By Chris Ihidero
So it’s Day 2 in cold cold Manchester.
Seeing that Nigeria is in elections season, it was wonderful sitting in on the What Now For…Democracy? session. My most important takeaway from Day 1 was the dictum expressed by award-winning designer, software developer and hacker, Stef Lewandowski: ‘Tools are not ideology.’ Using new platforms to transform democracy and encourage civic participation becomes imperative and hearing about innovations being made across the world in this area made me appreciate the things Nigerian platforms like BudgIT, EiE and others are doing.
And then all things weird and wonderful!
A core difference between FuturEverything and many of the festivals I have attended in Nigeria is our emphasis on completeness. Ideas often need to be fully thought out and in concrete forms before we accept them for presentation. Here, it’s been okay to present ideas in development, even many that may not amount to anything by themselves but birth other possibilities. Perhaps this is what tech people do.
Scott Sulten presentation made my day. What if we flipped the script? The norm these days is to emphasis all things tech. But Scott, an artist, writer and museum curator flipped the script and co-founded the world’s first Internet Cat Video Festival, which basically curated viral cat videos from the internet and presented to a live audience. It’s an amazing reversal and now counts audiences in tens of thousands. And now even I want to make a cat video, in Yoruba!
Respected writer Warren Ellis brought the conference bit of the festival to an end with a soaring speech. His deep voice boomed through the main hall of the 138 year-old Manchester Town Hall. He inspired and admonished in equal measure, asking the organisers to start all over again, even as they celebrated 20 years of FuturEverything.
Oh, by the way, Adebayo Adegbembo, Nigeria’s representative at the Futr Lab part of FuturEverything is looking for pepper! He has been struggling with ‘oyinbo’ food. Poor him; he has had enough sandwiches and pudding to last him a lifetime!
Final installment of this diary comes up tomorrow.
Cheers!
