Blue Sky Sessions are a forum for people to come together in a spirit of collaborative inquiry to discuss of the pressing challenges of our day and how we might go about tackling them.
The format is informal and interactive. Speakers provide some introductory remarks around a given question before some Q&A, followed by general discussion and networking. We encourage people to participate, to be creative and to think big. We hope you can join us!
Watch this space for the announcement of future sessions.
John McTernan, Co-Production of Government
John McTernan, current Adelaide Thinker in Residence, presented the July Blue Sky Session.
We recorded this session to share, so please download the podcast to hear the presentation.
Listen here: Blue Sky Session July 2011: John McTernan.
John McTernan is the current Adelaide Thinker in Residence. His residency is devoted to ideas for a new partnership between public service and the general public, including a customer focus, co-design or production with the public, a sustained conversation and shared rights and responsibilities for services.
About John McTernan
He is the Director of the recently established New Scotland Foundation which a non-partisan think-tank focussing on public service transformation. He is a global expert on public service leadership, working with governments in UK, Europe, South America, Australia and in Iraq.
A senior policy adviser to UK Prime Minster, Tony Blair, John worked in the Downing Street Policy Unit focusing on housing and cities policy, which led him to work with the Victorian State Government on these issues.
april (ADELAIDE)
Teach for Australia: A Model for Innovation in Teaching
Melodie Potts-Rosevear, CEO of Teach for Australia, presented the April Blue Sky Session.
We recorded this session to share, so please download the podcast to hear the presentation by Melodie and the Q&A session which followed.
Listen here: TACSI Blue Sky Session Podcast - April 2011.
Teach For Australia is an independent, not-for-profit organisation dedicated to confronting educational disadvantage in Australia, and sharing a vision of an Australia where all children have excellent educational opportunities. Teach For Australia seeks to attract outstanding individuals and transform them into exceptional teachers and inspirational leaders, placing them in disadvantaged schools where their leadership, passion and ability will in turn help transform the lives of their students.
This session will run from 4.30pm on 20 April in the Armoury Gallery, South Australian Museum, North Terrace, Adelaide. Refreshments will be provided.
This event is wheelchair accessible.
Please book your spot at this session by visiting the Blue Sky - Teach for Australia booking page.
About Melodie Potts-Rosevear
Melodie Potts-Rosevear is the CEO of Teach for Australia. Previously, she was a founding staff member of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership in Queensland. CYI’s mission is to champion reform and innovation in Indigenous and social policy. In her time as Think Tank Co-ordinator, Melodie performed a range of responsibilities including launching an education initiative helping remote indigenous students access top boarding schools for secondary studies
Prior to joining the Cape York Institute, Melodie was a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group in Atlanta, GA. There she worked on a variety of corporate and social sector projects, including an achievement gap reduction and school reconfiguration project for an urban school district.
Melodie holds a Master in Public Policy degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
MARCH (ADELAIDE)
From little things, big things grow - but how? The School for Social Entrepreneurs journey
We recorded this session to share, so please download the podcast to hear the presentation by Alastair Wilson and the Q&A session which followed.
Listen here: TACSI Blue Sky Session Podcast - March 2011 .
Alastair Wilson, Chief Executive of the School for Social Entrepreneurs (UK), will lead our Blue Sky Session on March 10.
How can we support great ideas or fledgling social entrepreneurs? How do we GROW, FUND and SCALE small ideas into successful social innovations and enterprise?
Alastair will talk about stewarding SSE as a social enterprise, its experience with social franchising as a business model, and kick off a wider discussion about building successful social innovations and enterprise here in Adelaide and across Australia. He is keen to share lessons learned and start a useful discussion which will hopefully give participants some new ideas for their own projects.
About Alastair Wilson
Alastair Wilson is Chief Executive of the School of Social Entrepreneurs (SSE) in the United Kingdom. Over the past 12 years, Alastair has been a leader in the development of the UK social entrepreneurship and social innovation sector including the establishment of the UK Office of the Third Sector. He has also been the driving force together with organisations such as UnLtd and Ashoka to launch the Social Entrepreneurs Manifesto to advocate on behalf of those that start, lead and populate new organisations for social change.
FEBRUARY (ADELAIDE)
We recorded this session to share, so please download the podcast to hear the presentation by Matthew Landauer and the Q&A session which followed.
Listen here: TACSI Blue Sky Session Podcast - February 2011.
A challenge for digital citizens: Transparency is changing politics, but can it change society?
Dr Matthew Landauer, co-founder of the Open Australia Foundation, will lead February's Blue Sky Session in Adelaide.
What is the future of eDemocracy and online citizen engagement in Australia? Many citizen-driven initiatives have focused on transparency and access to government information, but is there potential to use these tools and information to affect greater social change? What will citizens and governments need to do to broaden the impact of eDemocracy?
About Matthew Landauer
Matthew Landauer is the co-Founder and lead software developer for the OpenAustralia Foundation, which publishes OpenAustralia.org, PlanningAlerts.org and ElectionLeaflets.org.au. OpenAustralia's vision is to transform democracy in Australia. It's mission is to give all Australians the tools they need to affect the change they want. It creates technologies that encourage and enable people to participate directly in the political process on a local, community and national level.
What's on your mind? New media and meaningful debate.
Chris Adams, of An Inconvenient Truth and Murderball fame, will be lead October's Blue Sky Session in Adelaide over nibbles and a glass of wine.
New media has been lauded as the ultimate connecting technology - ready to change the way we interact and work together. But how do we get beyond the ego-casting of our Facebook status to connections that inspire debate and social change?
About Chris Adams
Chris Adams is an internationally recognised new media pioneer, entertainment
executive and entrepreneur with nearly twenty years of experience in creating
partnerships, programs and revenue-generating initiatives between and to the benefit of companies in media, entertainment, technology, online, agencies and brands.
In 2003, Chris joined with eBay’s Jeff Skoll as Chief Vision Officer to help create
Participant Media. Participant’s vision is to create entertainment that inspires audiences to make social change. Participant’s first slate of movies - Syriana, North Country, Good Night and Good Luck and the documentary Murderball – were nominated for an unprecedented 11 Academy Awards in 2005.
Chris is also proud to have identified and helped develop An Inconvenient Truth for former Vice President, Al Gore that, in addition to winning an Academy Award for Best Documentary, contributed to Gore being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Daily Democracy: Can art and technology drive social change?
Gavin Artz, CEO of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) will lead our discussion for the August Blue Sky Session in Adelaide.
When: Thursday September 30, 4:30 to 5:30pm
Where: Level 5, Bradley Forum, Hawke Centre, UniSA, 50 North Terrace, Adelaide
Join us as we explore the role of art and technology in driving social change. Here's a taster from Gavin:
"The technology revolution has given citizens the tools to effect change in their society like never before. Some individuals have been quick to adapt their cognitive surplus to fill the gap left by traditional corporations and government institutions, but this change is often a difficult picture to piece together.
This difficulty arises because we are experiencing a seemingly unstructured, bottom up change, where loose connectivity across creative tools is used to design the world we want, produce the products we want and enable communication to draw on the resources we need.
By having these tools and networks freely available we are letting creativity and culture drive change and how we embrace this new equilibrium will impact on what future we decide to have."
About Gavin Artz, CEO ANAT
Gavin Artz is CEO of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) where he manages a team that deliver national and international projects spanning creative innovation, science and technology. With experience in business management ranging from multi-national companies, to not-for-profit community organisations, Gavin has developed a focus on strategy, governance and creative commercialisation. His diverse background crosses arts and commerce – with a BA in Politics, Double Bass and Composition Studies at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and an MBA from the University of South Australia. Gavin has written and presented on IP and creative commercialisation both in Australia and internationally and developed the concept of Ancillary IPs.
Q: At a time of critical focus on the state of Australian cities, the discipline of design offers an unprecedented opportunity to re-conceive their future. But however creative, design responses always reflect a set of deeper social values and aspirations that are innate, not applied.
How can we capitalise on wider social currents, foster a community of entrepreneurship, and ensure South Australia's future is designed with authenticity and innovation?
Speaker: Tim Horton (SA Integrated Design Commissioner)
Q: Bottom up and backwards: What can we learn from turning social problem solving back to front?
Speakers: Sarah Schulman & Chris Vanstone (TACSI)
Check out details from this session here
Q: How can we build and measure community resilience through social innovation?
Speaker: Alastair McAslan (Torrens Resilience Institute) - Adelaide
Q: Bottom up and backwards: What can we learn from turning social problem solving back to front?
Speakers: Sarah Schulman & Chris Vanstone (TACSI) - Adelaide
Check out details from this session here.
Q: How can we harness the collective intelligence of society to find new ways to address unmet social needs?
Speaker: Brenton Caffin, CEO TACSI - Adelaide
Q: Can we save the world and make it look like a party? (the Kaospilot remix)
Speaker: Bert Meijers, Kaospilot - Adelaide
The Blue Sky Sessions are proudly supported by:
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