Leadership Summer School

Grow skills to lead self and others! Leadership training & coaching

Become effective data storyteller

meet infrogram

Nika Aleksejeva from Infogr.am – popular infographics creator – accepted to be one of the guest speakers at LSS this year to share effective online data storytelling practice.

Infographics proved to be one of the most effective way to communicate complex data driven stories. Infogr.am enables anyone to create beautiful and interactive infographic in no time.  Here is the infographic illustrating the citizenship of LSS Graduates since 2008.

“It’s easy to create infographic with Infogr.am. It’s harder to create a good one. We are taking the next step to help our community tell complex data driven ideas in effectively,” tells Nika.

The data storytelling workshop shares basic guidelines on how to create viral stories and participants will practice how to become effective data storyteller.

About Infogr.am

Infogr.am is world simplest infographics creator. It’s widely used for effective business communication and classroom teaching. Major online media such as Huffington Post, The Verge, Al Jazeera and many others are one of the early service adapters. The content created by users was seen by more than 8,5 million unique visitors last month.

logo-infogram

About Nika Aleksejeva

Nika-Aleksejeva-lss2014Nika is a passionate data storyteller from Infogr.am. She is constantly working on projects which connect and inspire great personalities with potential to change things for good.

Nika has been a journalist since high school. Most recently her work involved writing on business topics, making data driven stories about energetics, global economy trends and education.

Seeing the future in digital journalism she continues to work and share the knowledge which helps to develop new communication forms.

Learning Experience for Future Leaders

make_a_differenceThis year LSS wants to go few step further in the development of the event in our quest to transform into a full learning experience along with the theme “Creating a Movement”.

For this seventh edition we launched invitations to change makers to take part in the LSS as guest Speakers.

In order for us to achieve our goal, we are going to need some help & support. Therefore we launched a crowdfunding campaign to cover expenses for our guest Speakers including their stay for few days during the event at the Leadership Summer School 2014 venue in Yeditepe. We expect the encountering will boost motivation, provide food for thoughts, allow participants to learn from our guests’ successes and failures.

So far, we have an European start-up, infogr.am, which is revolutionising the data visualisation by creating interactive infographics, a Management Consultant challenging us to find out what can be Beyond Leadership and the Head of Innovation and Creativity Program of Google who will animate an Innovation Lab.

We will welcome your support as well! Please visit LSS Full Learning experience for future Leaders campaign and, in case you help, get ready to receive some nice thank you gift. 🙂

What is the Unreasonable Time?

It’s October 11th 2010, a day when an idea has been sent to me from Zero Generation… Next to a vimeo link to a nebulous Unreasonable Institute project, came the question: “What can we do with all the talents we collate?”
The mail was sent at 6:15 AM by the way.

More than my words, I think they are the best to explain who they are, what they do and why they do it.

Unreasonable Institute

Later on, October 11th 2010, 10:40 AM, I posted this: Thx to @salmaansana I disovered today the Unreasonable Institute (http://ht.ly/2RvVh ) on Episode 1! Awesome concept!

After many discussions, exchanges, a lot of time, and in our quest to develop and enhance the LSS learning experience, an idea about an activity has been submitted for the edition 2012: The Unreasonable Time.

“The Unreasonable Time is an opportunity for LSS participants to actively make use of the network of LSS, which sometimes happened in the past, on a more sustainable way.

LSS attracting over 60 ppl from different profiles from 25 different Organisations from a dozen field of higher education in Europe and the world.

We would unite them, trained in a similar location for 10 days, given time to develop solutions that could impact many.

Instead of mentoring, we could facilitate the process by providing a frame and feedback to their ideas.

Trainers would help participants not only in realisation, also in building and strengthening their ideas along with all LSS actors.”

All that said, the idea has been presented before the event, inviting participants to bring (im)possible ideas for collective implementation and, throughout the event, 1 hour was daily allocated for group work development.

“I’ve failed over, over and over again in my life that is why I succeeded.” Michael Jordan

As you can imagine, it didn’t work out as we planned:
– No responsible was initially attached to the activity as this was meant to be a free and uncoordinated time
– Low level of participation at first
– Frustration raising from the ones interested though not supported
– The follow up on the idea is very weak

Though, by failing fast, we managed to get the idea back on track.

filipe pereira lss2012 trainerFilipe Pereira, our Entrepreneur minded Trainer, took over to facilitate the process. He took part of the daily check-in of the Unreasonable Time.

Participants also took their part in by providing themes for the different Unreasonable Time: Open Space Technology, LSSx2, NGO Cooperation.

 

Together, trainers and participants organised and took part in a full day Project Creation Workshop (illustrated below) during which over 100 ideas were generated, about 20 of them were refined and made it through to a Business Model draft. By the day of today, a dozen have raised interest. As mentioned before, follow up should be improved.

project-creation-workshop-lss2012

We are still following the Unreasonable Institute project, learning from its failures as well as its numerous results and impacts. We will combine them with our own and improve the actionability of LSS actors ideas fulfilling one of the fundamental objective of the Leadership Summer School Project: to set an environment and a frame in which the organisation’s members will network and uncover possible new or better ways of cooperation.

If given the opportunity, would you join us?