OMGCLIMATE in London
If you were looking at OMGCLIMATE in Berlin earlier this year, and thinking “Gee, that looked interesting”, I have good news if you’re in London. We’re running an OMG CLIMATE in London on Friday Oct 18th!
A free, interdisciplinary unconference about tech, and climate change, happening on the afternoon of Friday 18th.
Tickets are free but limited, and you can sign up at the link below:
Okay, that sounds nice. What should I expect?
When faced with huge, wicked problems like the climate crisis, there is a job to be done with conferences for sharing existing explicit knowledge.
But for the real breakthroughs, unconferences are extremely effective for working out new approaches to try, get past previous blockers, or compare notes with peers to talk about what’s working, and what isn’t working so well.
You can read more about why they’re useful in this post about why you might use an unconference to explore a difficult subject, but in short… they help uncover tacit knowledge.
A community-run open space event
So, that’s the plan — we’re running an open space event, where you, the attendees, decide the event’s content on the day, by bringing along climate change and sustainability topics you’d like to discuss with peers, or ones you need help with.
What follows is a set of lightly-facilitated conversations to explore these subjects in smaller breakout areas, capturing the key insights, before culminating in a final session to share these with the rest of the group.
Thinking about the climate crisis and your place in it, is emotionally exhausting, but a) the crisis ain’t going away and b) it’s easier to work it out together.
Have you done this before?
Yup, we ran one about GDPR, called OMGDPR (ho ho), and there was an OMG CLIMATE in Berlin too, earlier this year.
This time we’re running it in Phoenix Court.
It’s central, and well served with travel arrangements, and has enough rooms for concurrent, high quality discussion.
It’s parent friendly — so if you’re a new parent, and more interested in the world your child will grow up in, you can still contribute.
It’s not tied to any one cloud provider, so hopefully that should make conversations about their role a bit more neutral.
Disclosure: it’s also the same space that Local Globe, a VC firm uses. Some folks there helped sort out the space to run this event, as a freebie.
Rough schedule for the day
We’ll be starting after lunch, at 14:00, at Phoenix Court, right by Kings Cross St Pancras Station.
Doors will open at 13:30 We won’t wait for latecomers, so please be on time!
13:30 — Doors open
14:00 — Introductions and explaining the format
14:20 — Pitching session ideas
14:45 — Sessions start
17:15 — Wrap-up, and sharing what we’ve learned
18:00 — Tables booked at a nearby venue, for continuing the discussion with new friends, over drinks and food (optional)
Diversity and inclusion
We want everyone to feel welcome and safe, and generally be excellent to each other, so we’re running it under the Berlin Code of Conduct.
We want this to be an inclusive event, with people coming from a diverse set of communities, so we can have a variety of perspectives when exploring this important subject.
So, we’re asking for your help to make it better. We’re speaking at various events about this anyway, but if you’re running a meetup and you’re interested in one of us coming to your event to talk about it, please drop Chris a line, as a DM on twitter (@mrchrisadams) or send an email to chris@productscience.net.
Carbon footprint
We’d like to emphasize that this is a local event. If you’re coming from another city, we heavily suggest low-carbon travel, by opting for a train, for example, over flying. A summary of the event will be available once it’s over.
If you like the idea of this event, we share all the resources we use, so you can run one yourself.
Thanks
Huge thanks to Phoenix Court, for providing their space to run this, for free, and the various staff time for making it possible.
