Why UnConference?
Highlights from the Emergent Ventures UnConference. Also food, travel, education blogs. Invite to Chatham House UnConference, Sep 6th.
Why you should host an UnConference
The Emergent Ventures UnConference
Travel: Meeting the Wana Tribe, Indonesia
Food: History and culture of Chinese food
Life: Racism and French pressed duck
Education: Naomi Fisher podcast on self-directed learning
Why UnConferences are so great. Why the Emergent Ventures UnConference was great.
Long-time readers will know I’ve written about UnConference type formats before. Here with Civic Futures, with Home Education, and with Sustainability and Chatham House. If you are in London do come to 6 Sep event if you’re interested: Sustainability UnConference: London Sep 6, Chatham House
Important elements of UnConference are:
the content is generated by the participants
participants are encouraged to move between sessions
You can add in other elements as well but these two ideas drive a rich event for participants and one where people feel more involved than with a traditional conference. A short blurb on the format here:
Unlike traditional conferences with pre-set agendas and passive listeners, an UnConference invites all attendees to participate actively.
Everyone is encouraged to propose topics, lead discussions, and contribute to conversations in a meaningful way.
While a conventional conference treats attendees like a passive audience to be entertained by the organisers, the UnConference format gives everyone a say by building something together.
UnConferences are choose-your-own-adventure. At any moment there will be multiple talks happening and participants can move between them.
The UnConference board is the centre of the event. The board is a large grid representing the schedule. The time slots start out blank. We fill them at the start of the day but they can change and combine throughout the time.
There are risks, if people feel constrained and don’t use their agency of choice; or when somehow you do not have a good mix of people, but I’ve never seen it fail.
Emergent Ventures UnConferences work at a high level because the participants are arguably even more agenetic than the average and every single attendee is doing at least one fascinating project, and in my interactions the norm was to have multiple amazing ideas and projects on the go.
I would describe Emergent Venture (EV) as a type of venture philanthropy where Tyler Cowen and team (Rasheed Griffith – looking at Caribbean, LatAm, Africa diasporas; Shruti Rajagopalan – looking at India; Tyler also on Ukraine) bet on people (mostly) and their ideas (partly).
EV writes:
Launched in 2018, Emergent Ventures is a low-overhead fellowship and grant program that supports entrepreneurs and brilliant minds with highly scalable, "zero to one" ideas for meaningfully improving society.
We want to jumpstart high-reward ideas—moonshots in many cases—that advance prosperity, opportunity, liberty, and well-being. We welcome the unusual and the unorthodox.
Our goal is positive social change, but we do not mind if you make a profit from your project. (Indeed, a quick path to revenue self-sufficiency is a feature not a bug!)
Projects will either be fellowships or grants: fellowships involve time in residence at the Mercatus Center in Northern Virginia; grants are one-time or slightly staggered payments to support a project.
We encourage you to think big, but we also will consider very small grants or short fellowships if they might change the trajectory of your life. We encourage applications from all ages and all parts of the world.
That description fails to fully capture the type of people EV supports. If you have an idea of normal, then EV folk tend to be a few standard deviations away from that. I met:
A writer and playwright writing a book about the creation of the universe (as an evolutionary concept)
Gender studies academic writing on why all societies have become more gender equal and some more equal than others
A scientist working on solving hospital access on St Lucia
A lawyer working on space policy and trying to get Ireland established in the space industry
A writer on her second novel, a former policy wonk writing a play
A startup digitizing UK planning and land
A non-profit start up working on opportunities for global talent
An academic working on why women in India are not entering the workforce
An expert working on allowing AI agents to interact in non-harmful ways
A start-up allowing visually impaired people to follow stadium sports games
A start-up helping (spaced repetition) you to recall information from podcasts and youtube
The list goes on… If you are thinking about applying, you might think the grant money is the important aspect. However, for many people I think the network and the UnConference might be the most useful aspect of being an EV fellow.
Another way of looking at this assembled talent is what they came up with to chat about. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the sessions called:
What is the future of secondary education?
Dark chocolate tasting and discussion
Why read fiction?
Unwritten books (books you have not written yet)
Selfish reasons to build more houses
The aesthetics of progress: Do they matter?
Future of humanity in space (Aliens?)
The end of gay rights?
The trickle-down effect in surgical tech: Does focusing on cutting edge surgery tech vs. low-cost solutions lead to more access to care?
What makes good theatre? What makes a good podcast?
Would there be prisons in Utopia?
Interpretation: Will it save us from AI?
Pandemic preparedness
Piano performance (this was a recital)
How to be a good dad to a daughter?
Given your worldview about AI, how should you allocate your resources?
Do scientists need more time to think?
Is our universe an evolved organism?
Is there a place for a Renaissance man in our time? Combining art, science, and business.
Buying passports (global mobility)
Gender struggles worldwide
What would you like to know about the Mercatus Center?
Languages!! Come if you speak one
The role model deficit: The case in Africa
Anything about longevity (biotech)
Is the world unfair to men?
Medical technology
Cloud computing & deploying ML models
Read poetry
Shifting from a growth economy to a well-being economy
The challenges of Islam in Europe
Self actualisation: How to find meaning
What will the world look like when software is alive?
How do we solve dating?
The simple joys of religious zealots
Security & safety in Africa & Caribbean
What are the consequences of digital development?
Magic show!
Puzzles & paradoxes
It helps to have a certain amount of stamina for these UnConferences because you can fill every moment with excellent conversation where you learn things. Learnings for me include:
Divisions amongst the LGB community and the fights around legal gay marriage.
The existence of buying Dominican Republic passports, and why people dislike other buying passport mobility.
Someone who never reads fiction and why; someone who never reads non-fiction and why; what fiction can bring for imagining other people’s worlds
The top problems for Dubliners (answer = housing, with public transport a second)
Newcomb’s paradox
Another unusual aspect of the EV UnConference was the multi-cultural mix, the political mix and that ages skew young. In one sense it’s an UnConference that has parts of the best of globalization and the sharing of perspective that brings. There was a mix of left leaning and right leaning views and ideas, perhaps the average person skews “Classical Liberal” but it mixed well from what I saw (inclusive of eg. social conservative evangelical and left leaning tech folk).
If you think you have an impactful idea then consider applying to Emergent Ventures.
Once upon a time I went to visit one of the most remote people on this planet. These people were called the Wana tribe.
Today, they are a semi nomadic hunter gatherer tribe who are transitioning to some forms of agriculture.
…Sulawesi is home to a lost civilisation. A few stone idols reminiscent of those in Easter Island all that remains of an ancient culture older and unconnected to the one sitting on those lands today.
All of this is mostly divorced from the Wana. The Wana tribe have lived their own lives in the jungle with only the occasional trade of resin with the outside world. More in this blog.
Fuchsia Dunlop is a cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine. She was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, and has spent much of the last two decades exploring China and its food.
In her book, Invitation to a Banquet, Fuchsia explores the history, philosophy and techniques of China's rich and ancient culinary culture. My interview with her here.
Growing up in London, I pretty much don’t recall a single event of racism against me. I appreciate that I’m likely not a typically Londoner. Except, I was born in London, went to school in London, now live in walking distance from my London primary school, work within walking distance of my secondary school and live walking distance from where my parents ran a travel agency for many years, near Portobello Road. I’ve lived almost my whole life in London apart from university. In that sense, I am very London. More in this blog on a form of outsider racism in a high end Paris restaurant.
Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist. She has written a book: Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning. The work is an excellent look at self-directed education also known in the UK as home education, or in the US as home school or unschooling.
Naomi discusses the different schools of thought on education and why progressive doesn't necessarily mean child-led education and why she likes the idea (Alison Gopnik) of a child as scientist.
Thansk for reading.