Sometimes I’m not so sure. Our booth at the resilient cities conference has been less than successful. We have just been positioned too far from the main door off in the corner, plus half the time they divide the room making it completely inaccessible. The Web 2.0 website and BC’s historic sites’ booth are of similar size to BOB’s but positioned right next to the main entrance. I’m sure they’ve given out more brochures and card’s than us off in a corner have.
More successful was our shoulder event which got exposure online and in the conference package though could have been slightly better attended. We got some good ideas on what to do once our proposed urban agriculture project on the 700 block of East Hastings is up and running, but we still need a lot of help getting over the final hurdles. I’m going to have to talk it over with the team and the team’s bosses, but we might be putting out an all points bulletin for labour, materials, and expertise to build raised bed garden boxes one day real soon now.
If you want to see resilient cities, or Vancouver become the Greenest City in the World, or would like to see the DTES become a nicer place and for the people hanging out on Hastings and Main to have good jobs, please get in touch soon as the BC Land Assessment conversion date is fixed and rapidly approaching.
On day three of the conference I’m going to work more on making one to one connections, but first something for the blogosphere. It was a bit ironic today that I was sitting alone for a while in the dinning room and when the VIPs came in, I actually personally knew a couple of them, close enough to have their personal email (Hi Mike, Hi Majora). You might recall who brought Majora Carter to town the first time she was in Vancouver.
I’m once again in Mink Chocolate Cafe enjoying a mocha and their WiFi and I just finished directing tourists to Granville Island. The conference has crammed in a lot of speakers and you can only go to one salon a day, there are much fewer shoulder events this evening, Tuesday night may have been the high point. Next year I’d like to see a little more down time for networking, maybe one fewer speaker per morning, there doesn’t seem to be a reception this evening as many speakers from yesterday such as both Mayors have likely left town.
The Mayor of West Vancouver was very much at the Media that Matters session and she needs help in convincing other local mayors to support a more expansive view of public transport here in the Metro region and she is really worried that the last 36 hours will be meaningless as the status quo, despite the conference and calls by Bill Rees and Anita Burke will be maintained or the the expenditure on public transit could even be lowered. She wishes others in the GVRD to lobby their mayors to support a transit plan looking forward 100 years to a post peak oil, to a post petro-chemical dependent economy and invest in public transit now.
