While we wait!

During these days the Team is presenting their May Projects for the final exams. Until we have more info please enjoy this featured presentation:

More May-project

The group working with Ordina made their own blog so you can follow the process. Check it out.

www.theordinarytrio.wordpress.com

May-project

What is Water Management? 

In The Netherlands water is one of the main topics. Because of the rising sea level, the many rivers, because of possible drought in the summer, the importance of the transportation on the rivers and because of the flooding danger.

All of these things are investigated, tested, thought of, created, rebuild and managed by Rijkswaterstaat.

Rijkswaterstaat is a governmental organisation that has existed since 1798. “Rijkswaterstaat is de rijksdienst die werkt aan droge voeten, schoon en voldoende water én aan de vlotte en veilige doorstroming van het verkeer” (Rijkswaterstaat is the national agency that provides dry feet, clean and sufficient water and a quick and safe flow of traffic).

Now three KaosPilots are working with WINN which is the department for water innovation in LEF which is a part of Rijkswaterstaat. One of their main foci is climate change and our assignment is simple:

In a few decades it might happen that because of the melting glaciers the rivers in The Netherlands will mainly be rain rivers. Which could mean too little water in the summer and too much water in the winter. -How would a government or an entrepreneur look at this?

We have worked hard on twisting our minds around this “problem”, tried to see opportunities instead of obstacles and we have meet a lot of people whose knowledge around this topic is incredible. There are many people working in these kinds of issues in the world and a lot of great ideas are already out there. We will through our process give another perspective and hopefully “our ways of working” can inspire and lead to new ideas and results.

On Friday the team is facilitating a workshop for the people working in LEF and others who might be able to help us with our process and give us feedback. This is one of the “ways of working” which we will use to challenge our ideas and the project and maybe through this we will encourage, what we are focussing on, awareness of the water in The Netherlands.

 

This also ties in to a little side assignment we have, namely trying out the Future Center. The Future Center is a different kind of working space that you can redesign and style, as you want so it fits the session you are having. All the furniture is movable, the walls are on wheels and with a lot of technical equipment is it possible to change lights, projections on the wall, lower/heighten the floors and much more.  

So this is all going to be put to the test by the end of this week. We will let you know how it goes.

Something to think about …

http://gigapica.geenstijl.nl/2009/05/mooi_milieu.html#more

Your daily inspirational …

Cute!

 

Pokerplayers on beggers feet

Despite winning more than 500K $ last month, three Danish poker players have fundraised for charity. Additionally they need to drive all the way to Rome from Rotterdam; in a Mercedes from 1976, driving solely on cooking oil. One of them is a KaosPilot.

More than 500.000$. This is how much Thijs ”Turbofluen” van Tilburg, Morten ”Loosegoose” Thomsen and Helge ”Kalacenikov6” Rahbek made last month. This month, they beg. So far they’ve collected 5000 Euro. Pokernet.EU and ClassicPoker  have supported their project.

Are they broke? No. But you might think they are when you hear that they’re going from Rotterdam to Rome in an old Mercedes, purely fuelled by cooking oil.  Wonders of Waste is the name of the race.

Ten teams takes off from Rotterdam tomorrow at 10AM and are supposed to arrive in Rome Saturday evening. Sounds like a piece of cake, but actually it’s more like a fast food menu. It’s actually possible for  old diesel cars to drive solely on cooking oil and the three infamous pokerplayers begging doesn’t stop here. On their way to Rome, they have to visit restaurants and try to collect fuel for their ’76 Mercedes 200D 2.0. Despite showing the possibilities for recycling, all their raised funds go to charity. The three has decided to support Educat (www.educat.dk).

Does all roads lead to Rome?

For more information: www.the7adventures.com

Preparing for a long meeting yesterday

Social Capital Day

What if … I tried carefully when on the phone with Geert … we don’t prepare the facilitation of this workshop. We were on the phone planning our workshop at Social Capital Day, one of the days at the 1st Europen SME-week. I heard some sounds of excitement at the other end of the line – Geert immediately got that this was not an act out of laziness but rather:

1. An out of the box approach to give the visitors what they came for: KaosPilot quality
2. A way to keep doing all of these conferences interesting for ourselves, a little experiment so to say
3. A great way of explaining part of what KaosPilots is by saying the one sentence: we did not prepare anything – now what do you want to do with our time?

We ended up noting down the expectations of visitors – got into depth about some of the themes that came up (as much as the 30 minutes that we had allowed us to) – and did this in co-operation with the visitors rather than for them. We even messed up the whole set up and sat in a circle, played a little game in the end, and then it was over. Thanks everyone for attending and cocreating, special thanks to the organisation at the Cabbalero-factory for a great day.

 

Racing to the destination KP style

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The factory

Your daily inspirational …

 Say what you want about microsoft but they are on top of their game if it comes to their advertising (found it through coolhunter.com).

 

The application forms start streaming in …

A pile on the floor when I came in this morning and someone from London dropping it of herself … awesome – thanks guys!

Your daily inspirational …

Your sporadical daily inspirational – this one is good (watch it HQ)!

 

A typical Sunday-afternoon train ride …

A typical Sunday-afternoon train ride. Inspired by the weekend’s events I dream away while the landscape flashes by.
Then the voice through the intercom wakes me up – back to reality – and I get out at Rotterdam Central. As I work my way through the crowd, down the stairs towards the trams, I see two police-officers finding their own way through the crowd. They are running. I stop and stare, like many others, and excitedly scout the area for any misshapenness. As they come closer I see they are carrying more than the standard police uniform: brown paper bags. Faster and faster they start running up the stairs I am observing them from. As they take the last steps up to the platform they slow down and stop. One of them curses inaudibly as he grabs for the content of his paper bag. His colleague shakes his shoulder. We’ll catch the next train he says out loud, presumably directed more at me and the others spectators then his colleague who now takes a bite from the bagel that he had meant to only take out of the packaging on their way out of Rotterdam.

It takes everyone a couple of seconds to register, some looks are exchanged, and the crowd starts moving again. I’m stopping by the bakery – those bagels look delicious.

Rotterdam May Project

How can KaosPilots connect to the city they are situated in? Connecting through adding value to Rotterdam seems like a great choice and opportunity.
The focus of our Project is firstly geographical; we are focusing on Rotterdam-South – a neighbourhood that is dealing with many challenges. But except for the challenges there is also a lot of raw potential – we believe too much of that potential has until now been left unused.

To tap into the potential of R.South., or enable others to channel the potential of it, we needed a focus in our project. We came up with a question: how can we enable entrepeneurs to improve their neighbourhood, or help them to enable the people in Rot.South.?

First two weeks were for us weeks to find above mentioned focus, and maybe even more importantly understand the context. We have been talking with people ranging from the director of Creative Factory to the owner of a pet shop at Afrikaanderplein. We have been talking with representatives of the entrepenurial comittee of R.South and people from the Nelson Mandela festival. Their oppinions, dreams and wishes we will now in the coming two weeks have to fuse into a tangible result driven conclusion to our project. We will report back!

 

Woonbron May project

May projects has started and here is a log of how the first couple of days went for the group that is working with the social housing company; Woonbron.

Woonbron is a social housing company with many different initiatives. In the area of Coolhaven in Rotterdam, where some 7.000 people live, they own 85% of the houses and apartments.
That gives Woonbron a very high interest in getting Coolhaven to become an attractive neighbourhood and therefore they started the ABCD-project five years ago.

ABCD-project originate from Chicago, USA, where people with little or no money where forced to work or live in the streets. Since work isn’t always that easy to get the ABCD-project started to inspire people to become entrepreneurs, co-creators and volunteers.

The challenge for ABCD-project in Coolhaven, and in Holland for that matter, is that social security is better, but there are less effort to become an entrepreneur. So how does one help people to move forward from receiving government money to earn their own and / or help the community.

And so, the three bearded KaosPilots, Ieshu Nathaniel and Nicholas sat out to help Woonbron with re-energizing this project.

The frames for the project are as follows:
We have one month to come up with an idea how to reenergize and implement it.
We work with the community of Coolhaven
We have some resources from Woonbron at disposal.

This is all we know so far, and Woonbron has unfortunately been hard to get in contact with to learn all the aspects of our project.

But we are the bearded action-men, so we decided to contact the different initiatives and organisations started by the ABCD-project and the headquarters it self. So far we have met up with some very interesting people that has given us some insight to Coolhaven and we are learning every day.

Most important meeting was with the Spider (manager) of the ABCD-project, Peet, to learn about his approach on the community. He has build an incredible network and a huge amount of volunteers that are willing to do favours and help out.

As Peet expressed it, it is important that he one day can step down and the community can continue on its own, but they are not quite there yet.

Let’s see if the following month will bring us closer.

L ‘n P

A low blog rate on our side correlates with a low view rate … 

It is not that we don’t love you – we are just really busy with our May projects (click here for the blog of one of them). 

We’ll be in touch … but please take initiative and get into contact with us while we are busy

love ‘n peace

Your daily inspirational …

A new brief from trendwatching.com …. enjoy!

 

Flight Facilitatorship

In Woerden, 6 people, one consultancy company, software testing at Meurs.  The second half of Team 2 started their Flight Facilitorship. At the consultancy company Meurs, a couple of enthusiastic people have been working on an idea to give employees the right to initiative with in a organization or a company.  They have develop an application that “The Woerden gang” is now working on.

The first day we were in front of our laptops most of the time trying to figure out how the program works.  This is still a beta-beta-beta-beta version as Quint (one of the guys from Meurs) said, so our job is to test, give feedback, develop, give ideas and ask questions.

                                                                                               

 We have been working hard and tried to keep focus and not get lost in all the opportunities we have within this projects. Working with the people from Meurs has worked really well. We got a great welcome. Had a long talk about us and them and our expectations. We have had great brainstorming sessions, and a lot of fun. And we have definitely loved being here.

                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Conference in Manchester

Enterprising students in Manchester

Lauran and I got the opportunity to represent KaosPilots in Manchester, at the 2009 United Learning Trust conference on education, enterprise, and entrepreneurship. This was a conference where mostly secondary educator shared what they know about engaging students in international enterprise.

We gave four half hour workshops about the basics of KaosPilots, and our teaching methods could be integrated into secondary schools. When we engaged these educators in a soul searching activity, they consistently expressed a desire to get students out into the real world, to give them the opportunity to start to make a difference in the real world. It felt like the group of 40 delegates represented a small revolution within the English standardized education system. The energy continued to grow as we spoke about the different educational possibilities. One of the hottest topics was figuring out how to quantify learning with out using standardizing tests. To many this was the key to creating a more dynamic learning environment. Yet this was not an excuse, the schools were already taking action.

This where we stayed, it was really nice

We visited some schools around Manchester to get an idea of their different entrepreneurship and international activities. It was really nice to be lead around the schools by the students, and we we’re surprised by how many extra curricular activities they had. This is really great because it gives students the opportunity to explore different activities, and to find out what they are passionate about. One of the most inspiring activities was a trading program for students. Children in Manchester were given the opportunity to trade with students in Ecuador.

So besides being inspired by all the ground swell of change in the English education system, we we’re treated like royalty. The organizers of the conference went out of there way to introduce us to all there prominent delegates, the food and accommodation were fantastic, it’s the closets I have come to being treated like a celebrity.

Upon leaving I offered to set up a wiki so that all delegates can stay in contact and continue to collaborate. This is only the beginning!

If you would like to know more contact me at nathaniel@kaopilots.nl

Book launch event TONIGHT

The day is here! We host tonight the pre-promotion book launch of Jan den Breejen’s forthcoming book “High Performance People”. The event will be in Dutch and English. See the program below.  We expect around 50 registered people as well as those of you who have not registered and will turn up at the door as a lovely surprise! 

We’ve had confirmations from a wide array of professionals and organizations, from Cap Gemini to Atos, TNT Fashion, University of Amsterdam and many many others. So the night promises to be inspiring, surprising and serious fun!

 

Hotel V will be looking after us with  drinks from the bar, tapas, and a specially created cocktail for the event!

Everyone is welcome. We begin at 6.30pm. We know that you are busy, you have to travel  and that unexpected things turn up last minute. We don’t mind – that’s why we are KaosPilots. So for all of you who think you might be late or cannot guarantee anything … chill out and turn up when you can! We have an exciting program for the evening and you are welcome from whatever moment you step through the door!

 

Program 6.30-9.30pm

 

Meet & Greet / The Hero’s Journey in Practise / Presentation Jan den Breejen / Music / Presentations by special guests / Closing Cheer / Kwela’s birthday reception

We will keep to a tight schedule. The official part of the evening will close around 9.30pm. After that you are welcome to stay and chat in a relaxed atmosphere until 11.30pm.

 

 

 

Impressive stories from Team1

Some more insight into the experiences of team1 (or more specifically Bert) at their outpost. Cool stuff! If you watch his video make sure to read his story!

Also make sure to read their blog! And here some more pictures …

What are we doing today?

May Projects in sight!

May is going to be one crazy month for us – divided into four groups team 2 is going to work for our partners and put all the learnage of last two semesters to a month long test. We are excited!

Team 1 on ODE site

More news from Team1 on the ODE site!

Emma

A ripe mango is sweet, with a unique taste. It is in its prime when soft and I think I can guarantee that most like it. Even so once you have tasted it you want more.  For me Emma is my favorite fruit.  Sweet, unique and with a core that is staple and you can count on it.

Dear Emma Happy BirthDay!

Yours

Unnsteinn

Flight Facilitation day 3

Harvest Thursday.

Today was the day where all good intensions and fuzzy words were to be put into actions and the agenda had one remark: Hard work!

With one day of trying to rest and not thinking about the Future Centers we were all fully charged and ready to answer the question of “How does one communicate the message of the Future Centers”.

And even though Wednesday was suppose to be all about the Open Day and not worry about flight facilitation it somehow ended up on the activity list. It was proposed that potential KaosPilots might be interested in what we are working on. And so we decided to take advantage of our visitors and got input on how they would see their perfect workspace and what is important when communicating a mindset.
We did get some powerful insights and we brought them with us to Oss.

And so we started the day with sharing thoughts and learning’s that we found important to this project. And to be really productive we also decided to work indoors the whole day and sometimes look out of the window when in need of inspiration.

We split ourselves in two groups and one group focused on the concept where the other on the presentation. This worked magnificently well and in a rush of creativity, arguments and fun, we developed the Reef.
Now, what is the Reef?

Well, the metaphore for the Future Center in Oss is a Seahorse, so we created a whole list of characters that live in the Reef with the seahorse. Ozzie the flying out-of-the-box fish, Leacher the learning teaching squid and one of my favorites, the very big fish that sees himself as small, Humble Bob.

The concept gives the Future Centers a very concrete message when explaining the mindset and Simoon was very pleased.

It was arranged on the spot to continue the co-creation and we had another heartfelt check-out before our last trip towards Rotterdam.

We will miss Oss.

Your daily inspirational …

Imagination is everything!

Open Day today!

Flight Facilitation day 2

The Future Center is all about creativity and today we had to see if we could put its purpose into use. “Twisty Tuesday” as we so happily named today started out with a late arrival but with very high spirits. Marieke, Jasmijn and Simoon from Oss municipal all join us in our creative process to “twist” all the thoughts, ideas and tools of approaching the day.

And as the sun started shining through the pine trees we rushed outside into the back yard like Germans flock to a beach in the summer. Sitting in the bean bags with coffee we really couldn’t complain about anything and started to build on ideas.

One thing we have learned from previous projects are constant to be on the same page in the process and with that in the back of our heads the flipovers, crayons and voices flew through our working circle and hit whatever it could catch on to.

Three important things came out of our unstructured structure (or call it chaos piloting…). We have the basic concepts of which format to present the Future Center, Our working frames of the coming days to develop the concept and our frame work of the project “rules” also called Wrame Fork.

The six KaosPilots had an emotional check out and their words about the day included perfect, amazing and heartfelt. Some of us even want to move here.

For the ones visiting us tomorrow at the open day you will have the opportunity to join our process as we will bring in potential Team 3 students to co-create on the concept.

Hope to see you there

This makes me happy..

This is a painting made by one of my friends. I love the feeling of summer in the picture and I wanted to give you the opportunity to enjoy this too.

We’re back – Flight Facilitation day 1

Does KaosPilots often get paradigm shifts? At least we seem to be more open towards them, but when the word “municipality” pops up I think we have our associations about small offices, boring environments and slow processes.
So when six KaosPilots walked into the city hall of Oss in the middle of Holland a surprising and pleasant sight meet them. The conference rooms and offices where all creative looking in there own way. One room was upside-down, another the “cow room” and outside was a green zone where we felt right at home.

The one who made not only this physical space, but also the mindsets of creativity, possible in the municipal of Oss goes by the name of Simoon. She was also the one who welcomed us and proudly took us through her workspace until we settle outside in the burning sunshine.

She calls the workspace for the Future Center and it started as a dream of bringing creative workspaces into places where it sometimes is the most difficult to have. The dream has been realized and we saw the proof of it this morning. We could call Simoon for the wizard of Oss.

Through out the day we learned about the dreams of the future of the Future Center and we learned as much information as possible. In short the Future Center needs a more tangible communication to spread the concept to the world and has asked the KaosPilots to come up with ideas.

The day was basically a “sponge day” where we sucked it all in and tomorrow we will squeeze, twist and turn the sponge and see what comes out.

We left with a smile on our faces and great hopes for what tomorrow brings.

E-Zine – The Official KP Magazine 1st edition!

This is a special moment! Through following this link you are about to open our first e-zine! It really makes us proud to present this to you! The magazine not only reads about dreams and ideas, but about actual results created and learnings that go with that. Five of our partners and flight facilitators reflect on their experiences working with pilots. And nice little miniatures in the form of Q&A’s with pilots and staff!

Enjoy

kaospilotsnlmagazine

Radio Silence …

we are going for a well deserved break. See you back here the 20th of April!

Ciao

p.s. don’t forget the open day the 22nd of April!

Pilots + Heroes = Kamagination

KaosPilots host ImaginHeroes

This afternoon we spent some time getting to know like-minded students from ImaginHeroes, part of the Academy for Leisure in Breda, which focuses on action learning as well as personal development.  

We started out with a little energizer to get everyone interacting then short introductions (really just an excuse to find out each other’s secrets).  A short round of questions and expectations, which then lead into a discussion about how our two schools are the same, how they are different, and how we can learn from each other and potential collaborations.  And of course, drinks and mingling afterwards.

14 imagineers came to visit and share today and it was wonderful to all of a sudden double in size and still keep the same positive attitude and curiosity that make both our programs what they are.  We share a lot of the same values it turns out and it would be great to do more things together in the future!  (There might be an opening in both our schedules sometime in 2011 )

Suggestions for the first FlashMob idea? Buhahahaha!

Lazy boy – In inspiration from the last daily inspirational…

Watch the earlier daily inspirational before seeing this post. Enjoy!

Your daily inspirational …

You have to see this!

 

Your Daily Inspirational…

The Tesla S can go almost 500 km after a charge of 45 min electric power. It is completely electric driven, and goes from 0-100 in less than 4 seconds. The front panel with GPS, radio, mp3 and internet, is touch screen and the accelerator is also on a screen, but no touch…

It is going to be put in production in 2011 at a price of 45.000,- euros.

Click the picture to see more picures (in Danish)

London G20 riots

Judging by yesterday’s BBC reports  you are forgiven for thinking London sank into chaos and anarchy yesterday. There was some damage to buildings (Royal Bank of Scotland) and a policeman was injured. But Jack Bright, 19, said: “When people surrounded RBS I could understand police tactics. But we were sat down trying to have a peaceful protest, and they started whacking us.”

The riot police tactics were the tried-and-tested coralling. 

I lived in London for over 11 years. I used to go to the streets every May 1st for International Workers Day. In 1999 we were given a taste of coralling for the first time ever. I was there. An eyewitness. On Trafalgar Square. Around a 1000 people who were gathering completely peacefully were suddenly encircled without warning by policemen in Matrix style clothing. We were trapped there for over 5 hours with no access to food, water or toilets. Worse, over those 5 hours the police ranks slowly advanced step by step to push us closer together like a herd of sheep. It was one of the most scary things I’ve experienced. My basic right to the freedom of movement taken away from me I witnessed a young mother with a crying baby in her arms begging a policewoman to let her pass and go home and feed her baby. The policewoman didn’t even look back at her. That’s what coralling means in practice. Crowd control takes on a whole new meaning when you are part of a crowd that doesn’t need controlling.

There will always be a few demonstrators who choose for direct action. I don’t endorse them but the hypocrisy in our modern democracies never ceases to surprise me. At school we are told to celebrate the values and achievements of the French Revolution – one of the bloodiest of its kind in history. Today public indifference and governmental opposition to any kind of protest mean you risk being ridiculed just for taking to the streets. Even a privileged Baroness was yesterday saying on British TV that compared with the student uprisings of ’68 (which she is old enough to remember) yesterday’s demonstrations were “rather orderly and good natured”. And in those days the economic and environmental challenges were arguably even less dramatic than they are today … say no more, except that these are my own opinions which don’t represent those of an organization or anything like that.

So come on, challenge me back.

Consumption critics by Jon Rodriguez

Your daily inspirational …

Need a place to work (in your garden?) …

Go!

Join us for free icecream!

One of our newly found partners of the KaosPilots, Haagen Dazs, has offered to come by today with a special treatment.

Because of the nice weather they will come to serve us as much ice cream as we can eat! Show up around lunch and join us in this feast.

Enjoy the first day of april.

Your daily inspirational …

Turning the place over by Richard Wilson. Art for now … solution for energy inefficient airconditioning for later?

Outside School

We had outside school today … I’m sitting inside but can still feel the sun on my face. Lovely.

We started out the day by exploring, through storytelling, what streetwise meant to all of us. Streetwise is one of the KaosPilot values, and together with Salih who came and joined us we had some good discussion and laughs. Then we spread out to go out and ask people what the characteristics of a good friend where. After a good hour we met up again to talk about what we learned – also in relation to streetwise – enjoyed the sun and checked out. Check the blog for a video on this later this week!

Your daily inspirational …

10 ways to getting a really good sleep!

Outside School

Meet us today at Rochussenstraat 355 (our headquaters) 13.30 for outside school.. Come join in, have fun and be creative..
See you there…

Your daily inspirational …

The story of stuff!

 

Come join us

The next month or so Team2 will keep on going with “Creativity on tour” where we go outside and have our classes outside.

We have now set some dates for these outside classes and if you want you are more than welcome to come and join us.  The theme for this month is our values. We will in a creative way explore and do some kind of projects that are linked to the theme. Our values are 6 and here we have some of the dates and the time.  Locations will be sent out as soon as possible.

• Streetwise Tuesday 31.st of March 13.30 – 15.00
• Compassion Wednesday 8th of April 13.00 – 14.30
• Balance Thursday 9th of April 14.00 – 16.00
• Playful Tuesday 21st of April 13.00 – 15.00
• Real World Yet to be confirmed
• Risk-taking Yet to be confirmed

If you feel like meeting up, you can also send me and line: unnsteinn at kaospilots.nl

Team 1 arrived safely!

Follow them on their blog!

Become fan on facebook …

Do it!

Your daily inspirational …

Smart design, fun gifts at SUCK.

and on top of that a time lapse (boy are you lucky!):

Itay Talgam

We invited Israeli conductor Itay Talgam to our school after having seen his inspiring speech at Picnic ’08. We had a great day together, talking about and exploring music and creativity.
This is one of his musical projects