Amplified Leicester - Project Presentation 15 Apr

Amplified Leicester is a city-wide experiment, supported by the IOCT and others and funded by NESTA. The project is designed to grow the innovation capacity of Leicester by networking key connectors across the city’s disparate and diverse communities in an incentivised participatory project enabled by social media. Objectives have been to:

• Develop a transferable model for amplifying a diverse city’s grassroots innovation capacity through connecting diverse communities through key individuals
• Provide practical examples of how collaborative technologies can be exploited in a city context

“A group that thinks in diverse ways will address a problem from many angles.” Charles Leadbeater, The Difference Dividend

In 2009/10 Amplified Leicester offered a small group of participants from across the city the chance to:
• Benefit from Leicester's huge diversity of people and cultures
• Generate new ideas quickly
• Think like a futurist and see the bigger picture
• Organise and collaborate better
• Be persuasive in different social situations
• Share and develop creative ideas
• Manage the stream of information which bombards us every day
• Choose the best people to collaborate with
• Make the most of different kinds of resources – social, economic, creative

Every fortnight participants attended inspiring lectures and workshops and in between meetings worked together via Twitter, Facebook and other social media applications. They filmed interviews in their communities and shared the videos online.

On Thursday 15 April 2010 Amplified Leicester will showcase their work and expand the conversation to include the city and beyond. This one day event at the new Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre will include practical workshops run by the participants themselves, presentations of their experimental projects, and talks by the project team.

Keynote speaker, Andrea Saveri, an independent foresight and strategy consultant based in Berkeley, California, who will locate the Amplified Leicester experience within a global context.

Find out more at www.amplifiedleicester.com

Admission is free of charge. Register early to avoid disappointment.