Firing up local innovation and thinking!
Hosted by Creative Albany, The Week of Fathom features events to fire your imagination, kick-start
your creativity, propel innovation and put you in the room with other people who think outside the
box.
Project coordinator Leon Delpech says the week of activities in Albany is an interesting – and
potentially challenging – way for people to be exposed to different ways of thinking.
“There’s great innovation in the Great Southern and we want to help those people connect and
collaborate with each other and create more ideas,” says Leon.
The all-ages Week of Fathom kicks off with Shipwrecked: Parables of failing and floundering. It’s a
night of talking about failure. Locals Jon Doust, Wiebke Ebeling and Ruben Willis won’t be sharing
stories so you can laugh at them but instead, take heart in the fact that someone is talking out loud
about failure. It’s a reminder that it’s ok to fail because it’s a natural part of life and we don’t speak up
about it nearly enough.
At Albany Soup, your $5 donation will go into a pot. You’ll hear four pitches for micro projects and
the best one gets the money. It’s a brilliant way to help along a small idea which one day could
become a big one.
For those who like to make things, check out the free screening of Maker. It’s a documentary on the
Maker Movement in the US, a do-it-yourself and do-it-together culture fuelled by passion and
powered by new tech. It subverts traditional manufacturing, using innovative concepts such as open
source, local manufacturing, crowd funding and digital fabrication.
“Micro-manufacturing is something we can do here in our own backyard,” says Leon. “We don’t need
to be in a big, industrial city nor do we need to send our ideas away. That kind of a change in thinking
has already spawned some interesting businesses in the Great Southern and The Week of Fathom
wants to encourage more of it.”
If you’re up for a challenge, sign up for GovHack and be part of this national hackathon which uses
existing data to create new solutions over a weekend. Come alone and join a team or get a group of
friends together.
“This week is about being creative and a little bit playful,” says Leon. “We hope it gets people
thinking differently and opens minds to the infinite possibilities around innovation.
“Even if this all sounds a little bit beyond you, I challenge you to try something new. You never know
what you might discover about yourself.”
The events have been inspired by the work being done in other communities around the world. It’s
hoped that more events will be held around the Great Southern during the year.