Welcome to Brave Conversations

/ INTRODUCTION

Brave Conversations Melbourne 2019 took place on Monday May 21 and Tuesday May 22 2019 at the Telstra HQ Experience Labs, Melbourne.

Brave Conversations Melbourne was held in partnership with Philanthropy Australia, the Blockchain Philanthropy Foundation and TypeHuman. It was the first event which we formally billed as ‘philanthropic’ and which sought to attract as broad a range of people from both the Melbourne start up and entrepreneurial communities, as well as, quite literally, the ‘person on the street’.

Brave Conversations Melbourne was held in the context where there had been the largest fish die-off in living memory, Cardinal George Pell was finally sentenced to prison for crimes of sexual abuse, and the Liberal-National Coalition was re-elected despite a move towards key independents amidst a global recognition of climate change.

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Conference Resources

Blogs

Will Technology Impact the Future of Humanity and Philanthropy?

Blockchain Philanthropy Foundation

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Background

In 2008 a group of people from industry, government, academia, and the community sectors came together to create the first Brave Conversations establishing a forum for people to discuss and debate the emerging issues related to humans and their use of digital technologies.

At the same time a group of luminaries from the Web world were creating Web Science and in the intervening period Web Science has gone on to contribute greatly to the global conversation around the evolving Social Machine.

Since that time the world has changed.

The Web has evolved from being read-only to read-write and now dominates how the majority of society interacts with digital platforms, giving rise to the largest companies of the modern era. These companies are now pushing the boundaries for how data and information are used. This is a key driver for the next step in human evolution.

We want to push the boundaries in terms of thinking about the World and the Web. Our focus is on helping to develop “smart humans” for the digital age.

Objectives

The goal of Brave Conversations is to challenge everyone who participates to more fully explore and understand the interplay between humans, the societies we live in, and the technologies we have created.

We want to empower people to proactively make decisions about how we live our everyday lives, how we participate as commercial actors within the economy, and how we operate as digital citizens and exercise our political rights. That empowerment comes from demystifying data and information and understanding how it informs the everyday decisions which gradually create the future.

Each of those decisions begins on an individual human level - our bodies and our minds - and then emanates out to our families, communities, societies and from there to nation states. We are all responsible for the world we are creating and never has there been a time when we have more potential to influence the changes around us.