Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

Many of you know that I am involved with events called “Campus Party”, which started sixteen years ago in Spain and have spread out to Latin America.

Briefly, Campus Party events bring together between 7,000 and 10,000 “campuseros” who live in tents under a gigantic roof, supplied with large amounts of electricity, tabletops, comfy chairs and state-of-the-art Internet. These “campuseros” then share ideas and experiences while having the chance to listen to some of the greatest thinkers of today.

Last year Campus Party started a program called “Something Better” where groups of campuseros worked on projects during the week that benefited non-profit organizations. I was proud to be a small part of that, and proud of what the campuseros could accomplish in one week while still enjoying themselves in the process.

Campus Party Europe will be held in Berlin from August 21st to August 26th, and in conjunction with the European Commission, Telefonica O2 and more than 100 universities is running “The Big Think Challenge” generate nearly 5000 ideas to be submitted to the European Digital Agenda in the categories of Youth Unemployment, Aging Well, Entrepreneurship, Health and Internet Rights.

The authors of around 5,000 of these ideas will receive free admission to Campus Party Europe, but also free transportation to Campus Party Europe and free accommodation. Just the admission and accommodation is a package worth over 190 Euros.

In order to enter the Big Think Challenge you have to present an idea in one of the categories. You do this by summarizing it in a tweet, but if you are like me and your ideas are really great (and what geek does not have really great ideas?) you may need to write a blog entry about it or make a YouTube or Vimeo video about it and point to that blog entry or video with your tweet.

You need to tweet your idea between May 15^th and June 15^th, with the Twitter geolocation feature activated and include a general hashtag #I4DA and one of the following category hashtags that best describes your category:

• #I4DA #YouthEmployment
• #I4DA #AgingWell
• #I4DA #Entrepreneurship
• #I4DA #Health
• #I4DA #InternetRights

While everyone is invited to summit ideas for The Big Think, the prizes are only available to residents of the 27 European Union countries.

For complete details on this, please see the official web site for “The Big Think”, and I hope to see you at Campus Party Europe in August.

Carpe Tweetem!