Backstage at the IDX hub

The IDX team had the privilege of taking part in a 4 day digital making tour in November. Working alongside ThreeFarm, D-Lux Media Arts, Michael Crouch Innovation Centre (MCIC) and Code Club Australia we ventured through Rylstone, Wellington, Dubbo and Orange. It was exciting, different and the first time we’d all worked together. We ran robot races, Code Club Australia delivered Scratch, Threefarm helped teach learners how to build a Geo-dome, MCIC 3d scanned and taught learners how to CAD design.

The days flew by and the communities we hosted learning experiences with were engaged from start to finish. “It’s something I don’t usually get to do.” - Canobolas High Student "It was really fun." - Wellington Public student

We attended a ’Soup Session’ in Rylstone, where local community members pitch an idea to be voted on, to win the cash prize raised by the audience while eating soup! We then travelled to Wellington the next morning where we delivered a full day experience with the local primary school. We used a round robin style method so all learners could have play with the different technologies. [Insert photo]

We spent two days in Dubbo, hosting a series of community workshops in our travelling maker space. Orana Arts supported the program and offered the Dubbo Fire Arts Station for our stay.

Orange was next. We worked with Canobolas Rural Technology High School and reset our travelling maker space, tailoring it for high school aged students.

“I don’t get to do many things with a 3d printer. I’ve never worked in a team like I did with the Geodome, and I don’t get the opportunity to program robots either.” - Canobolas High Student

“I would definitely love to be involved in this sort of stuff. Maybe as a hobby if I can’t do a career in it.” Canobolas High student

IDX headed out to Code Club's Kids Inventor's Day with a special addition to the team, Riley, who was our lead robot builder for the day. It was a jam packed day with different technology spilling out of every room of Custom's house... not to mention 200 or more kids taking to tech, like ducks to water.

To kick off the year we had a great time with some young people from USYD's Wingura Mura Bunga Barrabugu Summer Camp. We teamed up with our friends from ThreeFarm to run two learning experiences - robotics and building a geodesic dome.

It was a great evening with lots of minds solving problems and working collaboratively to complete challenges. Young people were able to get hands on with different concepts of technology. Students used Buckminster Fuller's priciples of "doing more with less" to think about sustainability and build a geodesic dome as well as learn how to program robots to navigate a "map" of the Sydney region and find traditional objects and learn what they were used for.

At the beginning of October, I headed out to the Dubbo Sustainability Expo to have a chat to the Central West community about the IDX Initiative. It was a great event led by the Central West Science Hub (Dubbo City Council) as part of the NSW Regional Science Hub network. There were different stalls from community organisations and from around NSW including the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage (OEH), Macquarie University, UNSW Physics, Taronga Zoo and Sliding Spring Observatory. The younger audiences even played a game of tag with Winny the Dinosaur (a Muttaburrasaurus puppet from the Australian Museum). The IDX Stall was definitely a big hit and had a steady stream of people learning how the 3D printer worked, printing their names and some eager young people initiating their own robot races throughout the day. But you may be asking yourselves, Why was IDX at a sustainability expo?

When we think about sustainability sometimes we only think about creating greener solutions, but sustainability has three pillars - social, environmental and economic. Sustainability speaks to the interconnectedness of people, places and things. I believe, that IDX is at the heart of that discussion and highlights the continued contribution that Australian Aboriginal people make toward innovation, science and technology as well as the amazing network of people.

“Since the late 20th century, as Western science has become increasingly focused on environmental sustainability, climate change and global warming, there has been a significant shift towards seeking solutions within Indigenous knowledge systems in order to mitigate the impact of globalised industrialisation. Central to this is an increasing awareness of the intrinsic resilience of Indigenous communities.” (Indigenous Engagement with Science: Towards Deeper Understandings, 2013)

Australian Indigenous knowledge has made a profound impact on technology, but sometimes we don’t see it. Did you know that NASA has developed a drone that will be the first to fly on Mars that references the boomerang? The boomerang is at the forefront of space exploration!

During the event I was primarily promoting the Flint EOI, an opportunity for regional communities to receive digital making workshops, training and equipment valued up to $25,000 as well as our digital making workshops, which is fondly referred to as learning experiences in IDX. The IDX learning experiences provides foundational digital making skills for young people through hands on activities such as robotics, coding and 3D printing and demonstrates the lineage of Indigenous Knowledge to new digital technology. It is an ambitious brief, but it hopes to encourage the next generation of Indigenous digital makers to continue the legacy of 40,000 years or more of innovation - and have fun doing it!

It was great to hear and see the response from the community and their enthusiasm brimmed when they found out that IDX would be heading back out to the Central West at the end of November to facilitate a number of learning experiences. I met a teacher from Wellington Primary School and he really illustrated the need to inspire young people and move beyond traditional education environments. He immediately, jumped at the opportunity to bring some students to our stop over in Wellington.

Recently my schedule was jam packed with conferences, talks and forums all focusing on the opportunities and challenges of technology. Admittedly most of the speakers were technology optimists rather than the doom and gloom apocalyptic types where robots are going to take over the world. What really hit home, was that Australia IS home to some of the most profound inventions in technology and continues to be at the forefront of innovation - it’s just about getting over our tall poppy syndrome and being proud on an international stage of the brilliance of our people not just our beaches.

I believe that it’s always good practice to see what’s happening in the world of tech and what are some of the ideas that are being thrown around on a national and international scale. There were backpacks on bees, immersive gaming and entertainment with the occulus rift and some great learning apps to encourage cross-locational learning.

Throughout the different events there was a central theme that peaked my interest, empathy. As technology is integrated more and more in our every day experience and the way we interact with each other, it makes sense that we also need to think about the social conditioning of technology or even further down the line, what does the data reflect.

Empathy can be described as:

The experience of understanding another person’s condition from their perspective or reference point

Identifying with someone’s emotions

The first stages of compassion

We can see from above that empathy is about people, as opposed to technology. At the Telstra Summit, I quickly became a big fan of Brian Solis where he said quite eloquently,

“You can’t think about digital transformations until you understand the way behaviours have changed” - Brian Solis (@briansolis), Telstra Summit 2015

Technology has revolutionised a whole bunch of things, but in my opinion we’re beyond the revolution stage, we’re now just evolving. Technology has changed how we as an individual and as a society interact: our relationships are more complex, the potential of what we can do is greater and the expectations of our time are higher, but on the flip side there are arguments that the “divide” is not only getting bigger, but is “deepening”. By designing technologies through an empathetic lens, technology can be responsive to the needs of people and create new economies which are more collaborative than consumptive. Technology shouldn't simply be about “innovation” for innovation’s sake.

How do we build technology and design systems that encourage empathy? It’s all about the data! At Web Directions, Alisa Lemberg (@DatabyDesign) from Twitter spoke of the phenomenon of “extension neglect”. Extension neglect happens when the size and scale of an issue does not hold any influence on the way a person values the subject. In other words, it’s harder for a person to relate to statistics and care about the issue.

“The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic”

This time last week, April Long and myself had the pleasure of attending day 2 of the Puliima Languages and Technology conference in Melbourne.

The conference brought together a number of practitioners from across the country to share their activities and learnings in relation to the transmission and preservation of language, an essential component of Living Culture. In fact, the sessions we participated in touched on a number of outcome priority areas for IDX: Living Culture (preservation, transmission, production), Engaged learning, Youth empowerment, and Digital fluency among them.

It was great to see all the terrific work happening in communities presented in the individual sessions across the day. We were really disappointed that we were unable to swing things to be there on day 1, given the connections we made.

Rather than do a “blow-by-blow” account, I wanted to share a couple of themes emerged for me across the sessions I attended.

Tablets and language apps

One key theme was the prevalence of apps being developed for tablet computers, specifically the Apple iPad. Most of the apps that were demonstrated were tablet based, ranging from interactive story books to dictionaries, some with the capability for local communities to create their own within the app.

Some apps were more bespoke, others were designed to be more broadly applied. Some were designed to publish the finished product on the App Store, others were designed purely for use within/by the local community.

The SharingStories Language Lightbox was one that stands out. It enabled communities to create local-language dictionaries from within the app, collecting supporting images and audio in-situ (rather than to be fed into the app).

Another interesting solution came from the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Language (VACL), where they’ve successfully used the Kiwa platform for a number of projects. Kiwa supports the creation of story book applications with multiple languages (one project saw up to 10 languages) for the same story.

Some examples stored content locally, others relied on internet connectivity. Given more time, I’d have liked to have dived in a bit more to the technology infrastructure “behind the scenes” to learn more about how apps were propagated amongst community (when not published on the App Store) and also how data was managed in these kind of scenarios (local vs. stored in the cloud etc. and the impacts in locations where connectivity is limited or non-existant).

The story book applications to me held the most promise for ongoing engagement and learning. The dictionaries seem important from a preservation perspective, but the story books provide the opportunity for greater longer-term engagement. Both work in tandem, though, so both are valuable contributions.

Youth engagement

All of the projects that I witnessed on the day had some degree of youth engagement. Typically this involved Elders and young people working together to share the stories and their background, and then young people engaged in creating the media to tell the stories, with guidance from Elders to make sure these representations were appropriate.

In the projects that I saw highlighted, this co-creation of content was highlighted as a key part of the process. As an avid advocate of co-creation and co-design methods, this, of course, made complete sense and was something I was really glad to see happening.

But it did raise for me a question about the longevity of the model. For example, if the creation of content is a key component of the engaged learning process, how do we engage the next group of young people once a dictionary is created, or book is completed telling the story? It is important that communities are able to continue to create new stories/books/content etc. so that new groups of young people can be engaged.

Also, can we sustain the development of bespoke apps for each group coming through? This is where platforms like Kiwa are most interesting from my perspective, as it enables communities to continue to create new stories into the future.

Intellectual property

There was one session on day 2 about Intellectual Property (IP) and some of the challenges practitioners have experienced in their projects. I estimate that a whole conference stream could be devoted to this topic, so a 1 hour panel was definitely a challenge to cover all the potential facets of exploration.

One of the key things that was highlighted was the tension between collective ownership of Traditional Knowledge and the individualistic nature of western-framed intellectual property laws.

Another was an acknowledgement that there is no “on-size-fits-all” approach that will work—context, community, and traditions all play a role in shaping what’s appropriate and what’s not.

A third was the tension surrounding materials that were collected historically by non-Indigenous people. The context of this collection, questions of the validity (and veracity) of “consent” and more were raised. This is not only a practical challenge (in terms of gaining appropriate permissions) but also holds significance as some materials may be critical preservation documents (i.e. in some cases the only documented record).

Terri Janke’s work was mentioned, but there was broad agreement across the panel that much more work needs to be done in this area.

Optimising efforts

One of the key things that struck me was how similar a lot of the approaches were. This is a good thing—independently different communities have started to centre around similar solutions and approaches that are engaging, effective and culturally grounded.

However, I couldn’t help but think that a shared infrastructure to support these kinds of efforts would go a long way. Given the similarities in approach and form factor, I suspect there is a prime opportunity for key groups to collaborate and pool their (sometimes scarce) funds to build shared platforms, it would stretch individual project dollars a lot further. I hope that one of the outcomes of Puliima is that this sort of collaboration and cross-pollination emerge.

For things like the story book, platforms like Kiwa are interesting, but being an overseas developed, and as far as I can tell proprietary, technology raises questions for me about its appropriateness in the long term. Even an Australian-based technology such as ChattyKidz, which has been used by the Indigenous Literacy Foundation in the Tiwi Islands, has similar drawbacks.

It strikes me that an open-source platform (i.e. not content) that is community funded and developed would be the most appropriate model. And that any data from the platform be hosted on Aboriginal owned/run hosting/servers located in Australia to further bolster community ownership and resolve potential IP challenges with overseas hosting.

The other risk that came to my mind is that this centring around intensive face-to-face models perhaps is missing other opportunities for self-directed learning and engagement. I’ve had a couple of conversations with Michael about how tools such as DuoLingo could be utilised. DuoLingo incorporates game dynamics to create “fun and addictive” models of learning.

In any case, it would be great to see a more diverse set of approaches at future conferences to understand how different ways of teaching and learning can be applied to achieving this important outcome.

IDX and Flint

April and I also had the opportunity to present on the IDX concept and the work that the IDX team have been doing with inspiring digital making within the community.

There was a lot of interest in the work being done by the IDX team, and particularly in the opportunity to participate in the new Flint program that Zoe and April announced recently at the Torres Strait Island Economic Development Forum.

I was recently given the opportunity to moderate a panel at the Australian Internet Governance Forum in Melbourne and I have to say some of the discussions were very insightful. This years theme was how the internet is transforming Australian society and the organisers thought it would be wonderful if we could share how the internet is transforming Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples society.

Our topic, "Internet and Indigenous Communities - The Inclusivity and Engagement Divide" focused on how access and affordability are crucial barriers to digital inclusivity particularly in regional and remote areas of Australia.

The panel was made up of a great mix of views from Professor Irabinna Rigney, Anne-Marie Elias, Bonnie Levi and Benson Saulo and they definitely covered a broad spectrum of views from academia, social change, Indigenous youth and real first-hand in the community experience.

The one thing I learnt was how important people like Bonnie Levi have helped remote communities like Irrunytju feel connected. Irrunytju is a remote town that sits on the Western Australian side of the tri-state border, four hours drive west of Yulara and is home to between 80 and 150 people. They speak three local languages and english. They continue to practice traditional hunting and gathering as well as traditional arts, crafts and ceremonies. They also enjoy modern day facilities such as a high speed internet connection and have had access for eight years.

Bonnie is reasonably digitally savvy and has an open, helpful and caring personality and is also an Indigenous Support Officer, Community Worker and Mentor who lives and works in Irrunytju. During the two day forum I was able to listen to Bonnie's trials and tribulations of how Irrunytju uses its modern day technologies and her view on things that could be trailed and perhaps even improved.

Bonnie recalls a time just recently when the line did go down and it was chaos. People were not able to contact friends and family to see if they were safe or to withdraw money from the local ATM to pay for groceries. That outage lasted approximately 16 hours, but they made do.

Bonnie laughs as we share a moment with Irabinna as he recalls the kids from Pipalyatjara running up the hill to get the reception from the Irrunytju tower so that they can send messages to friends on social media. It just goes to show that remote Australia wants to be socially included, all be it inventively. I wonder if the kids scientifically figured this out for themselves?

Whilst Bonnie did not grow up in the area she has come to understand how the internet and telecommunications are roadways to bigger and better things. The locals regularly call on her to help with their banking, welfare and medicare but the demand is increasing for other things. Things like, improving their confidence in using the internet for themselves so that they can pursue their interests and registering with social networks so that they can write to friends and family.

Last week, I was offered the opportunity to present at the third Torres Strait Economic Development Summit on Waiben, Thursday Island alongside our general manager, April. We offered to run our learning experiences with the young leaders while we were there. And we had a blast! Across the three days, we worked with 20 or more Port Kennedy Association (PKA) vacation participants each day, aged between four and twelve years old, sharing our robotics, online gaming and 3d printing experiences with the community.

The Torres Straits are definitely beautiful. But when we finally arrived on the Sunday 27th, I realised just how far away the communities are and how difficult it is to get resources there. We had 3 cases between the two of us, holding a 3D printer, 6 LEGO Mindstorm EV3 robots, 12 surface pros and all of the extra bits and pieces. It took 3 flights and a ferry before we reached our destination.

"I was so excited to finally meet some of the Thursday Island community. I was so thankful for the opportunity." - Zoe Betar, Learning Experience Designer

The sense of community and pride in culture was so strong that you couldn't help but notice.

seaside footpath

The first day, we shared online gaming. Learners built a canoe race game and animated their programs. They really enjoyed playing with the surface pros.

"... They didn't want to go home..." Miss Leah Lifu, Coordinator of PKA vacation care

The most impactful learning experience was of course, the robots which was run the following day. They were so excited about it and for young leaders that hadn't seen or used them before, they were naturals.

"They had them driving through obstacles, turning, reversing, racing and battling each other with little help from me! What was more special, was how the older students stepped up naturally, to help others with their robots. They worked together as a team and it was simply magical." -Zoe Betar

The young leaders were able to use the 3D printer on the last day, and printed their names or words of importance for them. There were so many questions about it and how it works, the excitement at seeing a 3D printer work was obvious.

At IDX, learning experiences with a Cultural focus in communities are our core business. And we're proud of doing them well. But as a team and initiative, we never stop learning. Each community will have a lesson for us. Each location will test the technology that we have and the way we teach it. There is nothing more rewarding for us as an initiative than seeing the excitement, the joy and the ability that the young leaders we've had the priviledge of working with so far, exhibit when they use the technology for the first time. There is so much potential. Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been innovating for at least 70,000 years and we will continue to do so.

This generation have constantly surprised us in a lot of ways. They constantly reinvigorate the what and the how we do what we do. It comes from them, and their desire to learn, and hopefully how we inspire them to think outside the box and explore different careers and opportunities for them in STEM related fields.

9 year old Tura, one of the inspirational young leaders from the TI community stood up to help others, shared his discoveries with them and had this to say about his experience with us.

"I've been playing with robots, helping other kids, making a video game, writing my name ona 3d printer. I found it extraordinary. I never thought I could do that. When I grow up I want to be an inventor. I want to make a big robot that can help the world."

It was a priveledge to be a part of the community for a week.

We have officially launched our Flint program that sparks the interest, ideas and talent of young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians in making digital technology. It provides $25,000(AUD) worth of in – kind support from the IDX Initiative for regional communities through hands on workshops for young people, skills development for local facilitators as well as equipment and educational resources.

So if you would like to have our learning experiences in your own community, click the link and send through your expressions of interest.

Before I wrap up, a special thanks to the TSRA The Port Kennedy Assocation Vacation care Program, Miss K and Miss Leah and the Thursday Island community for having us. Miss K and Miss Leah were wonderful supports for us.

The phrase ‘digital making’ has made a real splash in education, but what is digital making?

When I began at IDX, I asked my friend (otherwise known as google) about it and there was one idea that really resonated with me. Technology is becoming more available and is designed to be easier to use, however, there are less people who know how technology works, how to fix it and how to make it. Why does making technology matter?

I came across the recent March 2015, NESTA Report, Young Digital Makers, the other week and it provided some interesting points about digital making:

“Digital making, is about harnessing the digital world to tell stories, creatively solve problems and create innovative new businesses… It’s fun, motivating and beyond traditional subject limits, inspiring collaboration across the arts and sciences and between people - essential skills in the face of rapidly blurring boundaries”

“When our world is increasingly digital, it is those who can manipulate and create technology who will be able to shape it. The movement around digital making is based on the belief that making gives us access to powerful ideas that help us understand the world we live in and to shape it”

My first thoughts are that knowing how to make technology means that you’re not dependent on getting other people to make it for you, but it also allows the ‘user’ of technology to have a direct link to how technology is made and make it work for them.

So back to the question, why does making technology matter and why is it important for young people to learn about digital making? You may have guessed it already - being fluent (confident) in making digital technology provides more opportunities in the future and moves the ‘user’ from the position of consuming to creativity.

At IDX, we are excited by what can happen when the ideas, perspectives and talent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are given the opportunity to explore the potential of digital technology for the expression of their culture and benefit of their community.

IDX hopes to inspire and encourage Indigenous digital makers to become leaders through learning experiences that connects and deepens pride in cultures.

With the support of Microsoft’s Upgrade Your World Initiative, IDX will help build capacity of local Indigenous communities* through the build of a tailor-made “kit” that continues the learning experiences of young people in digital technology as well as supporting local projects and programs driven by the community.

“We are committed to celebrating those who inspire others and make an impact in their community and around the world” Anna Howarth, Microsoft Australia’s Citizenship Manager

Over the next 12 months, IDX will be engaging with Indigenous communities in regional Australia. We aim to inspire through invention and continue the rich contribution that Australian Indigenous people have made toward innovation, resilience and community prosperity.

The IDX Initiative was one of five not-for-profits announced at the beginning of September to receive a boost from Upgrade Your World alongside Australian Business and Community Network, Infoxchange, Social Traders and the Smith Family. Another five recipients nominated by the Australian public will be announced at the end of September 2015.

For more information about the #upgradeyourworld Initiative check out the Microsoft Upgrade Your World page.

Hi! My name is Alexia Estrellado. My family and I migrated from the Philippines to Australia when I was young. I grew up in Canberra and later left the nest to move to Sydney.

I love the way stories take different forms in art, technology, design and architecture and have been a keen learner about the importance of culture in shaping identity and connection to community. I studied in Design, Arts Administration and Development Studies and also explore the relationship of culture and technology through my own art practice, participating in residencies and exhibitions.

For the past 5 years, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with regional Australian communities and artists working in digital media and technology to build creative learning programs that explore the intersection of art, science and culture.

I believe that a strong community brings together people with diverse skills and experiences through sharing the same vision. It’s not only about what I can do, but what we can do together to create a collective impact.

In my previous work in the sustainability sphere I was introduced to a concept, articulated by social innovation researcher Ezio Manzini, called Small, Local, Open, Connected (SLOC for short). Two “introductions” I know of are this paper and the masterclass Ezio gave in 2010 as part of the Social Innovator Dialogues.

The concept describes how solutions that are developed within a community can be amplified and scaled. Ezio is looking specifically at sustainability initiatives—like community gardens—but the concept can be applied more broadly.

The basic gist is that rather than taking a “solution” that has been developed in a specific context and simply scaling it (replaying it) in different contexts, that potential solutions are replicated by others, adapted and evolved to local contexts (and bringing new learnings and ideas into the mix). So, rather than growing the scale of the organisation (i.e. more people or resources to replicate the same thing—tied to the idea of economies of scale), a more resilient ecosystem of activity is created (with an economy of scope in Manzini’s terms).

A key to the success of SLOC initiatives is sharing of materials and learnings among a network of people applying them in their own context and situation.

We’re keen to explore how this concept might apply to IndigenousDX. Rather than how we, as an Initiative, “roll out” a program nationally, we’re most interested in how ideas that we are able to develop might be embraced by people within communities across Australia, adapted and evolved, with learnings shared and built upon (continuing the cycle of growth).

And importantly, to acknowledge, celebrate and share the activities and learnings that are already happening within community.

IDX is a big idea—big aspiration, big goals, big challenges. As part of the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence, we have aspirations to promote and support IDX nationally.

But we know (from hard-won experience) that if we try to do that straight off the bat, there’s a high likelihood we’ll get it wrong.

While we encourage prototyping and “safe failure”, we don’t want to stuff it up at the big picture level.

We’ve used the phrase “Think big. Start small. Scale fast.” before.

You may have noticed that a lot of our recent activity has been happening at the IDX Hub, in Redfern. This is not because we intend to stay here or we’re focused only on Sydney-siders (or urban dwellers for that matter).

It’s part of this approach to doing business—the “Start small” part. We are testing our early ideas in the Hub to learn what works, what doesn’t, how we can improve.

Every workshop we learn something that goes into the next one. Every workshop we add a few more things to try and test. New materials. New partners. Different technology. Each iteration adds something to the mix, increasing complexity. And sharing learnings as we go.

Over the recent series of posts I’ve been posing some questions about the nature of IDX and what we might aim for.

Reflecting on these questions may make sense of some of our early efforts here at the IDX Initiative: the MIT Scratch and robotics workshops for example; our thinking re: the Raspberry Pi for the Indigenous Remote Media Festival; our plans to trial other workshop ideas based on technologies.

We think each of these offers the potential of being an engaging and meaningful way of moving from the usage of digital technology, to making digital technology (the “3” scale for Usage and Device in the AUDIO framework).

We’re believers in the ethos of “Think big. Start small. Scale fast.” (A phrase our friends at TACSI introduced us to, attributed to Saul Kaplan.) These early experiments (we’ve labeled these early workshops prototypes very deliberately) aim to establish whether these approaches:

are of interest to, and valued by, community

are effective in inspiring ongoing engagement in digital technologies (in general)

are effective in encouraging more in-depth discovery, exploration and learning of digital technologies (e.g. making)

translate into increased engagement with formal education pathways (this is not an essential outcome, but a key question we think we need to understand)

We don’t know if the answer is a definitive “yes” or “no” to any of these points at this stage (in fact, we expect to learn a lot through our early engagements about the nuance of what works/doesn't, where the value is seen etc.). In the spirit of Lean Startup we are asking and learning in doing—trying out different approaches and seeing where the communities we’re working with guide us.

But we hope that by sharing our learnings, in line with our commitment to legible practice, will contribute to our collective understanding of if/when/how they are useful in advancing IndigenousDX.

In my last post I mentioned that failure is an important part of the learning process.

Some of the participants at the recent muru-D workshop noted that it can be challenging to do this within community, when expectations are high that you’ll follow through on what you’ll say you’re doing.

This has certainly been at the forefront of our mind recently thinking about expanding our activities outside of Sydney. What happens if an engagement doesn’t work the way we hope? How do we ensure that we adequately support our partners and their communities in the event of a “failure”?

If we’re trying new things, some form of failure is (almost) inevitable—so for things to change, we need to allow for this—in broader community awareness as well as within program design and funding structures.

FAIL = First Attempt In Learning.

It’s a clever expression on a familiar concept, but I find this idea very powerful…

It prompts us, in those moments we’d consider a failure (in the negative sense), to focus on what we learned, not the feeling of loss/embarrassment/fear/disappointment.

Since hearing this “definition” I’ve found myself repeating the refrain when something didn’t quite work out the way I’d hoped, and this flipping of my perspective has been really helpful.

I’ve said to the team on occasion “the only time we fail is if we don’t learn”. Of course, we need to be considered in what we do—we don’t want to learn what we already know, or could easily know with a bit more foresight/forward thinking.

I recently wrote an article inviting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians to attend a 2-day workshop that could teach them about entrepreneurship and I just wanted to follow that up with a highlights package of things that made me say "ah ah!" and admittedly "hey, which way?".

BACKGROUND

The workshop was hosted at the Indigenous Digital Excellence (IDX) Hub, which is a space you can hire out in one of the heritage listed buildings on the grounds of the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence (NCIE) here in Redfern.

It was held over the weekend of the 25th and 26th of July and went for two full days, so it was quite an effort for us all to attend, especially the people who flew in from far away places like Perth, Broome, Jabiru and Cairns. Thank you guys!

MURU-D AND POLLENIZER

The workshop was led by the smart, genuine and patient people from both Muru-D and Pollenizer and I would like to say a big shout out and thank you to you guys for pushing me to learn. It was totally worth it and I am glad to have been a student to your teachings. You guys rock.

So. Five things I have learnt.

DIVERSITY, DIVERSITY, DIVERSITY

I have learnt that diversity is an advantage. It is with diversity that we have the ability to look at problems we are trying to solve through many different perspectives.

To really highlight this, I reflect on the people attending the workshop. We had a range of ages with roughly an equal gender, all from different parts of Australia, all with different types of skills, from art and film, to legal services, to design and technology (sorry if I missed anyone). Thank you guys for helping me see the world a little differently.

FLEARNINGS

I have learnt a new word. Flearning. It means to embrace your failures positively and to learn from them. All too often we can get caught up with the negativity that hovers around the word failure and having new words like this helps to make it okay if something does not turn out right.

I will also mention that part way through the workshop Natalie Walker from Inside Policy was kind enough to share a few of her tips and this was one of them. Natalie quoting the words like a mantra "I am completely okay with being wrong" really hit home with me.

DISCOVERY NOT RESEARCH

I have learnt that the earlier you learn your idea is not viable the less money and time is wasted. And to do that you have to get out of research mode and into discovery mode.

Accompanied with the workshop came a book called "Startup Focus" written by Mick Liubinskas and Phil Morle. In this book the guys explain that discovery is about creating value and strength of want or need and you should start asking yourself the questions "can I create something of value" and "how much does someone want this thing". They also talk about research too, and research is about gathering data and interpreting it, which is all still relevant, but it is just not needed right now.

Traditionally, I have been a research guy and have always been happy with looking at information that made me feel like I could justify what I was doing was right. I think that discovery is a real breakthrough for me and I will definitely be applying it to new projects.

LEAN CANVAS

This one is big and it probably needs a blog post of its own. But in short, I have learnt that business plans are good for the bottom drawer of my work desk and not much else right now. So do not do one. Yet.

A significant part of the workshop was spent learning about the lean canvas and in a way it is your business plan. It is a one-pager that I can reference to connect the dots about what problem I am solving, who my customer is, and what I think my solution is. It is not meant to be a substitute for your business plan, it is your business plan for right now.

PITCHING

I have learnt that it is important to pitch regularly and to anyone who cares to listen. Pitching is a way to refine and internalise your vision and to understand the different audiences you need to frame your pitch for, for example, the way I would pitch my idea to a customer would be completely different to the way I would pitch to an investor.

On the last day of the workshop, we were all asked to pitch our ideas and I enjoyed listening and watching everyone play out pitches. I must admit, some of us got into it more than others, but overall I think everyone learnt something.

TAKING IT HOME

And lastly, I think an important part of this journey for me is sharing this new information with my family, relatives and community. You never know, there might be someone out there who needed a little nudge, just like I did.