My Heart and I went to Ignite Baltimore 9 – The premise: “If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds?” This is our third Ignite – the last one was Baltimore 7 (that will come up later!). I can’t do the evening justice so I’ll just do some of my favorites:
The sponsors definitely deserve kudos for sponsoring such a great, inspirational event!!
Ron Schmelzer, Founder of Channelwave, ZapThink and Bizelo, did a great job of reminding us that we need to Fail in order to Succeed. You won’t get anything done or succeed if you don’t try because you are afraid of Failing! I liked the idea, which isn’t new but always a good reminder, and I love when the speaker gets the audience laughing and engaged!
This was cool because the last Ignite we attended – #7 – they awarded the Ignition Grant to Mother Made: “The mission of MOTHER MADE is to promote the financial independence and job training of low-income mothers/women by creating and selling products that reduce the impact of consumers on the environment.” They make reusable vegetable bags and shopping bags that are sold at community farmers’ markets. It was really cool to see them come back and share what they did with their grant money, including getting a “permanent” home for the business so they didn’t have to try to carry sewing machines, etc. around from place to place!
Nate Larson is a full time faculty member in the photography department at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. He currently has a project called Artist Desktops where he asked artists all around the world to share a snap shot of their desktop and a brief explanation. Anyone who knows me know that I am Very particular about my desktop (a co-worker, as a prank, moved ALL of my icons on top of one another at one end of my screen once… totally freaked me out and took about 25 minutes to get them all in the right places again… so… VERY Particular!). I found this project fascinating… and there were a couple of desktops that gave me a headache just for the few seconds they were on the screen!
There were 15 lightening talks that night and I just posted two of my favorites but all were pretty fantastic. Andy Mangold in “Gutenberg, Morse, Zuckerberg” talked about things that changed the world from the printing press to the Internet. Jason McCool (and YES… that IS his real name) gave us a glimpse into why Gustav Mahler’s “Music Will Make Your Head Go All Explodey”. Bill Ferguson talked about his political campaign and that the “little” guy CAN win without a political machine behind him! And Mel Brennan inspired everyone to step Up talking about “How Baltimore Can Launch a National Citizen Renaissance”. I love going to Ignite Baltimore – nothing like an evening of thought provoking speakers!