Brave Conversations Arabic/English 2020

"And in today, already walks tomorrow." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Pandemic has been a great leveler all aroud the World. Most of the global population has been in some form of ‘Lockdown” or isolation over the past six months - many have lost their livelihoods, many have been separated from loved ones, everyone has been impacted one way or another. But, for the first time in human history, we have known what a ‘Pandemic’ is and we have been globally connected by the wonderful technologies called the Internet and the Web.

Following on from our first fully Virtual Brave Conversations held in July 2020 we decided to use the opportunity afforded by the Covid Corridor to experiment with new ways of bringing Brave Conversations to people we would otherwise be unable to reach, and to connect them with each other in a way that would have previously been impossible.

Whilst we each have our own unique story of life in the AnthroPause, we all have a collective story of how humanity is learning to navigate new ways of being, doing, working, communicating and surviving. It is these stories that we hoped would emerge during this Brave Conversations held in two languages - English for the plenary sessions, and then Arabic for the Breakouts so that we could harness the potential of a virtual event but make it as easy as possible to converse and share.

There were challenges of connectivity and bandwidth; each person had their own way of interacting, but collectively we co-created the opportunity to craft something new where we learned from and about each other and about ourselves.

Brave Conversations was created to bring Web Science to mainstream conversations that occur in everyday life. It’s objective is to demystify the world of emerging technologies and enable an exploration of the impact that these technologies will have on everyday life - our selves, our communities, our societies and our planet. It has always sought to ask difficult questions, to challenge mindsets and to empower those who attend to think more inquisitively about their digitally mediated lives.

As a core part of this is to deliberately create a space where everyone can be brave, can say the things that they know need to be said, and be prepared to apply intellectual rigour to challenging ideas that might take us to uncomfortable places.  This happened in spades for Brave Conversations Arabic/English and our sincere thanks to everyone who joined us.