 I feel like yesterday we did talk a lot about some of the barriers, some of the challenges, and those are really important discussions. But at the same time, I'm wondering what would happen if we just opened our minds to the possibilities, the dreams, the what if, and that exercise where we closed our eyes and imagined a common space feature was really great or that kind of mindset. So we thought we'd invite some dreamers to the stage. So if I could get my five dreamers to please come up here, there'll be Laura and Lindsay and Doug, Lilian and Sasha. Let's have a seat here, thank you. So we asked this variety of lovely people to pose a question that started with what if about the idea of an open future. And they're each gonna share with us what that dream is to them. So I've just asked you to pass the mic along and go through to the end and then I'll jump back up. Is it okay if I start with you, Doug? Here you go. So my question was what if we could blend work and life together so fluidly that we no longer even think about work-life balance? And many years ago I really pondered this question of work-life balance because I noticed that everyone I was working with was in fact alive. And yet there was lots of literature, magazine articles, books, conferences around work-life balance. And the term work-life, work and life is hyphenated which suggests a dichotomy somehow between the two means of existence. So I really was pondering this question and then I, in the 1990s joined a company called Morningstar and we started this company from scratch and the founder came in one day and shared a book called The Game of Work by an author named Charles Coonratt. And we all read this book and it was very interesting. And talked about how to turn work into a game. And we talked about what if we could make work kind of a joyful journey of discovery. Is what's fun to watch about little children is that everything they learn is a new discovery and it's really fun to see the world through their eyes. And what if we could create an ecosystem at work that resemble that joy? And so what if we could make work into a game? And so we intentionally set out to do that. And we created a company with no human bosses where everyone was a manager and our company continued to grow and from scratch until it became the largest tomato processor in the world with thousands of employees. And there are no bosses to tell people if they're doing a good job or not. The only way people know is through scorecards that they create themselves around their own personal game of work. And people were having fun at work. And then a couple of years ago, a dear friend of mine, Dr. Laurie Kane, who runs a blog called CollectiveStoff.com came down to interview some of my colleagues there. And she sat down with Vince and Gordy and Bob, members of our project team, and asked them, what is it like to work here at Morningstar? And what followed was an hour of joyful reveling and just talking about how much fun it was to work there, how much they enjoyed each other and how much love they had for each other and their fellow colleagues. It was a magical hour. And so she actually published their story in a book, an e-book that's differentwork.com. And well, the book is Different Work, How to Go from I Should to I Love My Work. And I know in one version of her e-book, she actually included an audio file of that particular interview. And I'll always treasure that interview because even though it was just three years ago, while Vince is still working there, Bob retired and Gordy passed away, but the legacy of that interview will live on for anyone interested in obliterating the distinction between work and life. Kia ora everyone. My name is Laura O'Connor Rapida. So my question was what if democracy was genuinely transparent, accountable, and participatory? Since pondering that question, I wanted to add the word responsive as well. And I mean, this section is about dreams. And if I'm being honest with you about what my dream is, it's that we would all live in earthships and there would be food forests everywhere and permaculture would be the best thing out and there'd be bike raves every night and we would have decentralized community-owned power generated for everybody. So in order to get to that place, I think that we need to start with democracy. And what I mean by that is that there are so many enormous challenges in our world which you all know about climate change and equality, mass surveillance. And I think it was Pete Seger who said in order for us to overcome these problems, we need participation. It's participation that's gonna save the human race. So last year I was lucky enough to work on a campaign. I co-founded a campaign called Rock and Roll which was basically to get more young people to vote because what I found out was that 60% of people under 30 weren't voting that got me really, really worried because young people weren't having a say at that highest level. And then I looked at the statistics around X Factor and the average number of people that voted on X Factor was about 560,000 people each night which was insane, right? So I was like how can we make voting as interesting to people for politics as we do for X Factor? And Rock and Roll was basically about trying to make the story of politics a little bit more sexy and a little bit more interesting to people. So we more or less bribed people. We said if you make a promise to vote in the election, you can come to one of our parties for free. And the kind of logic behind that was that young people, particularly for all people, in order to want to be the good in the world, they first need to believe that there is some good in the world. We need social proof that other people are out there doing good things in order for us to step up and be that change as well. So what we were trying to do there is invite a whole bunch of young people to come and see a whole bunch of other young people who in fact do actually care about the future of our nation. When they made that pledge to vote, we then would call them and be like, hey, yo, have you got all the information that you need to go and vote? And then we'd point them to the awesome tools that were spoken about yesterday, ask away and on the fence so that they actually had the information that they needed to go and cast that vote. So I'm really interested in increasing the way that we participate in the decisions that affect our lives. Cool, let me just scroll down. I've prepared a whole presentation, but that's okay. I'll show it to anyone if they want it later. Delay Lama says that a lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity. And one of the most frightening things to me about that at the moment is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which if anyone knows anything about the TPPA, right? Terrifying. An employer would, you would never sign, none of the politicians who would go to sign on, sign New Zealand on to the TPPA, they would never sign a contract without reading what's in the details and they're asking us to do that. So that's terrifying to me. And for the last five or six years, prior to working for Action Station and Rock and Roll, I was working as a charity fundraiser. And the interesting thing about charity fundraising is that the number one question, does anyone have a guess of what the number one question you get asked might be as a charity fundraiser? Where does the money go? Exactly right. How much of my money goes to the people and places that need it? And that puts enormous pressure on charities to keep their overheads below 20%, which means that they're more or less running a profitable company at an 80% profit margin, which is quite hard to do really. And in light of that, we had to be really transparent and I had to be like, look, I'm the overhead. That's that money that we're talking about, that 20 cents from your dollar is me. So my question is, imagine if government or corporations were forced to be as transparent as charities are, that would put a lot of pressure on them and that would beg the question that more people would start saying, where is my money going? Taxpayer funding. Cool, let me scroll down. Cool. And then the last points I wanted to make was about accountability because accountability breeds responsibility, right? And we see this in the marketplace more than anywhere else. So this year, Action Station, who I work for, were lucky enough to run a campaign. I don't know if everyone heard, but Cotton On was the first New Zealand company to try and take advantage of the fact that the government were taking away pay, tea and meal breaks. So what we did, I managed to acquire the fax number of the person who runs HR for Cotton On and we got a whole bunch of people to send us through messages, which we then forwarded on to her in the form of a fax. And the logic behind that was basically, she probably gets 100 emails today and like three faxes a week. So we were like, how can we get cut through? We managed to get 200 faxes sent in less than four hours, which was pretty awesome. And then they announced via Twitter that they were gonna keep the meal and paid meal and tea breaks, which to me says it was the social media pressure that really made that decision. So I guess the other question is, imagine if our government was as responsive as the companies that rely on us to buy their consumer products. The last thing I'm gonna put to you and this is actually Ant's idea, which I find beautiful. So 2% of the population before the election decided that the New Zealand flag was an important election issue. 2% of the population, yet we're still gonna have a referendum on that. Now that's gonna cost about $26 million. That $26 million would be enough to supply 140,000 children in New Zealand with the essentials that they need to learn. That's crazy, right? So Ant's had this brilliant idea, which was let's put forward a proposal to the government. And if you're working for the government, this is sort of my proposal to you. We at Action Station could do that for $1 million and let's donate the $25 million to someone else. We will crowdsource the design from all New Zealanders and then we could use Lumio for people to be able to vote on which flag they want or indeed decide whether or not we even wanted a flag change. So I guess my big thing is dream big because the future is ours to create. Let's be really radical because the problems in our world are so enormous, so urgent, so vast that our response needs to be exactly the same. Thank you. So hello again, Sasha from Washington DC where I work with zombies, vampires and the other undead unlike Doug. It is a fascinating place. And the question that I was asked to create was around the work that I do. So I chose what if we lived in a society that had free, safe, ubiquitous connectivity for everyone on the planet. Now most of us are familiar with something in one form or another with something a phenomenon called Metcalfe's Law or Network Effect, which is this idea that if you have access to something, the more that more people have access to that, the more benefits accrue to everyone, right? So if I'm the only person with a phone, not very useful, but as more and more people have phones, it becomes ever increasingly valuable to everyone on that network. And in fact, the benefits accrue super linearly, right? Exponentially, this is called Metcalfe's Law and it's a very important driver for many of the things that we do in society. It's one of the most important reasons why governments collectivize access to a number of resources. And in telephony, we often have something like a universal service fund in the U.S., I don't know what they call it in New Zealand, but pretty much every industrialized nation subsidizes telephone connectivity in some form or other to help drive universal access to that medium of communications. Now, Metcalfe's Law is a powerful thing. It basically means that we all benefit the more that we extend access to that resource to everyone else. There is however a flip side to Metcalfe's Law, what I call the dark side of Metcalfe's Law, which if you imagine a world today where less than half of the global populace has access to the internet, but where we're driving more and more connectivity through our policies, through free markets, let's call it. And what you can see is that we're extending connectivity down the stack of wealth. We started with the number, the first quintile, the richest people on the planet, the first billion. And we're now at about three to four billion. What happens to the poorest of the poor? What happens to the most marginalized? If all of us are getting ever-increasing benefits from online access, then the gulf between those of us that are connected and those that are not is also ever-increasing. And so what we're creating through the successful implementation of connectivity is a widening digital divide that doubly disadvantages the most disadvantaged constituencies on the planet. And given that reality, the solution which both benefits us, as well as those that are disenfranchised from this medium, is universal service on a global scale. And we do that because it benefits us, it benefits them. We do it because it's the right thing to do. It makes economic sense. It is win, win, win, win, win, win, win, all across the plane. But right now we have no plan to do that on a global scale. And when I think about what is the kind of society that I wish to live in that I want my daughter to inherit, it's one where she benefits to the greatest extent possible from everyone being online. And it's a world where we understand certain baseline access to resources that online connectivity brings is fundamental to this goal of a universal democratic, liberatory society. And thus, free, safe, ubiquitous connectivity for everyone on the planet. What if it was really easy to use data and everyone was able to use it? If you think back to what society used to be like when not everyone was able to read. People used to believe that not everyone was capable of reading and that there was only a small portion that could do it and so the knowledge sharing was quite constrained and information and insights were kind of had by a few and then passed on to the rest of the population. We know that's not true now. We know that everyone is capable of learning to read when we kind of mainstream it and we teach people how to do it and we assume that they can learn. But that's the situation that we're in with data now. People believe that most people aren't capable of using data in their thinking and that we require kind of intermediaries and analysts to look at data and to provide insights and tell us what it means. So I don't believe that to be true at all. I believe everyone is capable of using data in their thinking and that we just need to assume and believe that they can and then build our platforms and our systems and how we deliver data in a way that everyone can digest whether it's like a seven-year-old writing a story or a 42-year-old tow truck driver in Hawkes Bay wanting to understand how accidents change over time, et cetera and so it's been really interesting to see the kind of how unusual it is to assume that everyone can use data. It's just too hard right now. So New Zealand's data is essentially organised by a source at the moment and by that I mean, if you want to use some data, the first thing you have to know is who collected it and that makes a lot of sense when you're someone that's kind of collected data and put it on your website and you've made it available but that's from a user perspective. It's kind of as silly as having a dictionary ordered by the country of origin of the word and so you open it up and you're like, you know, it's just too hard. If you don't know what that knee where exists, you don't know where to get climate data and so there's a huge amount of kind of power and fear about data at the moment because of how hard it is. So a couple of like little thought experience about that. If you imagine a panel of people speaking, going to do a debate on something, say climate change for example and you said to them, right, you know, you've got five minutes each and I want you to debate this topic but you aren't allowed to use any numbers. I don't know how you'd do it. They would be so constrained in the kind of arguments that they can have but that's how most of the population are at the moment because they aren't able to use data and they're thinking because it's all kind of held and databases that require a certain amount of skill to use and if you think about, if someone is doing a talk and they mispronounce a word or they use the wrong word, we don't care, right? Because we've got a knowledge bank large enough to test that and go, oh, you know, that was just a mistake, that's fine. But if someone uses the wrong number, they get like destroyed and cut off at the knees and assumed to be totally misleading and that means that there's so much power when you use a number and when you get it wrong and a lot of fear around it. So people, yeah, it's just been really interesting to realize, you know, because I've been going around for a couple of years now with New Zealand talking about how people use data and how there is just such a barrier to it. So I think of data as a language that we can all become fluent in and part of that is getting people to realize that data is not black and white, that it's something that you can kind of swim in and out of and you can, there's lots of assumptions in it and my dream is for like with Wiki New Zealand what we're doing with bringing data together and kind of putting it into simple visual form. My dream is in 10 years from now for people to not even think about it, to not even think about the fact that we exist in the same way that you don't think about something like Wikipedia or using a dictionary or Google, you just use it. And when you think about at the moment, if you're either in a work context or a personal context, you're having a conversation and you're trying to build on an idea and you're like, oh, I can't remember what that name of that thing was or what this acronym means and you can do a quick Google and you can answer it and then you can continue the conversation and continue building on that. But we can't do that with data at the moment. If you're sitting there having a conversation with someone and you're like, oh, are there more possums in the North Island or the South Island, you can't build on that conversation. You can't kind of continue that because you'd have to spend a few hours going off to find the data set, who collected it and see and kind of download it. So that's my dream is to imagine if everyone can use data in their thinking that it becomes less of a powerful tool and more of a language that enables us to kind of look at our past and to look at through different lenses at different patterns that have happened and that it's easy to do that. Yeah, look, I've heard a number of terminologies being thrown around the room, entrepreneurship, innovation, Craig Ambrose, nice presentation on innovation. I quite like that. Look, I'm not here to talk about, you know, the typical sort of recruitment jargon as I am representing Talent International, a recruitment firm. I'm here to understand the entrepreneurs in the room and the innovators that, you know, want to disrupt the norm. We run a program at Talent International called Unleashed and for the last two years, we've recognized talent across APAC with judges like Sir Richard Branson, Steve Wozniak and Mr. Rosenberg from LinkedIn to find talented individuals that like to shake things up in our technology industry. So what I'd like to hear from today are the people in the room or outside of the room or nominations that can talk to us about a fantastic creative idea, collective as it is that we as a business can help launch as venture capitalists so that those individuals can be recognized at the Richard Branson Center of Excellence over in South Africa where they can go on a week training program to become entrepreneurs of the future. So come and see us. I'm happy to have a chat. My team of experts is here also. I do recognize you from our event and also Chalkal was a nomination also. I think we shared a cabin cross church. So yeah, look, I'd like to hear from you all. Thank you very much. Let's have another round of applause for all of our dreamers. Thank you so much.