A Thought before Thinkerbelle

and yes. I hashtaged a title. maximizing my social share skills here people. maybe there's a better way. I should email garry tan at posterous. he aims to answer emails in 12 hours. see I learned stuff at planningness. ;)

joking aside, just wanted to a) express my deepest gratitude to EVERYONE involved in the planning and producing of the event. you guys SERIOUSLY rocked it out. and are genuinely great people, which made the whole process absolutely lovely. b) thank all the awesome folks who attended and presented: there was just such a great, positive energy in every room and i felt like it grew with every session we had. it was absolutely electric by the time we got to adrian and rob's session. i think the feeling that we could really leap back to our real lives and start making awesomeness come to life. and in the least, know you have a room full of people who live and believe the same thing...change is a coming. watch out world.

a few highlights for ME (these are by NO way exhaustive! so many good moments that my little senile mind can't recall at once!):

- running around outside and doing man-on-the-streets again for the Smart Design session. i'll be honest, it's been a little while since I've done the good old man-on-the-street, i'd forgotten how much fun those can be!  the team at Smart Design did a phenomenal presentation on digging deeper on what drawing out those REAL human insights (based on how people are act) for our innovative new products. let's all push ourselves to DESIGN our way forward...

- doing GOOD is not just about altruism, it's about this new world where idealism meets pragmatism. we need to start learning how to code awesomeness (umar haque: http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/09/is_your_business_innovative_or.html ) to wall street. good challenge for us all. pardon the pun.

- the great thinking and thoughts from the advocacy session. i'm biased a bit as I was lucky enough to collaborate with mr. striefler for this session, the conversations and ideas that came out of that on how to build advocacy were amazing and inspired. great job everyone. http://bit.ly/1Suv8

- never thought I would be able to say I "actually" helped concept a google chrome app. but i guess now I can. fabulous session with nick baum. truly think the app our team created would be one I would use every single day (fyi--i actually have 19 tabs open right now. i definitely have the commitment issues we talked about group). everyone in that room had inspired thinking working for them.

- garry tan had some phenomenal insights on web interface and design. a couple of my favorite thoughts stretched far beyond just web design: the notion that people treat computers like people. and when you're small, don't try to look big; own who you are. thank you for your honest and smart thoughts.

-  and modern branding...wow. like i said. electric by the end of that session. we all want change. it was a great experience to have so many people feeling that intense desire to break some of our more archaic ways of looking at things and making something fabulously new.

so to anyone who attended who may be reading this, thank you for making this very cool experience happen. stay in touch. we'll start a revolution together.

and if you weren't able to attend, i know there will be more presentations/videos posted soon.