Trampoline 2

Yesterday I spent the day at Donkey Wheel House attending Trampoline 2.

If you’re not familiar with Trampoline, it’s a kind of unconference held in Melbourne to discuss interesting interesting things and ideas in a self-organizing cross-discipline environment, put together by Melina Chan, Steve Hopkins and Pat Allan.

I almost didn’t make it – registrations were filled a couple of hours after they were announced on twitter, but the organisers were able to arrange extra capacity getting me off the waiting list and into the event.

All in all, it was a fantastic concept, and for the most part it worked really well. I met a lot of interesting people and heard a lot of really interesting and amazing things.

The grid of the day’s workshops was ten 20-30 minute slots run concurrently over 5 different rooms. Unfortunately there were 3 flights of stairs separating the two big top floor rooms and the three downstairs areas, which made it difficult to move between rooms mid talk, and in the end I missed a couple of sessions that I would have liked to have at least stuck my head into. (Click on the image if the grid for the big version with a detailed view of all of the sessions on the grid.)

Dan Donahoo and I ran a “How to Juggle” workshop that seemed to go down okay. Everyone who took part did amazingly well considering the short amount of time they had to learn (and considering the tendency of my dodgy homemade juggling balls to explode on people).

In general the level of conversation was quite varied, as were the topics. Most of the sessions were captured on video and I’ll post links as they are uploaded, but some of the highlights for me were:

• Peter Spence’s talk on intergenerational learning
• Paul Szymkowiak’s talk on co-working spaces in Melbourne
• Stef Convery’s “How to write a story in 10 minutes”

Overall a really interesting and inspiring event and I’d certainly recommend keeping your ears open for the next one.