a fully integrated network of sustainable communities in all parts of the world that a tribe of like-minded people could co-fund, learn from and enjoy would have a much better chance if one; each tribe member was more empowered to impact the project and two; the fundraising was subscription based and not just one-off payments.

Decision made we fundraised what we could to build our new platform and started to work on the legalities of founding a Community Interest Company and recruiting a board of experts and ambassadors to kickstart Tribewanted 2.0

A year later and dare I say it – finally within touching distance of the beta launch – and it feels like I’ve metaphorically been around the world and back to make this thing. I thought I knew a bit about building websites and this time round it would be easier, especially because so much more of what we needed is safely accessible in the cloud…I was wrong. It’s been a real slog. Way too much time alone at the kitchen table with an ageing macbook, its fan whirring so loudly that during skype calls people have asked I was in a hurricane! But as the new version slides into view, and I can finally sniff a launch, here’s 5 things I’ve learnt…

1. Developers are an amazing collection of talented, hard-working, independent, diverse individuals who all approach the code in their own way.
2. As a result – if you can’t stick with one developer (due to the fact they’re working on a tight budget/passion for the project/out-of-office hours/not sitting next to you etc…) then when you switch you often take one step forward two steps back.
3. The proliferation of coding languages is maybe creating a more open web but from what I’ve seen this year it’s becoming increasingly chaotic. No one actually knows what’s really going. It’s hack and error. Master-plans don’t really work.
4. I’ve discovered that you need a stupid amount of integrated software services to build a ‘simple’ subscription, content and booking platform: Heroku (host), github (code safety deposit box), zuora (subscriptions), paypal (despite my significant efforts to move on – payment gateway), community engine (content and user management), booking bug (booking trips), asana (project management), google drive, dropbox, twitter bootstrap, DNS made easy, UK Reg and that’s just the back-end!
5. Everyone has a different opinion as to how many / how few features you should have, how quickly / how smartly you should build (build fast, release often is the increasing lean start-up mantra) – learning which bit of enthused advice to listen to is the challenge.

Has it been fun? Honestly, not really. The bits in-between have been fun – going back to school at THNK, working on our Sierra Leone project, getting married – but not all this time alone with the whirring machine. Next time I’ll do it with a team in person which I hope we can build when our beta launch starts to get some traction – but at £750 a day for a good developer in London my biggest learning is that I should have learnt to code.

Film Doc Review: Stories from Lakka Beach (our neighbours in Sierra Leone)

Daan Veldhuizen’s ‘Stories from Lakka Beach’ is a soulful and thoughtful collection of human stories and serene cinematography of life in a small fishing village at a time of change in post conflict Sierra Leone.

Following the half dozen characters as they describe their challenging livelihoods and the change going on around them, you get a strong sense of a peaceful country rebuilding and the lessons learnt from a dark past.

Having spent time over the last few years down the coast at John Obey Beach building a sustainable tourism community, the empathy I felt watching was significant; especially in terms of the aspirations of Isaac, Aminata, Alpha and co. We also know that there are threats to the rebuilding process of these communities – the road may bring business but takes sand from the beaches to build; the new housing may bring better quality of life – but will destroy parts of the forested hills behind the village bringing erosion and flooding. It is a fragile time in terms of resource management. At least it is a peaceful one.

The pace of the story telling in the film is slow – almost frustratingly at times – and as a result the viewer gets an authentic sense of of life on Lakka Beach. It is ‘small small’, tough, beautiful, hopeful and a scrap for every last Leone. For all these things Daan, his team and stars of Lakka should be congratulated – this is an honest and rewarding portrayal of a place and people with an opportunity to finally choose their future.

Film Synopsis

In Lakka, a picturesque beach village in post-conflict Sierra Leone, five villagers reveal the deepest and most profound moments of their lives. They tell stories about the ocean and the land, about war, love, hope, religion and about foreigners; tourism on the white heavenly beaches is nothing to what it was in the 1980s. Visitors stay away because of the recent war, a painful memory that the inhabitants are trying to forget. This is a story about life after war.

32 days to create a melting pot of minds & a Bollywood flash-mob

How can you make the most of 32 days of your life? Write a book, start a company, get married, travel around the world, trek across a country, have a baby?

You could just join THNK.

1 month at the Amsterdam School of Creative Leadership – spread out over four sessions in 2012. That’s all it’s been. It’s not a long time. So why does feel like its’ been forever and over in a flash all at once?

We were the guinea pigs. The early adopters. The ‘Yes’ people. With this new faculty of dreamers and doers we ‘built the plane as we flew it together’ and last night in a decadent den deep in the gut of Europe’s creative city we welcomed the new class of participants and with the rapidly-growing faculty celebrated what a melting pot of THNKERS might begin to look like as it takes its first step towards living its critical design element – scaling.

We formed a human tunnel of energy and noise to embrace the new participants as they stumbled in from their island bootcamp bemused, bewildered but surely buzzing.

Over dinner we shared stories of how we’d all come to this moment in this place. There’s something quite emotional realizing you’re in a room completely surrounded by talent, passion and ambition and trying to soak up as much as you can as fast as possible. You barely notice the food.

We handed the baton over with stories, pictures, insights and a bollywood flash-mob which soon had – despite near exhaustion for many of us – all 100+ THNKers rocking. The force is strong in this new school.

And so we’ve reached the end of the beginning. For us, as founding participants, we feel a sense of loss today. The intense ride that the last few sessions have given us is over for now. But like anything good in life, we all want more of it. To that end we’re devising a way to get us all back together in 6 months to keep the ideas, impact and spirit growing. For now, with the support, trust and talent of our peers, it’s time to accelerate our ideas. Right now, despite exhaustion and with an inbox backlog, with these guys it feels like everything is possible. And it only took 32 days.

Destroying Paradise to make Concrete Blocks

Powerful blog from my partner @tribewanted Filippo Bozotti on the serious sand mining issue in SL and what we’re doing to tackle it. As Filippo says: “Sierra Leone is a small country. Sand mining in Sierra Leone is a local problem. But it’s a microcosm of a global illness.”

Sierra Leone has been my home away from home for the last two years. In 2010 we launched our ambitious second Tribewanted project there, on the pristine beaches of John Obey, in the Freetown Peninsula; a village of 500 souls, mainly fishermen and petty traders. We arrived with the goal of promoting the local culture, protecting the environment, and creating an enterprise managed by the local community that could provide long term benefits to John Obey and its residents through eco-tourism. We have had many successes and some setbacks, we have built a sustainable community together with our visiting tribe-members and the local villagers, we have shared incredible experiences and driven each other crazy, just like any family. After two years, our ethos has endured, and we have begun measuring our impact to try to constantly improve our model of sustainability.

The beaches of Sierra Leone, with their bright green tropical forest cliffs overhanging nearby, are some of the most beautiful in West Africa, and provide a great opportunity to the country to invest in eco-tourism, bringing not only sustainable development but promoting a positive image of Sierra Leone to the world.

John Obey beach is a golden stretch of sand extending for miles untouched, with a pristine lagoon on one side and the Atlantic ocean on the other. In two years, we have seen how fragile our special sliver of paradise is. We have seen illegal fishing trawler boats deplete the fish stock and destroy the local fishermen’s canoes and nets. We have seen the effects of deforestation caused by charcoal production and the ever-spreading concrete tentacles of Freetown. We have witnessed the damage it caused to the water cycle, with extreme droughts in the dry season and flooding in the rainy season.

Fortunately some great organizations are working on the front line to protect these patrimonies, orgs likeWHH working to preserve the Peninsula’s rainforests and EJF, exposing illegal fishing practices, which have had real successes in changing the trends of destruction.

But now, a new threat has emerged that risks destroying Sierra Leone’s eco-tourism untapped opportunities for sustainable development: Sand Mining.

It began slowly on the beaches closer to Freetown, Hamilton and Lakka. Chinese and Senegalese companies in need of sand to make asphalt to build roads, or quarries mixing it with cement for concrete-block buildings surrounded by barbed wire, the new image of “success” and “development” in Freetown, very similar to a prison to the untrained eye.

Then suddenly, around February of 2012, the free-sand-for-all bonanza exploded. Without permits, hundreds of trucks attacked the beaches on a daily basis, hiring local boys as daily laborers to destroy their own communities. Hamilton beach and Lakka beach quickly disappeared. The landscape changed. The trees collapsed. The mangroves are gone; there is nothing to protect the coast now from rainstorms and flooding. And so the trucks, always more numerous in numbers, moved west, and quickly arrived to John Obey beach. Some communities were forward-thinking enough to turn down promises of quick riches and temporarily employment to their residents, others unfortunately less so.

Everyone gets a piece of the pie, the local community is bribed to allow their beaches to be ransacked, the district councilman in nearby Waterloo fill their pockets, and the authorities in Freetown turn a blind eye. Read more about it here.

For 140.000 LE per truckload of sand ($30) they are destroying paradise to make concrete blocks, asphalt and concrete. And we are left as the eyewitnesses of this destruction, sometimes losing our workers to the nearby quarry who will pay them double until the sand is all gone and they don’t need them anymore.

We started a campaign online to stop sand mining in Sierra Leone. Together with WHH and Shine On Sierra Leone, we invested in a public awareness campaign domestically through radio stations and newspapers, to shed light on the issue. An online petition was born out of it. We are pulling together all the stakeholders, the local landowners and the community leaders, working together on more goodwill projects that can provide alternatively livelihood to the local youth and prevent them from mining the beach.

What else can be done? What alternatives are there?

From our small experience we have seen how it is possible to build homes using local materials instead of concrete. We use local earth and clay for our earth-domes, bamboo and local wood for our bungalows.

Most importantly, the government could step in and regulate the sand mining industry, so that sand is mined sustainably while the roads still get built.

Mr. President, invest in eco-tourism instead of concrete, follow the example of Costa Rica.

We are at a tipping point. Half of John Obey beach is already gone, the palm trees have already started to collapse. Soon the beach will be gone altogether and the opportunity to create a sustainable community through eco-tourism, to promote the local culture, to protect the environment and tell a positive story about Sierra Leone will be gone.

Sierra Leone is a small country. Sand mining in Sierra Leone is a local problem. But it’s a microcosm of a global illness. Instead of protecting our most beautiful and pristine environments and cultures, we trick them to want to be like us, we pillage them, and then when the dream turns to nightmare, we send them aid. We haven’t yet learned what living in harmony means.

Wonder, wit and revolution: On Friday night I understood what being British meant

Just to walk into the Olympic stadium on Friday night and discover that the ‘wasteland’ of East London had been transformed into a country masterpiece of J R R Tolkien proportions was enough to kick-start the wonderment. And it didn’t stop for the next few hours. For the lucky few thousand of us inside were shaken, rattled and rolled through the most remarkable live show I’ve ever seen.

As we took our seats beneath ‘the oak’ on top of a vast hill planted thick grass and wild flowers – I touched it – and watched the local cricket match, farming and livestock potter about, the feeling that spread around the audience was of contentment and comedy. After all many of us have spent a lot of time in these quaint corners of our islands.

The real highlights – and there were many – from then on for me included Kenneth Brannagh’s Shakespearean performance that triggered the industrial revolution where dramatic change came fast and furious and the smelting of the fifth Olympic ring amongst the 100ft chimneys and must be the most spectacular bit of iron masonry this century.

And as a British ‘paradise’ with echoes of Jerusalem and Flower of Scotland gave way to a progressive, smoking, dirty Britain and then world – you realized just what magnitude the impact of that small act of industry was. As great as the act of progress was you very quickly felt nostalgic for the life buried under the cement– something I’ve seen in many other corners of the world and literally what we’re experiencing with the sand mining problems near to Tribewanted in Sierra Leone.

Later this was echoed in the second ‘revolution’ of the night when Sir Tim Berners-Lee appeared inside a suburban house writing the alogorthym that led to the world wide web with a gargantuan 80,000 people pixilation of Tim’s epic tweet: This is for everyone!

Bond & a skydiving Queen, Mr.Bean and Chariots of Fire, Beckham on a speedboat, Team Fiji, Salone and one of my sporting heroes carrying the Olympic flag – Haile Gebrselassie – followed by a tribe of young athletes lighting the incredible copper petals that merged to form the Olympic cauldron – there’s no doubt in my mind that Danny Boyle should be knighted.

This was the greatest show on earth from the Greatest of Britain – the Isles of Wonderment. No pressure on Team GB then…

For two excellent reviews of the opening ceremony read Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian and Jim White in the Telegraph

Tomorrow: Free Drinks

The sign was clear to see for all of those walking out of the bar. The incentive to return the next day was strong. And then it happened again. ‘Tomorrow: Free Drinks.’ Tomorrow, of course, never came and business remained good for the bar.

An opening anecdote at THNK: Amsterdam’s School for Creative Leadership 3^rd session with my fellow founding participants, kick-started another 10 days (and nights) with the theme; how to orchestrate creative team.

The ‘team dynamic’ is central to any THNKers learning – small groups of 3-5 are a constant in and out of workshops, projects, forums, meditations and energizers.

Certainly the most exhilarating and challenging part of the program so far has been within these teams. The ebb and flow of energy, ideas, productivity and breakthroughs is a bit like what I imagine it must be to play professional rugby: sometimes euphoric, free-running, seamless, and in-flow but often turgid, back-peddling and painful as the opposition rips the ball off you as you’re about to score and boots it back over your head.

So what did I learn this time round?

1. Current leaders want to change but ‘the system’ won’t let them

“The tyranny of short-term reporting cycles (business) and elections (government) leads to an unsustainable world.”

Kumi Naido, CEO of Greenpeace global dropped by to share that actually the political and business leadership is there and is authentic to make things better but the systems and culture – both in big business and politics block these good intentions.

The question he needs help with: What would it take to have a paradigm shift in thinking towards the environment? How could you build leadership teams with this in mind?

Always good to start the day with an easy question I find.

2. Casting is all that matters.

Michael B Johnson from Pixar conducted an excellent evening sharing how this studio’s incredibly successful tribe of animators, creative’s and producers have guaranteed back-to-back global hits with their films.

How? By building the best team in the world and not ‘shipping’ until you’ve perfected it. Quality is the best business plan. The story boarding and re-boarding in-house at Pixar sounds like a THNK team experience on steroids and over 4-7 years.

Recipe to cast a great creative team:

A large dollop of equal calibre

A spoonful of communality

& a sprinkling of challenging perspectives

3. The magic happens when time leaves the room

We met early on Sunday (there are no ‘days off’ at THNK) in Jordaan, the heart of Amsterdam’s picturesque canals, café’s and rich architecture. The theatre company director introduced us to her beautiful home and said that by the end of the day we would each perform a 5-minute play for each other.

First, the casting – the chosen directors had to agree on which pairs of ‘actors’ should be put together to create the right on-stage dynamic. Once in our production trios we were handed a ‘big personal question’ by someone from another team that we then discussed how to turn into a story that could be scripted and performed.

Before we realized we were all nervously preparing for our big moment. What happened in the next hour was surprisingly emotional. Each of the 9 teams – one director, two actors – performed their own written pieces with passion, intensity, humor and in many case some quality amateur acting.

We left the theatre at sunset in a happy daze as 10 hours had flashed by without any of us even glancing at our watches. Creative free-flow is timeless.

4. Successfully scaling an idea requires intense sensing

Sit on a chair on the grass. Do not get off that chair for three hours. Sound like fun? Nope. But this was one suggestion that came out of our discussion on ‘scaling our ideas.’

After 10 minutes you feel lazy, sleepy, frustrated. After 30-45 minutes you begin to get lost in the world that lives in the grass: the colours, the life, the ecosystems. Becoming ‘present’ allows us to see things differently and clearly and although it takes a lot of effort, that breakthrough leads us to identify the ‘cake’ no one has yet cut. Suddenly everything is possible.

5. The next decade will be about the well-being economy 

Bob Johansen is the President of the Institute for the Future. In a 3-hour skype forum Bob shared his forecasted hopes and fears for an increasingly VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous). But when Bob was asked about the future of love by Liat Azulay (whose quiet little mission is to cure all broken hearts in the world) he was at first stumped before explaining that actually despite the VUCA landscape, there is plenty of room for optimism as the search for the production of well-being begins in global earnest. 

To celebrate this bright future we spent our next forum mostly outside by the lake in Westerpark – I hosted a traditional Fijian kava ceremony complete with wingman, mixer and story-telling and songs to please the chief. Other participants shared their personal missions and perspectives on the world from the UN food program, to the Arab Spring, to the art of negotiation.

If the THNK experience can be captured and scaled into the world then there is no doubt the well-being economy will thrive…

5 reasons you should spend 4 months in Sierra Leone helping lead Tribewanted

Fancy being Tribewanted‘s eco-tourism volunteer co-ordinator(see here) or community development volunteer (see here)?

5 reasons to join Tribewanted on the beach…

From founder Ben Keene:

• Popular Community Tourism project heading into its third season with some great projects lined-up
• John Obey Beach ‘I’ve just returned from paradise‘ will be your home…
• Play an important part in building a ‘sustainable Salone’ – education, microfinance, green tech
• Daily Catch of the Day BBQ
• Live alongside visiting tribe-members, fisherman and Tribewanted team

Tribewanted builds sustainable communities in amazing places that benefit locals and visiting members; inspiring positive change within and far beyond the village.

• VOLUNTEER TOURISM CO-ORDINATOR JOHN OBEY SEPTEMBER 2012 – here
• VOLUNTEER DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITY AT JOHN OBEY – SEPT 2012 – here

For more information contact sierraleone@tribewanted.com and check outfacebook.com/tribewantedsierraleone

30 participants, 10 days, 5 insights and the best canal party in the world.

I’ve just returned from my second session at THNK: The Amsterdam School for Creative Leadership. There I joined 29 other ‘creative leaders’ and faculty team to explore the big ideas emerging in the world and how our own passions and projects might create transformational change. The program is split into 4 parts and run over 14 hour+ days whilst in Amsterdam as well as remote learning:

Quest: Personal development through professional and peer-to-peer coaching.

Forum: Debates and discussions with creative leaders.

Challenge: A partner to THNK sets the question, and you and your team go through a ‘creation flow’ process to provide a solution that can be used. Our challenge was from Vodafone NL and the brief was: What do we do with big data?

Accelerator: Applying THNK learning & resources to your start-up or big idea.

At the start of the session we were asked to think about what we wanted to achieve from the next 10 days. I wrote down: 5 big insights that I can apply.

Insight #1: Amazon has replaced The Amazon.

‘What do you think children today would say when they hear the word Amazon?’

Werner Vogels, the Chief Technology Officer of Amazon Ltd responded instinctively to my question: ‘Where you go to find whatever you need.’

A pedantic question maybe but the point here is that in putting the consumer at the heart of everything, companies like Amazon have simply empowered us to become expert gatherers of ‘anything that’s legal’. That’s impressive as a service but it’s also changing the narrative of the world rapidly away from something more authentic. Is that what we really want as ‘customers’?

 Werner’s pure business innovation insights, however, were very valuable:

• Make mistakes with small number of customers first
• You can experiment more if your cost of failure is low
• Don’t build a business pan, build a business
• Lean start-ups: reducing waste is anything that’s not delivering value for the customer
• Get product into hands of customer ASAP
• Start with a press release (theory) and work back to product

Insight #2: Transparency of data is a big wave coming

As we began to transform the THNK work-space into a post-it note apocalypse some clear patterns began to emerge around our challenge topic of ‘big data’:

• Data used in the right way can economically empower people
• Data is a potential currency for positive user-commerce
• Data has potential to prevent conflict and increase well-being
• Data is abundant, a renewable resource that is not scarce.
• Data owners (telecoms etc..) are not trusted.
• Data will be in the hands of a further 3bn young, innovative & motivated people in emerging markets within the next 10 years.

The challenge or opportunity for telecoms and other mass data hoarders is to somehow hand-back control and ownership of data to the producers of it: us.

The first movers in this field will be the biggest winners. We started to prototype what a transparent data service might look like and called it Splash.

Insight #3: Nature has the answers we’re looking for but artificial intelligence could undermine this opportunity

By mid-week we had a trio of inspirational forums:

1. Anthropologist and migration philosopher Wayne Modest asked us ‘how can people live together’ and suggests the solution is a smarter re-distribution of resources so that our movement between places becomes more efficient. When asked if national boundaries barely exist anymore, Wayne said: ‘Try traveling on a Jamaican passport.’
2. Biomimicry expert Saskia van den Muijsenberg resonated with me and asked; ‘What is the function of our concepts/work? And how might nature deal with this?’ Asknature.org for some amazing answers.
3. Artificial Intelligence guru Prof Anders Sandberg exploded our minds and challenged us to realize that AI is happening and how should we use it responsibly.

What stuck with me from these three sessions is that playing God may lead to a ‘smarter version of me’ but that we would sacrifice our humanity in the process at a time when we’ve only just started to learn from 3.5bn years of evolution. In other words, look back to go forward.

Insight #4: Your ‘sweet-spot’ is at the meeting of your passion, talent & value.

Tech software entrepreneur Mark Randall dropped in to share his story. Draw three circles and label them as:

1. Things that you like
2. Things that you’re good at
3. Things that people pay/value you for

Where all three overlap is what is meaningful to you. Everything else follows from there. 

Insight #5: Megacities (10m + inhabitants) will become the bright resilient islands of the world but not sustainable unless our culture changes.

Rem Koolhaas Architect Reiner de Graaf outlined a dramatic version of the future of where we will live: Over half the world’s population now lives in cities and this will only increase as agriculture as we know it declines into a map of megacities.

The challenges are clearly enormous but the biggest question is what a progressive and sustainable megacity might look like when it holds more power than it’s surround nation states?

Sustainable Construction expert Livia Tirone argued that the big barrier is not technology or economics but culture. We will be resistant because our instinct is to survive but to thrive and sustain we have to change our behaviour. Decentralizing wealth into a circular economy is the first step.

 And we also fitted in the best canal party in the world… all I can say is Queen’s Day Amsterdam is something I’d recommend to everyone.