Right now I'm sitting in the lobby typing and waiting for it to be time to grab a cab. Haven't gone to sleep today (we had another karaoke session tonight and then the party just kept going on in the hotel. But back up about 24 hours to when I was waking up...
... It is pretty hard to believe its the last day of conference. In the morning we finished off our Global Engineering (GE) work. There was a job fair and I took the chance to discuss the aerospace with one of the Bombardier engineers. Lunch included chapter awards and some minor speeches (just to warm up for the Gala). Following lunch was a panel on Canada's role in the world and the panalists had suprisingly close views. This was a great session -- the panalists had lots to share and the questions were well posed.
In the afternoon we had a team meeting for all the SO volunteers, and I gathered ideas ranging from how to engage new volunteers to applying for massive NSERC grants. Then we had chapter meetings and we started applying our new design skills to sharing our conference learning with the rest of the chapter. Look forward to this in the next couple weeks.
The gala dinner ended the conference, complete with great speeches from George and Parker, and the conference prep team. Lots of dancing, talking and saying good bye to everyone.
We'll thats it for my conference blog, I hope it was a useful way of sharing our conference events. We will be running some sessions at school over the next couple weeks, so if any of these events sounded fun (with the possible exception of karaoke), you can look forward to seeing some sessions.
Cheers,
Mike
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Friday, January 8, 2010
Friday
Friday started with our MOE and then we had sessions related to our focus discussion groups (Global Engineer). The MOE workshop was fantastic, the students were super engaged in the presentation, and participated a lot. Then about 120 students went to the gym and saw a simultaneous broadcast of our keynote speaker. All in all, about 4000 students in and around St. John's participated in the presentations and saw the keynote.
In the afternoon I was involved in a breakout session about Global Engineering. First we looked at project design in general (designing a method for engaging new members at our chapter's kick off meeting). The design process is really neat, it involves 3 steps:
Ideation - defining the boundaries or constraints
Inspiration - rapid fire creative solution brainstorming. No bad ideas
Innovation - Construct the prototype system or device based on previous 2 steps.
We determined that our target audience (constraints) was a non-engineer in thier first or second year. Next the whole group listed a number of possible solutions ranging from scavenger hunts to food to meetings while running a 5km run or doing yoga. Then the large group subdivided into small groups, choose one solution and innovated it. We choose freestyle, so our innovation involved new members writing a rap about EWB for the senior members to 'freestyle'. The idea was a fun way for new members to activly learn what EWB is all about, but in a low risk way since the senior members are the ones performing.
A video encompasing some of our design elements is linked below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M66ZU2PCIcM
After design, we moved to Global Engineering. We focused on professional engineers (constraints) though another set of groups choose students as the target audience instead. Similarly, each small group spent some time in the ideation stage, and 'prototyped' 3 systems. Then everyone voted on these systems (10 total votes/person) and a second iteration refined the products with the most votes. Some popular ideas included:
- GlobeBook: facebook but for global engineers
- Standards for global engineering
- Making sustainable engineers sexy
- Handbooks of materials and suppliers, but also including sustainability data in with the materials cost, strength, surface and other properties
- Sustainability professional development system
In the evening was the AGM. At my first conference (last year in Missisauga) I only attended the last half hour or so, so this time I decided to stay for the whole thing. I can't lie -- it was generally pretty boring. There was some debate over the rules and process of voting, especially regarding the elected directors, and there were some interesting questions during the Q and A. It seemed to me that certain questions were glossed over (specifically a question regarding the GARI program in Ghana that was recently dropped) which is strange; normally the exec is more open regarding its decisions and decision process. And especially strange since this question was the most voted for (questions were posed online before the AGM started).
After the AGM (about 1) a bunch of us went out to Kops Karaoke. I was shocked that the bars in NL only really get going around then, and are open to at least 3:30 AM. EWBers filled the place up, sung and danced to terrible songs and had a ton of fun. Not as epic as the time in Malawi I rode home from a club in a police van, but pretty close. And super cool that all these bars are within a 10 minute walk of the hotel on the infamous George St.
-Mike
In the afternoon I was involved in a breakout session about Global Engineering. First we looked at project design in general (designing a method for engaging new members at our chapter's kick off meeting). The design process is really neat, it involves 3 steps:
Ideation - defining the boundaries or constraints
Inspiration - rapid fire creative solution brainstorming. No bad ideas
Innovation - Construct the prototype system or device based on previous 2 steps.
We determined that our target audience (constraints) was a non-engineer in thier first or second year. Next the whole group listed a number of possible solutions ranging from scavenger hunts to food to meetings while running a 5km run or doing yoga. Then the large group subdivided into small groups, choose one solution and innovated it. We choose freestyle, so our innovation involved new members writing a rap about EWB for the senior members to 'freestyle'. The idea was a fun way for new members to activly learn what EWB is all about, but in a low risk way since the senior members are the ones performing.
A video encompasing some of our design elements is linked below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M66ZU2PCIcM
After design, we moved to Global Engineering. We focused on professional engineers (constraints) though another set of groups choose students as the target audience instead. Similarly, each small group spent some time in the ideation stage, and 'prototyped' 3 systems. Then everyone voted on these systems (10 total votes/person) and a second iteration refined the products with the most votes. Some popular ideas included:
- GlobeBook: facebook but for global engineers
- Standards for global engineering
- Making sustainable engineers sexy
- Handbooks of materials and suppliers, but also including sustainability data in with the materials cost, strength, surface and other properties
- Sustainability professional development system
In the evening was the AGM. At my first conference (last year in Missisauga) I only attended the last half hour or so, so this time I decided to stay for the whole thing. I can't lie -- it was generally pretty boring. There was some debate over the rules and process of voting, especially regarding the elected directors, and there were some interesting questions during the Q and A. It seemed to me that certain questions were glossed over (specifically a question regarding the GARI program in Ghana that was recently dropped) which is strange; normally the exec is more open regarding its decisions and decision process. And especially strange since this question was the most voted for (questions were posed online before the AGM started).
After the AGM (about 1) a bunch of us went out to Kops Karaoke. I was shocked that the bars in NL only really get going around then, and are open to at least 3:30 AM. EWBers filled the place up, sung and danced to terrible songs and had a ton of fun. Not as epic as the time in Malawi I rode home from a club in a police van, but pretty close. And super cool that all these bars are within a 10 minute walk of the hotel on the infamous George St.
-Mike
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Thursday's Sessions
So today was the first day for all of SFU to participate, and did we ever! Morning started off with a cup of FT coffee, some speeches and then we jumped right into chapter cheers! SFU was up first, and we were all decked out in our prison wear (white shirts with black stripes and black pants) and we did our version of the jailhouse rock:
Get up in the morning ready to rock!
Got to get to class cause its 7 o' clock.
Theres a cool new club at the SFU jail
With our ideas on board its never gonna fail....
Lets rock........lets rock.........
Everybody on the SFU block... doin' the EWB rock
If I understand correctly, there should be some video footage somewhere on the conference 2010 website, though I haven't seen it yet. Definately try to find it if you want to see some killer coreography.
Next up was a set of speeches by Mark Hemsworth, George and Parker to set the stage for the conference. I was chatting to Parker later about the conference and we discussed how this one was so much more informal than the Waterloo conference. He had an interesting point though, I love the style where we have tons of time at meals to seek out and chat with other chapter members and OVS, however if this was my first conference I would feel a little lost by the openness.
Afternoon sessions revolved around our overseas strategy. I participated in the SA AVC (Southern Africa Agriculture Value Chains) workshop, as this is where I had some experience from my JF placement in Zambia. We had a killer role play, it was probably one of the most fun things so far at conference. I got to play an NGO worker who interviewed farmers and tried to get them to play a role in the sorghum value chain. Challenges were similar to the ones we faced while actually in Zambia, including excessive beaurocracy among other things.
Alfred had an amazing speech after lunch, during which he educated us on CLTS (Community Lead Total Sanitation). It was super effective, I think he managed to 'trigger' most of the audience. I was happy to have a chat with him after on effective workshop facilitation, he had an interesting perspective to add on engaging everyone. Alfred seems to be a big fan of the opening -- its the best chance to grab everyone's attention and he uses it to the max. That being said, he uses participation and interaction, combined with outrageous comments to keep everyone paying attention througout his talk also.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the things I love about this conference is the openness in the plan. I had some great chats about our overseas work over lunch with Hans, as well as managed to catch up with Danny and some other NO staff. We had time in the evening to prep for our MOE (a huge SO event across St. Johns tomorrow morning that I should probably be sleeping in preparation for) and got a good chance to check in with our delegation and see where they were all at. There were a series of open discussions that followed which were an interesting (albeit uncharacteristicly formal) way to discuss some of the dialemmas facing EWB over the next couple years. I had an interesting chat with some chapter communications reps.
The evening still left a couple hours for socializing, (between about 11 and 2) which was a great chance to catch up with past Zambian volunteers and drink Castle. We even sung the Zambian national anthem (while holding a very legitimate Zambian flag) to great applause of the other EWB members who were still awake.
Tomorrow I'm looking forward to a great MOE, as well as the AGM. Haven't had a chance to form some questions for the board or the CEOs, but I plan to do that tomorrow afternoon. Wouldn't mind spending a bit of time prepping for the Global Engineering session on Saturday either, but we will see how time goes. So far conference has been insanely busy, though super productive too!
-Mike
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
RJF Day
Yesterday was a long day of travelling, and a chance to visit the town of St Johns. Its a small place, only a couple of major streets, and some small shops. I'm starting to get a feel for the town, we've eaten out a lot here, and it seems the menus all consist of burgers, fish and chips. My vegeterian friend Patrick is not too impressed :)
Today was return JF (RJF) day, which consisted of a couple workshops desinged to help us reflect on our first 4 months back in Canada and gather some ideas for continued impact with the chapters.
The first session was a guided reflection looking back from conference last year to the present. It was neat to see how my perspectives have changed on topics from leadership to goal setting and planning.
Next we launched into a session designed to get a glimpse into what everyone has been up to back at their chapter. I heard about Patrick's killer faces of Twapia, a set of stories and pictures of people he met during a typical day around town. Mike K told us of a sweet frosh event involving a minibus, bargaining at the market, and lots of IWE!
After lunch we moved into challange sessions, where each person in a group of 5 brough a challange to the table and everyone spent about 30 minutes giving advice. I got some great ideas for dealing with SFU's not sending a JF this year: hoping to engage some chapter members in the writing of a mega-guide to being a JF. The plan here is to both leave behind a written and visual training manual (yes video footage too) and also hopefully training volunteers in how to be a JF at the same time. If all goes well (yeah, this may be a bit hopeful) then we could end up sending 2 JFs next year. It would be a pretty sweet recovery after this year!
The last structured session was a guide to coaching future JFs. I took a lot of great notes on coaching and leadership, and am really looking forward to trying some of these things out, even if I don't apply them to JF coaching explicitly.
During our unstructured session at the end of the day I was talking with Victoria (one of the Burkina JFs) who had a really neat idea for a member learning that ended up engaging the chapter for over 7 hours on a Friday night! Might be bringing this one back to SFU once I get my translation skills sorted out, and adapt it to be Zambian focused.
Other highlights of the day included seeing Alfred, Mike K's counterpart who came here to visit. That guy is so intense, he just keeps on going! I'm looking forward to hearing his speech tomorrow after lunch. Its definately awesome to be seeing everyone again, and meeting lots of new people, and I'm well on my way to building a list of 10 cross-Canada contacts to bounce ideas off when the need arises (one of my key conference goals).
Tomorrow I'm looking forward to sector meetings (Value Chains in Southern Africa), and hoping to get to chat with some of the OVS who are back for conference, just to see what they are all up to and get a feel for how Zambia is right now. It should be a good day to rebuild some of my relationships overseas, and set myself up well to bring that back to the chapter.
Oh, and there has been some pretty serious hackie sack going on in the hotel here too! Seems our skills have been improving every time we try!
-Mike
Today was return JF (RJF) day, which consisted of a couple workshops desinged to help us reflect on our first 4 months back in Canada and gather some ideas for continued impact with the chapters.
The first session was a guided reflection looking back from conference last year to the present. It was neat to see how my perspectives have changed on topics from leadership to goal setting and planning.
Next we launched into a session designed to get a glimpse into what everyone has been up to back at their chapter. I heard about Patrick's killer faces of Twapia, a set of stories and pictures of people he met during a typical day around town. Mike K told us of a sweet frosh event involving a minibus, bargaining at the market, and lots of IWE!
After lunch we moved into challange sessions, where each person in a group of 5 brough a challange to the table and everyone spent about 30 minutes giving advice. I got some great ideas for dealing with SFU's not sending a JF this year: hoping to engage some chapter members in the writing of a mega-guide to being a JF. The plan here is to both leave behind a written and visual training manual (yes video footage too) and also hopefully training volunteers in how to be a JF at the same time. If all goes well (yeah, this may be a bit hopeful) then we could end up sending 2 JFs next year. It would be a pretty sweet recovery after this year!
The last structured session was a guide to coaching future JFs. I took a lot of great notes on coaching and leadership, and am really looking forward to trying some of these things out, even if I don't apply them to JF coaching explicitly.
During our unstructured session at the end of the day I was talking with Victoria (one of the Burkina JFs) who had a really neat idea for a member learning that ended up engaging the chapter for over 7 hours on a Friday night! Might be bringing this one back to SFU once I get my translation skills sorted out, and adapt it to be Zambian focused.
Other highlights of the day included seeing Alfred, Mike K's counterpart who came here to visit. That guy is so intense, he just keeps on going! I'm looking forward to hearing his speech tomorrow after lunch. Its definately awesome to be seeing everyone again, and meeting lots of new people, and I'm well on my way to building a list of 10 cross-Canada contacts to bounce ideas off when the need arises (one of my key conference goals).
Tomorrow I'm looking forward to sector meetings (Value Chains in Southern Africa), and hoping to get to chat with some of the OVS who are back for conference, just to see what they are all up to and get a feel for how Zambia is right now. It should be a good day to rebuild some of my relationships overseas, and set myself up well to bring that back to the chapter.
Oh, and there has been some pretty serious hackie sack going on in the hotel here too! Seems our skills have been improving every time we try!
-Mike
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Getting ready to leave
Welcome everyone! Today is Sunday, and tomorrow night I am off to St. Johns for the national conference.
Even though most delegates arrive wednesday night, JFs, return JFs and chapter presidents go a day early to attend a couple workshops specific to these positions.
So far, our conference team has been doing a bunch of prep work over the last couple months:
- Forming and sharing conference goals
- Developing a plan for sharing conference learning
- Getting ready for the MOE (Massive Outreach Event)
- Making up our team SFU 'baseball' cheer
- Researching OVS (Overseas Volunteer Staff) and JF (short term volunteers) blogs and placements and finding out about what EWBs work overseas is
- Researching in-Canada focus programs like Global Engineering and Fair Trade
So what makes this conference special? The goal this year is to build a strong connection between the overseas programs and our in-Canada programs. So in short, finding ways to relate what we are doing here in Canada to the work our short and long term volunteers are doing in Zambia, Burkina, Malawi and Ghana. How can you do this even if you aren't going to conference? Start by checking out my summer blog: http://mikeinzambia.blogspot.com/ and this will give you a feel for some of the work I was doing with the AVC (Agriculture Value Chains) team in Zambia.
And here's a picture I think connects the overseas and in-Canada programs well! Every year EWB publishes a calender featuring our overseas work. When I was in Zambia, I took a picture of my host father, Morrison Hakakwale, and he was featured as Mr. August in the current (2010) calender. This is a picture OVS Arthur Kong (http://arthurinzambia.blogspot.com/) took in December of Morrison recieving a calender with his picture in it!
Looking forward to keeping you all updated as we head off to St. Johns for the next week!
-Mike
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