 I'm a multimedia artist and poet as well, or a striving poet student of life. I was sharing with the panel just before we came out that I'm a three-time combat veteran in the United States Marine Corps. And while that is not a particular aspect of my life that does in fact define my life, it is a very significant sounding board or a starting point for where I am today. And my life has some very profound experiences during that time of my life and it's led me to being an artist and to being here with you today. Good morning, I'm Nat Urban. I'm a member of the faculty of the University of Louisville Business School. I teach at the MBA program and teach two courses. One is called managing in the future. I'm a futurist and I've been studying in the future for the last 35 years and as I said, I teach a course called managing in the future and also course of leadership. I also work with Chris Kimmel and the I-Date Festival on the Foundry of Troubles and I'm looking forward to engaging with you about this great topic of good group things. I love that idea. I have two microphones, that's dangerous. I don't know if it works. That's fantastic. I don't manage in the future, I manage in the present, so we're going to have a good conversation. I'm Ted Smith. I have a couple of hats and no hair. The first hat is the Director of Economic Growth and Innovation for the City of Louisville, so I work for Mayor Fisher. And in that capacity, I'm very interested in the interplay between the public, the public realm, the private sector, the non-profit sector, all of these things all work together to make a place special and vibrant. So I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. The other hat is the University of Louisville Executive and Residence hat. And so I'm very interested in sort of hand-to-hand combat, hand-to-hand engagement with entrepreneurs in our community and in my past life, started and sold companies and started year-in-year with me. And my name's Will McAdams and I'm a community-based theater maker, so I create local plays based on original local stories. I spent two years directing The Apprentice Intern Company here. Are there any apprentices in terms of gear? Yeah. They didn't make it early on, so I didn't want it. And one of the things that I love about Louisville and what was really inspiring to me when I was here is the decades-long history of community organizing that a lot of folks who really transform Louisville and where my mentor is the Fairness Campaign at the Reagan Center and many other places who really were, for me, doing the work that is about transforming communities. And I'm just kind of attacking along the right. I'm Gil Howland, I'm an art cell entrepreneur, I guess you could say, because I'm a film producer. I've run a little record label music publishing company and did some real estate down on the East Market Street. Okay, thanks. We have an interesting topic this morning to talk about the idea of canned communities, how can communities really come together and influence change. I just wanted to start it out by putting some context into this. I think we, and then basically open it up to the group to start the discussion. We live in an interesting, certainly an interesting time and particularly with a lot of the new technologies that have come forth and certainly the new media and things like Twitter and iPads and iPhones and all the things that that involves. Facebook creates certainly tools for collaboration, tools for coming together for good and sometimes not for such good things that are kind of unprecedented in the world. And so the platform is there for a lot of interesting things. I think we also live in a time with obviously where resources are quite limited and the role of government is certainly changing. And I think what government can do and not do sometimes is certainly changing as well. And there's, you know, there's a lot of talk nowadays about crowdsourcing, you know, crowdfunding and collective intelligence and the ability of people to come together and that that amalgamation of people results in what's called immersion intelligence. And that is that the group together is in fact, you know, even it's intelligence, direction, wisdom, whatever you want to call it, much more powerful than the individual parts. We've certainly seen parts of that happening in the Arab world over the past year or so. So it's not that it's, you know, I'm not pledging a value saying it's good or bad, but certainly these things are important. In a city like Louisville, we have a lot of challenges. It's part of Kentucky. Kentucky has a lot of challenges. And so I'd like to start out by just asking everyone their thoughts on is it in fact, what do you think about crowdsourcing? What do you think about collective intelligence? Does it have a role in making Louisville a better place in a meaningful way? I don't just mean some of the simple problems, but some of the more difficult problems as well. To where it wants to start. Because I think that for years, decades, centuries even, there's been a top-down, you know, authority has come from the top-down, you know, the pope down to the people by the churches, the energy companies top-down, you know, big distribution centers, you know, near New Orleans, and then distributed across the country. And then I think within the last five to ten years with the, you know, Obama's reelection, with the fact that, you know, the traditional media is also kind of going away. I feel like there's a great opportunity for lots of ground-sourcing ideas and change. So I feel like never before has the individual had such power. I'd like to add to that, Gil. The other thing to think about the time when you live and understand too that this change is not just in Louisville, this is global. Within about three or four years, you know, we have a population of the planet, it's 7 billion, we'll have about 5 billion people will be connected to this idea, this whole emerging intelligence. So what you find is, and why I think this is important for our community, is thinking of, seeing ourselves as being isolated is not feasible. We have to think in terms of this intelligence as being part of something global. For example, as the world becomes more connected, now we have new tools for solving medical problems. I read a really interesting piece the other day about how we're solving the issue of AIDS by promises, by using gamers, because we have previously expected that it will be only the scientists. But now we have young people, 17, 15, 13-year-olds, who can use computers in a much more efficient way than maybe they've ever been used before. And you've got millions of these young people who've got extra time on their hands, who have these great minds, and are actually helping to solve problems in the lab. And that's just an early example of how this sort of cognitive surplus that we have, that we have not used, that we're going to use. And so it's not just a matter of thinking about the city of Louisville as if it is restricted by the Ohio River. The city of Louisville will be in context of global changes itself, and the people in Louisville will be connected with people all around the world, some of whom who have never heard of us, some of whom have never shared an idea with someone from Louisville. But our next generation will be within them. I think that's the most exciting thing about the whole idea of thinking about group thinking processes. Let me just follow right on. I completely agree with that. And actually I think it sets up a kind of a paradox for us because it never has the world bits of flat in our experience as a species. And so that's great. So we can all be connected to all sorts of bigger things than us. Bigger things than our city, bigger things than our state, bigger things than our country. And so that's great. No doubt about it, that's great. I think it now raises a kind of an issue which is what happens to cities, states, and countries in a civilization that's all connected everywhere, right? And so I actually think there's a kind of a challenge for us is we celebrate the local. We all live somewhere. And there are no rules of the road for where are the boundaries? What is our identity? I would argue as a guy who works for the city that if there's far greater affinity for the diversity of local, then there is for the city of local. And it's a daily challenge. When you get up in the morning and you say, well, how do you get up? Do you get up as a Louisvilleian? Do you get up as a Nulu cardinal? Magnet? Do you get up? What do you get up as in the morning? And I think this is going to be one of the great challenges we have, which is we may have to redefine the value of local. And I would actually argue hyper-local is probably the biggest competition to local. I don't lose a lot of sleep worrying about affinity to France. I lose a lot of sleep about Butcher Town. These are important new kinds of conversations. And I'll be interested to know how we sort of hold it together because it was just a county when it was born. I would say the issue of what a border is becomes very contested at a moment like this. And I'm working right now in the California in the Central Valley. And it's an area that was the home of the migration of dust bowl folks. Part of the Graves of Wrath were set just in the town next to where I'm working. And it's now 95% Mexican and Mexican American. Many people came from over the border in this generation. Many people who came generations past. And there is incredible tension between those two groups. And I would argue that one of the main reasons that folks who are afraid of immigration are afraid is because they sense how fundamental that transition is that we're at the midst of and it's terrifying. And so, I mean for me, people are always moving across borders and always from the beginning of our country and will continue to. So it's to put it in a larger context it may not be as scary, but I think that the intense anti-immigrant sentiment and rage and racism and fear has a lot to do with people truly sensing that shift and not knowing what to do and being afraid of what might be lost. I think really in terms of the youth today harkening back to America post-war 1950s the beginning of the so-called beach generation moving into the hippie movement, moving into punk rock and kind of where the youth happens to be today from a counter-culturalist and very creative perspective I think that one of the more sort of punk rock things that someone can do today is to go to their farmers market and to buy local and to be an integral part of your community and I think that honestly if you hit the streets and talk to a lot of the youth today, you'll find that precisely what these gentlemen are so eloquently speaking about right now is kind of coming up through the roots into the youth of today and that is that everything from crowdsourcing to multimedia and how you use social networking and attending your farmers market on Saturday morning is something that the youth are really behind right now and ever increasingly more so I think one of the I think one of the interests that I have specifically as an artist along these topics is there's a local group called the Center for Neighborhoods CFM and I believe you can look them up on centerforneighborhoods.org Hallie Jones is a good friend and the director there and my wife and I Shelly Von Halsey who happens to be in the audience right now with us she and I collaborate on a number of artistic projects and one of the most interesting aspects of art in the 21st century to us right now is the idea of art incorporating technology, social networking and media and being experiential and we develop a project through the Center for Neighborhoods. We unveiled it last year Mayor Greg Fischer was there to pull the curtain off of this large sculpture that my wife and I created. The project is called Push the Envelope and long story short it's a very large oversized pop art style sculpture of an envelope addressed to the universe and and the return address is a specific community within Louisville. The return address is from Germantown or Schnitzelberg more specifically and this envelope is a place where people are invited within the community whether it be Schnitzelberg, Germantown or all of greater Louisville to go and visit this sculpture and to place a thought into it a note almost as if the experience that I had when I was in Jerusalem and visited the Wayling Wall and saw people write a note or a prayer or a thought or a hope or a wish for their future for their family and their community and place that into the wall. There's a metaphor imbued within this project called Push the Envelope and when people come up to the work they can place something inside of it. How they do that is on the left of the sculpture and on the right of the sculpture there are two slots. On the left it's labeled Private which means that it's between the person who writes it and the universe so it will never be read by the public but on the right hand side it's a public slot and when they place those comments into the slot it's completely democratic you can write wherever you want anyone can place something in there and once a month we go to the envelope, we empty its contents and post that online and via a blog and Facebook and a number of other things and it's really interesting the comments that we're receiving and how people want to have their voice heard and sometimes it's very personal and sometimes it's very practical and utilitarian. Sometimes someone may have the idea that perhaps a stop sign on the corner of such-and-such road is a good idea for pedestrian crossing and that made the city ought to look into that and it gets deposited into the envelope and everyone can read it and fortunately Mayor Greg Fisher has been very interested in the project and people are using it for what it's intended for. One of the things about Matt just back from the point he made because he kind of mentioned what he was referring to is a game called Folder which was developed at the University of Washington by, it's a game basically a game-based strategy to help people and help our scientists understand how proteins fold, which is a key in a lot of diseases and things. One of the interesting things was there was a group that a scientist that had been working for 10 years trying to understand how a particular protein was misfolding relative to a key component in understanding something that he was doing for treatment and they had been frustrated for 10 years and so they decided to give Folder the chance and the gamers sold it in 10 days. That's a great example. The Pierre Levy who is a French philosopher who coined the phrase collective intelligence as a great, he said something I think was pretty profound, he said nobody knows everything but everybody knows something and I think what we're talking about in terms of community whatever that community is defined and I think the first thing we get into is the geographic definitions probably aren't relevant anymore, I don't know what it is but they're probably not, is how can we bring these things together. One of the things I want to ask the group is it's one thing to do things and give people opportunities for input and that's certainly one way of bringing people in but there is something else that operates at this kind of edge of chaos it's not completely chaos but it's not that organized as well and that is how do you use these kinds of strategies, can you use these strategies in a way to really effectuate meaningful change and one of the things about this as well is that these kinds of crowdsourcing strategies by their nature are unpredictable so there's always a little bit of uncertainty and danger in these kinds of things and that doesn't mean danger being a negative thing but it's not like a mayor or somebody getting up and saying okay I'm going to do this, everybody give me your thoughts. It's also often some danger in that. So how do we take what we're saying here and how do you apply to that, how do you actually apply that to a community of people naturally what we're talking about. I was just going to say that I love that danger actually I think that it's particularly true for boomers boomers have this idea that they know everything and what young people are going to ask boomers sometimes if you guys are so smart, well I think it's so screwed up that's what young people should have and one of the things that intrigues me about having crowd intelligence crowdsourcing now is I am always encouraging and I get this from my MBA students but also working with young people in high school is we need more revolution on the part of young people challenging the status quo and I expect that they will be. For example I just cannot believe there's anybody in here who does not think that young people could actually redesign our education system better than it is now and they could do it in two weeks I mean they could literally redesign in two weeks. They could redesign the way we do government better than it is right now. They could do it more efficiently but boomers are in the way our attitudes are in the way we think that we have inherited the right to be able to do things it's great for the past but I don't think it works for the future and I think that's one of the things that keeps us from moving forward and it's also one of the advantages for having a community about the size that we have because you do have to have there are some restrictions when there are restrictions limits you can have more freedom and one of the things I challenge in our community to do is get young people involved more young people involved. I think we should have all the high schools at the idea festival we should have high school young people at manual and if you work with these young people there at Central and Manual we have some brilliant minds but we all cannot think of them in terms of just being high school minds they're just minds M-I-N-D-S and they are just brilliant so we're going to have to start thinking about think differently about the surplus about the intelligence that we have in our community and start to use it we're not using it and these young people can really help overall us to think better about social political, economic technological powers all of those forces they can help us do this better but boomers have got to come to grips with that I mean just don't worry she was mad just a boomer I do know her by the way because I told my daughter she doesn't buy one of the things I think you're right to one thing but here's the other problem basically and really we're talking about systems whether they're social systems or natural systems they operate the same way in many respects all systems basically in a sense are engineered to some degree to come back to the status quo they don't like to be agitated so let me just throw this out I'm just going to stop there but to say I don't think it's much more difficult and complicated than one group saying we kind of know it all therefore we're going to resist the system itself is designed to resist change that's how things survive well I hear a few people indulge me with a two minute experience in group think right now so one of the things my work is often asking and other people are asking me is crossing borders and crossing boundaries and I think this was particularly relevant in being such a segregated city and so there were a lot of folks who crossed lines of race of class of sexual orientation of gender of ability to educate me and those are the people who inspired my life and my work and I bet each one of us has an experience like that or many and I think if we share those with each other it's an opportunity for learning among this group of people so what I'd like you to do is turn to someone either next to you or around you who you don't know and tell them the story of one person who crossed the boundary in that way to educate you or inspire you for example for me we were working in Highview and the associate master of Highview Baptist Church we approached him and he was incredibly welcoming of me, of our company of our process we have very different views of the world and he knew that going in but despite that awareness he was able to kind of cross the line to welcome us in a really genuine way and so what I'd like you to do is to find someone and tell the story if you use their name if you can if you remember it or if not that doesn't matter just take a minute to exchange that story I do think the cities that will succeed in the 21st century are seeing that race be quickly adapting used and in a quarter of the geographic borders and it's a border of ageism thinking that high school students are as far as we are or thinking, you know, terribly ripped in as that great book the Impacted Civilization that the more connected we are with the rest of the world we realize that we're all on this planet together the more environmentally friendly and conscious we will act so I think the boundaries that you discuss are really all in our minds now let's use this as an opportunity to open it up to everybody now in the conversation if you want a question you want to make a comment yes sir I'm really interested in the process and I watched theater change just over the years between where you buy a play and you do what's on the printed page and people come to see it to where we were most recently creating Tom Sawyer and what happened was that both the actors were part of the collaborative process in terms of bringing out the ability to tell the story beyond just the story that we know in terms of Tom Sawyer so what happens in terms of the how do we train people or help them become equipped with the skills necessary to become facilitated managers of the process so that people can be brought together in a collaborative group because some people think right brain, some people think left brain and many times you need to bring it together everybody hear that question the question was using the theater as a context that the theater has changed dramatically over the years is evolving continually and so one of the, from that he was saying how do we bring provide opportunities and save places for people to come together right brain, left brain, etc to really engage in this participatory process and let me just make the following up that one comment about young people today that is very different that is germane to this conversation this generation that has come of age, of recent they are not they are not content being passive observers of anything whether it be theater they watch TV and they text together as they're watching TV in things like this and I think one of the challenges to this is to realize that we're going to have to figure out ways to allow people to participate in stuff we're doing because they're not content sitting around and saying that's why gaming is such a powerful incentive for people because it's a collaborative it's interesting because it's a collaborative experience and in most cases there are no monetary rewards rewards for people the reward is simply collaborating with people and getting a rep in the game so what are your thoughts on that? I have some a lot more than we have time for thoughts on that so I think when we have these conversations you go to the place that's sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns and if it's all one thing why have we been getting in the way and leaching all this up and I think the bottom line is it's a brackish period so to have a great idea that you're going to go and have a concert in the lobby of Jimena actually is still not really possible it's corporation it's graph corporation and navigate that so the sort of free spiritedness still bumps into regular institutions that we've had for a very, very long time that aren't always so obvious so I'll just give you an example when I started in July as the director of innovation from the city I had a group of young entrepreneurs say you know how do we put the zoo on Google Maps you know I go by my phone and I can't figure out what the language is but it makes it very possible but you know Dick Chang is out and the little zoo are not on Google Maps in two years and you know I'm like what a great gosh we should go south with that problem and then we're going to go up and I'm not going to throw anybody under the bus in the city government but let's just say that the idea that a bunch of people already have been on a volunteer basis and do that work is not allowed because the only people that have ever done that kind of work before were threatening a workforce so this is where values truly collide so organized labor which is about protecting workers' rights is actually becomes a problematic element of well you can't just volunteer to do stuff and so I'm not here to no value judgments on labor corporate management and all that kind of stuff but you should recognize that this happens every day of the week and it sends a message and see that's exactly the class because what we now know from research in Christian literature business is that the thing that motivates us most will have nothing to do with money and this is what we're finding from crop sourcing is that this is the reason why people will come together to create new computer languages without being paid by the HDP somebody said I'm going to propose that millions of people are going to come together they're going to create an encyclopedia they're not going to be paid at all they're going to stay all night to do it and this is going to be their reward in and of itself of course that's Wikipedia and why isn't that people will do things without being paid why isn't that people will do this because there's some value to them they're motivated and intrinsic which is one of the great things about the time why group think is possible but it does require acting but more importantly it requires a whole lot of extra work so when you meet the fence the question is will you rise to take that on the fence and my practical experience is there aren't a lot of people that rise to take that on the fence so you don't have to go play somewhere else and just speaking artists are often asked to do things for free and on behalf of large institutions that make money and I think that it's a tricky place and it's also a tricky place for community based artists who've been creating kind of the facilitated leadership that you were describing Jack for decades and now we're at the point where that work is becoming mainstream and it's a point it's a moment of possibility it's also a moment of co-optation because a lot of the larger institutions are able to have access to funding streams that a lot of the folks have been doing that work don't have access to and it's a time of great collaboration it could be something really transformative but it can also be for folks who feel like they've created the work and doing it for free and now there's maybe money available to make a living doing it feel isolated so I think just to say well people just do it for free because it's intrinsically valuable doesn't I mean I think it's a lot deeper than that I'm sorry yes ma'am the front row first not getting you I work in a public library and if there was ever an institution that figured out how to do more than you thought you could on less than you ever thought you could have and at some point knowing that all of that group work is going to produce wonderful activities you do hit the reality of money pretty quickly and an example is a person who uses my library often weekly three times a week who got in the habit of coming into the front door for months and the first thing out of his mouth was to the front desk staff with a smile well how are you all going to steal my tax money today every single time every time you walked in the door and maybe it started as a joke not like a joke after that so at some point all the good work you do has to come against money and so in our society and our economic times right now talk about brackish and scary that's a reality we have to deal with can I say one good thing you're actually correct and this isn't a criticism but I think it's back to this notion of things there are ways of doing things that have to evolve as well for example I know that the library can't charge for anything well maybe that's one of the things that needs to change money is reality we all have to figure out a way of being able to pay for the things that we want to do and I think that's an example of I know we've come across a couple of times and the thing is it doesn't mean you have to charge a lot but I think again as we move into these different kinds of times the days of us being able to set things up and having people pay for them are probably over we have to figure out creative and artists are very good at that figure out ways that entrepreneurs are good at that we have to figure out ways here's my idea here's my passion now how am I going to get people to buy this and I think all of us have to realize that's part of this creative new way of doing things that's going to have to come to the point well really from socialism to communism to capitalism all these isms that we live under are ultimately based upon infinite resources and really there are no infinite resources especially not while we continue to burn dinosaur bones at the rate that we that we are and the sun itself not to be ultimately negative because I tend to see the glasses have full but the sun itself is a giant life source with a lifespan and so there are really out of the box different ways that I think we are only on the verge of the century of really discussing where there is a new system yet unforeseen that we can live under and that there is a different kind of value to be placed on something other than currently how we view it within the capitalist society of the almighty dollar as you were talking about sometimes the need or the desire to want to do something individually or collectively because the soul is excuse me the whole is equal to the sum of its parts that sometimes the desire to do something just for the intrinsic value of bettering oneself and their community and the joy that comes out of that is a payment rightfully in and of itself and I find too with the talk about you know artists educators library you know that there is this whole feel that is really grossly I believe underappreciated within the capitalist society that we live in a good artist friend of mine just made a t-shirt that says exposure doesn't pay the bills which I'm getting exposure right now but you know it's a fact of life of where we currently are and I think that really even within the artistic community you find a lot of people going back to bartering economy which is really interesting it happens all the time one artist will barter with their local framer to services rendered to in order to have an artwork frame so that they can show it in an exhibition and various things like that so there are different ways of placing value on things I find the need to give my thanks and gratitude to this young man that he found the need to speak about his marines of days and marines our country gives you our thanks for us being free we're free the men and women over there die for this freedom and I want us to never forget those people that are dying in serving our country my son-in-law just came back last year for tours in Iraq and he's at Fort Bragg now and he says I hope I never have to go back I know what they go through they eat sand it's 140 degrees in the sun and stay alive and write forever Can I just answer the guy who asked how you're stealing his money I would say well did you get here in a car did you walk on streets that were designed by people that probably learned something at the public library working in a building this building was designed by people that learned things in a public library the food you ate was probably inspected by somebody who learned something in a public library so I just find this all very helpful and I have messages from my adult children along the lines of in great times of economic distress and that kind of thing some of the best ideas come about because people don't have anything else to do but just to think and we've got pretty much everything we need basic needs met not everyone of course but the vast majority of people that you're directing this to do have their basic needs met they have time on their hands to start doing some of this so they're willing to do it for free if it's going to benefit themselves in some way or I don't think we do things so much anymore for fame and fortune I think there are a lot of really creative minds just listen to the TED Talks and they go on all the time and they find these interesting things and they post it and pass it on to their friends or the idea festival I think is a good example of some of the ways we need to start changing that thinking but I also work for a very corporation and their ways of thinking are very slow and coming so I'm not a creative I'm an artist that I've been for my whole life and so some of my ideas come up against resistance until I stand on my desk and start yelling like the Lorax I'm not I'm the crazy one but I like that I think it keeps me out of fear and I think fear is a big factor in keeping people repressed and not coming up with these ideas so we just need to continue to that conversation and I just want to say for me the whole arts education it's not so that our when all these kids grow up to be 25 they can smoke political cigarettes and read sardra it's so they will have creative minds to invent the next Google it takes around a hundred and fifty years from now you know so it's all for me it's all about entrepreneurship creative thinking because that's most of the kids today are going to be working in companies and industries that do not even exist today I saw it I just think it's interesting that we sit here today within the last 48 hour period where one of the most huge crowdsourced things ever happened around the world which is Coney 2012 and as I posted yesterday whether you agree with them or not they got tens of millions of people around the world to watch a 30 minute video and then do something and the vast majority of them were young people so I guess and now as I said you know I looked into it as soon as it started to roll the naysayers started coming in right well they don't spend much of their money right so no matter what your trajectory towards success there's going to be people clawing you down okay so I found after the now we're into the third day of this cycle we're getting some truth out of Guy's Star and they're saying yeah they were a new non-profit but they spent 80% plus of their money on what they're doing and yes the guy is still out there doing bad things and you know yes we do still need to keep pressure on Obama so the main parts of what they were saying were true and so I wonder how and this relates back to even kind of a selfish point but of the work that I do I'm looking for ways to teach young children to be discerning consumers of social media okay and for them to use social media as a tool to help them rather than the other way around and also to look for ways to use the virtual to facilitate the real I still want you to go and meet your friends and be with your friends and you know all of you guys work on a project together so I think that's a dilemma that we looked at as we start to get the education community a little push back of anytime you want to introduce some new technology or whatever I'd like to know how you think we can free those little minds well one thing let me just take a pretty point it's interesting you said that because one of the things we do we feel very strongly about with the idea festivals we do a lot of social media stuff but it's still fun to be able to bring people together and it's you know so we feel very strongly that I mean I feel very strongly ideas have to be discussed and they have to be discussed among people social media is a wonderful venue to help do some of that but there's still no excuse which is one reason like with IAC University several people have said well you get these classes together or you get a video or put them online and the answer is no we're not five or six or seven or ten or fifteen people sitting together talking about an idea that's important to them and it's a space to do that and they don't have to worry about saying something and finding it on YouTube the next day humiliating them or something and so I think that's a very good point and the other thing is there is all of this stuff we're talking about takes work being an educated person is work learning how to use social media properly is work being a great athlete is work being a creative person is work this idea that somehow it's an aid and it just kind of flows from the universe is not true and I think with a lot of what you're saying James there are ways of doing that but it's work we have to find techniques to educate to inform to encourage to persuade people along these kinds of lines and they just don't happen because they're good and then I'm going to pass the mic on when you talk about ideas and you talk about creative thoughts and things the number one key characteristic of successful people, entrepreneurs artists, anybody is persistence you know it's persistence you're going to get beat down you're going to be told no a thousand times when we had Steve Weiss the idea of us a couple of years ago with co-founder Rappel one of his messages was don't listen to what people say and most of the time they don't know much more about it than you do and Guy Kawasaki was one of the already avocais and started garage.com I heard him speak a number of years ago and he said something on paraphrasing but it's always actually meant a lot to me and that is he said don't worry about people buying your ideas if it's a really good idea you'll have to shove it down their throes actually let me just start running over because I think you fit a really important point when you mistake ideas thinking off an opinion with action I mean they are actually different things and so you know I can tell you there's no shortage of thinking Klescher he's about all of this extra creative intellectual energy that is what it's about when it comes to actually using it applying it to work this is actually where all of the learning gets hurt hey that's great you want to stop sign on the corner are you going to put that stop sign up and it turns out nobody is going to put that sign up they wish the magic pixie will show up with a stop sign up so that's just not realistic and it actually cheats everybody of the authenticity of closing the loop so you actually only learn by doing and the crazy thing is I think all that I've learned about from and about social media is people are generally really poor judges of how much time they spend thinking commenting, sharing really poor judges of that amount of time just like there were poor judges of how much good a result when they watched really poor judges and in the end game it was a big number and it's an embarrassing number for western civilization because it was one plot one plot it comes up a little way to get off the island and it's going up at the last minute same freaking plot every once so we didn't learn anything new by watching the incremental growth of the island and never watched it in reruns so this line between thinking about commenting grounding your friends around and actually doing it is such an important line and I worry greatly that we aren't good teachers about that line and I'll just show you in a second as a city a line you can call essentially to comment and complain you can ask good questions about when is the garbage going to be picked up but it's often used to say there's a problem there there's a lot of activity on that relative to the mayor's give a day site mygiveaday.com where we want 50,000 people to give a day right around derby on the give a day relatively I'm really grateful for that personally but it is the difference to me if you're not going to do we really have to question the quality of the thing we need both but I think do is a good place to learn and just said before it goes away in the moment about the power of millions of people just in praise of theater I mean theater is small like in its very nature even if it's a 2,000 street seed house it cannot compare to 15 million people around the world tuning in in one moment and I just feel like that can be us being really jealous and try to find ways to kind of become that but I also feel like there is a great power in just small amount of people sharing experience and we do that really well and that has meaning so I just don't want us to leave thinking that somehow this act is not something that's very important in the midst of all of that ahead of I'm so glad you said that I think in this discussion of technology and Facebook and Twitter and believe me I over tweet maybe a problem with that but to me that is what you know Broadway commercial theater tries in my humble opinion too much to be the movie you know Spider-Man we have that whole debacle they're trying to compete with CGI and I think the reason one of the reasons people love theater and have drawn to it for centuries is that it is real time and different from it's separated from the technology it's not virtual it's real happening to people in front of you and I think there's a danger in trying to compete with technology or try to copy it to be a facsimile which I see a lot of theater doing today trying to compete with the film or the computer there's a difference that people are drawn to about the theater there never has been nor will there ever be any substitute for experience and that direct experience is powerful not that mass media can't be powerful but you know for the I'll just say 90 let's say there's 100 people in attendance currently these 100 people along with all of us on stage will later say we were there because we are for those tuning in via webcast they are getting the information but they won't say we were there and they won't feel literally the breath of others around them and they won't inevitably have the conversation once this is over and off in the air that we will have continuously once this is done I think crowd sourcing social media and mass media it is not action it is a catalyst for change and a catalyst for action but it's only a springboard it's just where it begins if you look back into history there was a time on earth referred to as an axial period where Confucius Siddhartha Gautama Mahavir among others all lived at the exact same time on this planet and we may very well be moving into that exciting time of thought and of change groundbreaking philosophy at this very moment the difference is is that through technology you know at that time the only way to have shared that information would be a very long trek across mountains we can share that all over the world immediately now with some of our greatest minds and it is a catalyst for change but the action hasn't come from the people yes sir when you talk about crowd sourcing it sounds new but I think the guy with no hair mentioned the idea so if you take crowd sourcing and you think local what you're basically talking about is civics so it is about civic engagement so then the question is the guy with no hair again it does it sounds so much better than the guy with no hair but does the city know who has no voice in the crowd sourcing my guess is 60% of Louisville has no voice so how do they get this voice so is there an interest index an involvement index or something like this now I actually think Louisville knowing how involved people are how many access points to be involved that's actually a marketing thing for Louisville for outside it's not a marketing thing for Kentucky or any place but nobody knows this and I will ask you this question because I'm up in Bloomington, Indiana and I'll be asking them the same questions nobody knows who doesn't have a voice let me I'll stay with the man with no hair for a while so I think there's this interesting challenge here for us so if I look at the interest that people have in the community it turns out you have to really have a conversation I like the point earlier about this this is kind of an intimate gathering here you know this is human scale and I spent two years in Washington DC before I came back here and like Manhattan it is a place that when you walk and you arrive you are anonymous immediately I mean absolutely anonymous and you would need to work hard to build a sense of this is my village right I know these people and I know what they do and I know how this place works and what the businesses are and where the churches are and all that kind of stuff Louisville is probably the smallest big city you can have this is a community where you can know pretty much where all the neighborhoods are without a whole lot of work and you can understand who the civic leaders are and you can understand these things without working really hard and then what's even better is that you can actually participate I often think of the difference between the sort of semi pro college sports and intramural sports this is an intramural town everybody can play soccer if they want to play everybody can be in community theater it's actually true and it's easy to do and so one of the things that I struggle with while I take a paycheck a tax payer is how do we make the most of that because that's actually the story it's not we're a better Indianapolis we're not a better Indianapolis you know we have a very special place and we work at human scale and that has to be an advantage we should work hard to make that part of the way that we really understand where we live and that's where our technology can really help us is that building platform this is where social media where we can where we have the virtual and the real collide which is one of the things for the future is how we mitigate those the state, the city, the government has more control over the real citizens have more control over the virtual and merging those two together is one of the ways where we can find out more voices and that's one of the things why it makes me hopeful is that we will build a new platform you had a question? okay as a place where gears grind in this transition you libraries came into existence when it was possible to accumulate a certain critical mass of human knowledge in one place where people could go to and consume it and digest it and talk about maybe other ideas they were hugely important to growing literacy in this country all of that we know the benefits of libraries what about now? a few public spaces in cities I'm not questioning the value of libraries where if the internet achieves its full potential the dissemination of information through it will far surpass what the average local library is so then how does the library add value are they really a place where people gather I think that with all of the things we're talking about in the theater I thought was an excellent commentary being authentic creating a place for yourself in the world being competitive competitive is not a bad word whether you're an artist or that just doesn't mean money but it means being out there means that I think all of us have to realize we have to reinvent ourselves the library is going to have to reinvent itself or it will become obsolete that's true of everybody in today's world change with the times you're going to become obsolete that doesn't mean getting away from what you do it doesn't mean forgetting your soul whether you're a company or an artist it doesn't mean that at all it means being unique simply simply trying to replicate a movie is not unique that's probably the fastest way to obsolescence as opposed to figuring out that it's authentic what can we do that people will value and how do we do it perhaps differently without perverting what we're doing but I do believe that fundamentally we all in this world in biology everything changes things that don't evolve die that's the nature of these things that don't evolve ultimately disappear and I think this world for every action one of the troubling things and for every good one of the troubling things I read recently was that a lot of gyms are having problems surviving in today's world and the reason is not because people don't want to work out but gyms were a place where people would work out and gather and talk and now people come in with their iPhones their iPhones they don't work out they're on their own little world they don't talk to anybody and they leave so the question then becomes maybe how do you do that but I'm just saying that I think that fundamentally the question is we all have to figure out ways to change or we're not going to survive we'll have a quick comment one more last thing to say because I know we're done we talk about information we talk about Twitter and all these things knowing isn't the same thing as understanding and simply knowing something or reading a headline or knowing that we're looking at perhaps bonding or a rant or something isn't the same thing as really understanding and understanding the context of it and that will never be lost and that's the thing we have to guard against one quick comment for everybody and then I know we're done I think we're actually over so quick comment and it's a that's a powerful microphone as a Marine Corps veteran I'd like to say that please permit me to speak in a large metaphor here but I believe that well I'll kick this off actually by saying there's a Hopi Indian word it's koi anaskasi which was made into a film by Godfrey Reggio and Phillip Bynes but koi anaskasi loosely translated in the English language means life as war and living is a battle but it's a battle worth fighting for and we are all warriors and as a warrior in the 21st century I urge all of us to with the most authenticity that you can muster up from within to merge your inner technology meaning your heart with your outer technology and spread that around love is always where everything begins that's the most important thing technology or not Miss Isis first of all thank you for hosting us today I want to just share briefly with this audience that one of the IAF University we're going to launch something you may have read that I wrote a piece about it in Korea Journal a few days ago and you're going to see something that percolates around the city that will be on the Kentucky on the center for performing arts that billboard will see it on various billboards around the state as well as in Lexington and there will be questions that will be probing the future and it will be designed to create to help nudge us toward a new way of thinking about the future so some new platform a crowdsourcing idea of where we hope to get 6 or 800,000 people responding to various questions about the future and we think it has a very powerful potential to engage on much larger number of people so we're going to do an experiment with crowdsourcing and it's part of the IAF University live for it alright I would be embarrassed if I didn't leave with a plug for one of the most important things that I think we're going to do as a community and that is we're pushing into a 25 year vision for the city of Louisville and there are lots of ways that that could be done we could have a handful of city employees in an office room for two weeks for such a plan it probably wouldn't be very good or we could all be involved and we could get the community that we want and I think these are special opportunities I will tell you what I'm bringing to that exercise is actually the happy ending to the zoo story with Google Maps and that is we have failed to recognize in our sort of expertise at zeal for urban planning and all this we have failed to recognize this sort of digital layer which hangs above it all and guess what, there's no city in the world that has a digital urban plan so we will be the first community to actually take this seriously and say well, where am I and how are the ways I could know where I am and we can't ignore the things that much younger folks actually expect to work they expect it there's no such thing as a dead structure anymore there's a structure with extra stuff that we can know about it so please get involved and we will hear more about it shortly and it will be better with you than without you first of all, just thank you to Actors Theatre for bringing me back and then just to kind of close out the exercise of you all telling stories that is something that we all can do every moment we can leave this theater and be the person who crossed a boundary in somebody else's story so I just encourage us all to do that and I'll pick up on two points one, the experience, we are humans we like experiences, you know, the old days the only time you could experience theater or music was to go to a performance, there was no recordings there was no radio, no TV and now I feel like, you know, music I have more songs, you know, on this little thing than most people I ever heard about, you know, 200 years ago and the only thing that is special I think about experiencing music and plays is the experience and being there in person again so we kind of come full circle and the second thing about the people that have a voice, I think Louisville is a great place I think everybody can move the needle does have a voice here, but a lot of people don't realize they do and so how do we educate them to feel empowered to speak up to band together and then make this kind of more socially equitable city So, Actors Theatre and the manifesto of the New Berkeley plays Thank you