Paper Lanterns in Kamakura
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Ramen Rock at Wasted Time
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Volunteering at TEDxTokyo 2011
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Disaster Cleanup Volunteering, Part Two – Volunteer Life & Cleanup Jobs
[This is the second of two posts about my volunteer trip to Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture, Japan.]
Disaster Cleanup Volunteering, Part One – Damage & Debris
Hearing about the devastation up in the disaster region, I started to get quite antsy about getting up there to contribute in some way. I eventually found an opportunity, booked the time off work, and headed up for 8 days to Ishinomaki – one of the areas worst hit by the tsunami.
Tohoku Disaster – Effects in Tokyo
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Open Governance Week 2 – Learning to act like baboons
Alternative title: Remove the Alpha Males, Change the Troop
The assigned radio show and reading were based on the work of Robert Sapolsky – a notable primatologist & neuroscientist at Stanford University. The original text and recording are both interesting and fun worth checking out so I won’t spoil the fun with much of a summary. The basic background though is that during his observations of baboon troops, a small chain of unlikely events led to a tremendous and extremely unexpected change in behaviour from the otherwise brutal and high-strung life of a single troop of baboons. More unexpected is that the troop still operates the same way 20 years later despite an almost complete changeover of community members.
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Taking a Course At Peer 2 Peer University
I’m currently taking my first course through Peer 2 Peer University. The course is Open Governance, which is about “how open communities of volunteers… can make decisions and take [effective] action” through the use of various open governance structures.
Peer 2 Peer University is a fairly new creation out of South Africa. It’s “a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls… [by] leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online.” The project is still in its early stages and is currently offering free, 6-week, university-level courses on a variety of topics through volunteer facilitators. The long-term plan is to become a platform that allows anyone to create and run courses online.
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Selling Great Big Ideas at Media Tectonics
Media Tectonics held another interesting event, this one themed around selling ideas. The format changed this time to make room for an experiment–only one main speaker. The rest of the evening was taken up by a smorgasbord of community members in the spotlight to talk about their own creative and interesting projects and creations.
Deborah DeSnoo
The main speaker was award-winning producer, director, writer and actor Deborah DeSnoo. She animately talked about various experiences with selling her ideas for some high-profile projects to large Japanese and international media organizations. As with any good story teller, her tales about some of the associated challenges with proposing, selling, and actually producing some of those projects kept the audience engaged and entertained.
Hand Made Mississippi Blues in Tokyo
TokyoHackerSpace hosted a cool “Hand Made Blues” fund-raising event on March 25th at the Pink Cow in Shibuya. Special guests were Steve Gardner with his Hand Made Mississippi Blues and Komuso Tokugawa’s Bitstream Boogie Trio (w/ SouHatori on Drums and Hisa Nakase on Bass).
After Steve put on a bit of a demonstration with some interesting and usable hand made instruments, he put on a great show – along with the first harmonica performance I’ve seen in Tokyo.