Late last year I opened up my email to find that an Alex Steffen had registered for the Collaboratory Melbourne Meetup group. “Could it be?” I thought. Sure enough, I clicked on the email and there was the profile of one of the world’s leading thinkers on sustainability, climate change and how we can build better futures: Alex Steffen – founder of Worldchanging.

Just before Christmas I had the great pleasure of meeting Alex, who was in town for a few weeks, and over a most engaging and inspiring conversation got him to agree to present his current work at a special Collaboratory Melbourne Meetup in January. A few weeks later, thanks to the great staff at State Library Victoria (partic

ularly Hamish Curry), we were able to pull together an extraordinary event for an amazing crowd of 200 people.

Alex’s pre

sentation, How to change absolutely everything without leaving town, paints the picture of a shared, connected, carbon zero future that is inspiring, transformative, full of potential and practically realisable – today. Or, as Alex put it, it’s about “a larger way of looking at things”.

Below you’ll find a video of Alex’s talk edited to include his presentation, the full version of which you can find on Slideshare. The video goes for an hour and 45 minutes. Alex’s talk goes for an hour, and the excellent interview with Jason Clarke (Minds at Work), with questions crowdsourced from the audience and via twitter, goes for about 45 minutes. I recommend you grab yourself a cup of tea or coffee, and a notebook, and give yourself time to watch and listen – in fact you may want to do this more than once.

In conjunction with State Library Victoria we’re planning to hold more events like this with high profile change-makers and future builders in 2012. Make sure you join the Collaboratory Melbourne Meetup group to find out when.

For highlights of Alex’s presentation, tweets, links to related sites and blog posts written by attendees, please check out the Storify summary.

We are at a time of most transformative change. ~ Alex Steffen

A big thank you to all of our sponsors – State Library Victoria (for venue and video), GoGet Car Share and Hub Melbourne, and to Jason Clarke for his sterling interview of Alex. Thank you also to the Collaboratory Melbourne crew that helped out on the night, particularly Matt Cooperrider and Andrew Suttar.

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David Hood

Social Systems Architect and Catalyst for Change

David has been working with not-for-profits and community organisations for close to 15 years. His mission is to help people and organisations doing something good to realise the potential of the strategic use of the social web, emerging models for business and collaborative networked communities to build better futures for all, together. A graduate of the School for Social Entrepreneurs program in 2011, David was named Melbourne Social Entrepreneur of the Year in 2012 and one of The Age's Melbourne Magazine Top 100 most "passionate, powerful and provocative personalities of 2012".

Latest posts by David Hood (see all)

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