TED x Youth Day@Taipei Introduces UnityDrum to Taiwanese Youth!

UnityDrum was honored with the opportunity to guide the TEDxYouth in Taipei for a heart-felt connection with the power of the drum! OVF’s Joy Tang, the leader and founder of UnityDrum Taiwan, put together a 18 minute presentation about the UnityDrum Program and approach. This is part of the cultural component of onevillage Foundation’s Global Sustainability Initiative (oneVillage Initiative).

What’s TEDx Youth day: TED is series of conferences about inspirational ideas to World Urgent Issues. TED is run by a small nonprofit devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading.” It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED). The lower case x denotes affiliated, but independently organized events that use the TED name.

For TEDx Youth Day there were events in more than 40 cities for (and by) young people. These events varied widely in size, format and theme, but they will shared a common vision: inspiring curiosity, igniting new ideas, empowering young leaders. The aim is to give young people a megaphone, to hear what they have to say about the future.

Approach: The goal of the UnityDrum performance at TEDxYouth Day was to teach the youth about self-empowerment techniques in which they can evoke and awaken the innate creativity within them. This is done by learning to appreciate the sound with focus and intuition as well as to create harmonious energy with rhythmic movement. UnityDrum uses the ‘drum language’ to ignite the natural instinct of participants to listen, reflect and harmonize the sounds. In the process of the performance we ask the participants to consider the following questions:

1. Do we talk too much?
2. Do we know how to listen to others?
3. Do we communicate clearly of our thoughts?

Outcomes: There had a very limited time frame to teach, but in the 18 minute presentation and performance, participants learned about:

1. The art of Radiant Listening
2. How to focus
3. Exercise team work
4. Experience fun
5. Collectively make unified yet distinct voices of our own.

Unity Drum Performance Picture Gallery

More Info:

1. View “TEDx Youth day 2010″ Video which includes drum intro and presentation by OVF’s Joy Tang.
2. More about TEDxTaipei
3. See original posting about the event on the Unity Drum Blog
4. See more about our colleague and TED India Fellow Olatunbosun Obayomi
5. Pictures of TEDx Youth event: http://www.slide.com/r/WPL3zhBy2z-3kSauPQ0EgExzX98XKgi9

Recent events related the Gawker screw-up (see the page where they admit to their screw up) are opening up a can of worms in the online community.

On a practical level, its leading me to force myself to not be Lazy & change my passwords. Even though I am not a member of Gawker and do not have any passwords with them – that I know of at least – the issue made me realize that I like many others would be vulnerable if security at one of the many sites I use was compromised. So that’s really why this has raised eyebrows because it shows how inadequate security systems are in terms of managing and dealing with the information – and particularly the very private and secure information – in our lives.

Now you like me might be asking: “Gawker whats that?” Apparently its another big new media empire that sprang up virtually overnight like Huff Post and Daily Beast…Just another sign of these rapidly changing, super turbocharged times we live in where everything seems to getting old in our minds even before the print on the documents are dry.

What’s difficult is thinking about having a different PW for each account I have and remembering all those different PWs. I recall someone suggesting that you could abbreviate the names of the site at the end of the PW for each site so that you could remember them and then still distinguish from the core password.

Anyhow…its a wakeup call for many and that’s why Gawker’s security hole is much bigger news than it should be.

More on the deeper implications of this later in this blog.

The concept of money and values are changing in the minds of  digital natives as well as immigrant generations. Could system changing mimic the collectives on the Internet?

In October, Yunlin Province of Taiwan held 2010 International Yunlin Puppet Theater Festival and I was invited by Yunlin Storyhouse to share African culture and stories around puppetry.

I love African drumming but I have not much experience on African puppetry. I decided to take this chance to learn about the puppetry and how it might relate to the GRIOT tradition of West Africa which has been the core of my motivation in designing oneVillage Initiative: the working process and guides for the ICT4D in Africa and beyond.

Since ‘Africa’ is such a foreign subject to many people in Taiwan, let alone in a small town of Huwei where the event was held, I decided to start with the map of Africa: where it is in relation to Taiwan, how many countries are there in the continent, what kinds of culture could we possibly imagine, which countries colonized Africa and during what period of time, etc..

After getting to know the map of Africa, we began to review the wonderful collection of African puppets that is produced by Gary Friedman in 1987. That means the puppets shown on this video are older than 23 years old AT LEAST!

In my research, I also found some puppetry using traditional Griot instruments, songs, rhythms and puppets to convey a message through storytelling. Here is one great example from Togo, West Africa:

In recent history, puppetry has been used for development in Africa: puppet for democracy leading up to the first democratic election in South Africa 1994, political puppets to reflect Kenya democratic development and community health awareness. All these indicate the power of storytelling and the embedded inadequacy of verbal communication that needs to be complimented by our inner voice through puppetry.

We concluded our elementary learning of African puppetry with a drum circle. I never know that my love for African culture would have reached to the tiny little farming town in Taiwan.

SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITY BASED WASTE MANAGEMENT PROJECT

BENEFICIARY

The state is located on the south-western part of Nigeria on the narrow coastal flood plain of Bight of Benin.  It lies approximately on longitude 20 420E and 3 220E East respectively and between latitude 600 220N. Lagos State is bounded in the North and East by Ogun State of Nigeria, in the West by the Republic of Benin, and in the South by the Atlantic Ocean. It has five administrative divisions of Ikeja, Badagry, Ikorodu, Lagos Island and Epe. Territorially, Lagos State encompasses an area of 358,862 hectares or 3,577sq.km.

Lagos state is considered a conurbation with the highest population in Nigeria. UN-HABITAT (2008) rated it as the second most populous city in Africa, after Cairo, and is estimated to be the fastest growing city in Africa and the seventh fastest growing in the world. Its present population density is 4,193 people per km2, projected to grow to 25.4 million population by 2015. The city is the economic and financial capital of Nigeria and it produces 9 000 tonnes of waste per day. Despite the efforts of the Lagos State Waste Management Authority (LAWMA) and the Private Sector Partnership (PSP) who is responsible for the collection and disposal of municipal and industrial waste, we still have heaps of waste being dump on the street of Lagos state.

PRESENT PROBLEM FACED:

1. Waste Generation Rapidly Increasing
2. City Authority Cannot Cope with the Sanitation
3. Lack of source separation
4. Inadequate waste collection
5. Shortage of Land for waste disposal
6. Pollution of surface and ground water
7. Organic waste is left unutilized
8. Lack of partnership between stakeholders
9. Emission of Green house gas

MAJOR PROBLEMS

1. Environmental and Health Problems in Urban Areas due to Unmanaged waste
2. Organic Matter Depletion in the soil of rural areas
3. Water Pollution
4. Spread of Disease Vectors
5. Green House Gas Emission
6. Odor Pollution
7. More Land Required for Landfill

PROPOSED SOLUTION

oneVillage Foundation, Nigeria is a non-governmental organisation registered in Nigeria in 2006 as Global Resources Information Technology Network (GRITEN) with registration number 22671, committed to facilitating community development through its various programmes is proposing a recycling process in this community to overcome the outlined problems.