The leadership challenge is going nowhere slowly for me. I thought I
would take a brief backtrack through my journal to see what I’ve
been thinking about and actually doing so you can get an idea of the
emotional rollercoaster I’ve been going through as ideas have
come and gone.
The first
idea was to form a punk band and release a lofi single into the ether
of the internet and see if any sort of following could arise.
Starting a band, even for a small project like this is a leadership
challenge in itself and met with the requirement to be something that
I’m excited about. When you were discussing the challenge on
the first lecture night I thought about my own heroes and what they
did to become leaders to people of my generation. Jello Biafra, Sid
Vicious, Jonny Ramone and Henry Rollins were all heroes of mine and
they vented their anger and frustration through music and poetry. It
seemed like the perfect vehicle for exercising a bit of my own anger
at the state of New Zealand Society and Politics, protesting about
boy racers, drinking culture, rugby culture and the political apathy
of the masses whose highest aspiration in life is to lead a
meaningless existence as middle class debt slaves. Like punk rock
itself this idea lived a short life, the walk home after the lecture
to be precise, before being shattered upon the reality check known as
marriage.
The second
idea was a little more sensible. I had a look at the video of
Nicholas Negroponte (I guess that’s a posh way of saying
Blackbridge) and the One Laptop Per Child program. The program is
always looking for people to volunteer their time and skills to
developing software for the OLPC platform and I thought this would be
a project that would be right up my alley. Full of enthusiasm I set
out to find who had been doing volunteer work in New Zealand and if
there were any groups I could move in on. I found a couple of people
who seemed to have been contributing to the projects and sent off
some email to contact them and see what I could lend a hand at doing.
After a week of hearing nothing I figured that my challenge had
better not involve any actual followers because people are useless at
getting back to me and don’t follow through on their agreed
action items – more on that later. Anywho this idea went
nowhere, especially after I worked out precisely how much work is
involved in setting up an OLPC development environment and getting to
work creating a Maori dictionary for it. Oddly enough it was about
this time that Google announced they were producing a Maori language
version of the site. I’ve some the conclusion that it’s
pretty pointless to produce a OLPC Maori language module when there
are no poor and underprivileged people in New Zealand. OLPC only
goes to poor countries whose government are not too proud to admit
they have some problems and want to buy into the deal.
The third
idea showed some real promise and was suggested to me by a classmate.
The Wellington Cable Car Challenge is a competition to produce a
business plan and sell your idea to some investors while riding the
cable car. The idea I had was to offer up my services as a brainy
MBA student to Cable Car Challengers for free. I got straight down
to business. I contacted the organisers and talked through my idea.
They were enthusiastic and said to email through my stuff and they
would post out a link to my website with the nest newsletter. I set
up a website with an advertisement, put some analytics on so it so I
could track the hit count and waited for the emails and phone calls
to roll in. They didn’t. During mid term break I chased these
people up and it turned out that their site had been broken for two
weeks because of some problem with the hosting company. We had a
chat and I offered them my services as a computer geek to assist them
as well as making sure they put the advert for my free services onto
the website. I even went to the trouble of checking with a lawyer to
make sure that I wouldn’t get messed around with professional
liability issues in case I helped someone and they didn’t will
the challenge. Time marches on and still no mention on the website,
blog or new letters so I’ve decided that relying on others to
do anything is a futile activity.
The next
new idea occurred to me just last week. I’m getting desperate
now so I thought I would start a political discussion group on
Facebook “New Zealand Society & Politics”. The idea
is to start conversation subjects that rant and rave about stuff,
just like the uneducated peasants who write letters to the editor in
the paper – or the opinionated journalists who write editorial
content. So far I am the only member of this group and no one has
looked at any of the topics, however I am hopeful that with the
election date drawing nigh that the followers will come. The key is
to get good content onto it and see if pulls followers in. My
classmates have all promised to join the group anyway so it might
gather some momentum.
If all
else fails I will go full circle and make a punk single as a solo
artist and release it on iTunes. I dusted off my guitar for the
first time in about six months just last week and did a little bit of
recording on my PC. I’m actually quite good at music. It
might be my best idea yet!
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