Today we had the wonderful Jan Bieringa come in to share lunch with us. Jan started (e)-vision, a digital media centre, in Wellington in the 90s, and was also a co-founder of the 7×7 Ideas Forum. She is currently working on a feature documentary and is the coordinator for the World Summit Awards in New Zealand and the Pacific.

The World Summit Awards seek to ‘bridge the digital divide and close the content gap’, by celebrating e-content and ICT applications that allow people to create and share information for social, economic and cultural benefits. As coordinator for the New Zealand-Pacific region, Jan is drawing attention to work of this kind being done in our region.

Now that we are reaching a point with Project 2058 where we need to shift from researching and writing reports to communicating the ideas and solutions we are coming up with,  we asked Jan along to help us think about how to begin this process. As our Think Piece 10 outlined, New Zealanders are great at coming up with ideas, but putting them in motion is where it gets tricky.Talking to someone so involved in digital content and participation was a great way to work through some of the challenges we face at the moment.

We had a great conversation* and we look forward to hopefully working alongside Jan in the near future.

Willow

*Unfortunately we were so involved in the conversation that we forgot to take a photo!