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tech, ethics and consciousness...for all life

ParTecK 21 Presenters

https://chinookx.ca/
Cumberland, Vancouver Island

Lee White

Nov 12 ParTecK Event Host

Lee is bringing his creativity and collaborative spirit to an experiential-poetic group activity that will invite us to reflect and mingle with others. He’ll also be our dance dj later in the evening.

Bio

Thought leader and social impact innovator with a diverse global background. Independent  researcher, futurist and entrepreneur pioneering climate adaptation strategies. An early career in the  non-profit sector including national leadership roles for Outward Bound in Canada and South Africa has culminated in legacy work delivering adventure therapy programming to BC’s Youth Custody Centres. Unique expertise in complex conflict management has bridged into strategic advisory services and negotiations on behalf of First Nations for the past 15 years. Founder of ChinookX Technologies Ltd pioneering sovereign data with First Nations to drive clean energy innovation and economic reconciliation.

Derrick Yoder

Grants Incupbator and Mastermind Host

Bio

Derrick is lead editor for an 18-volume book publishing project at the Center for Integral Wisdom, a foundation seeking to weave together wisdom traditions to inform sacred activism. Derrick is an independent researcher at Ronin Institute, where he explores meta-evolutionary process and its implications for and applications in systems design. Derrick’s background includes: working in the health care sector to implement evolutionary strategy functions that integrated capacity building (aka, merging the traditional strategy and human resources departments into one… thing); a few years working on a small  team to develop and test governance information systems and group process toolkits to enable communities to be self-governing; meandering paths in meta-existential risk research, psychedelics curricular development, and running a group process laboratory for discovering novel, capacity-building group process methods. Derrick is recently engaged thanks in large part to ParTeck – woo!

Scott Nelson

Bio

Scott Nelson is a tech entrepreneur and investor. His passions include consciousness, blockchain, decentralized digital currencies, and open source and standards. He’s a digital footprint minimalist, cyclist, and integral psychonaut.

Darlene Gering

Bio

Darlene Gering works at the intersection of business and social impact. Darlene started her career at Dun & Bradstreet in Toronto. Following her desire to live and work in Latin America, she founded D&R International S.A. in Costa Rica which became Dun and Bradstreet’s fastest growing agency in Latin America. Darlene led Thriving Generations Employment Agency, a social enterprise helping moms in poverty transition back to work. She has recently founded Sociatek to create economic empowerment for women in Latin America.

Carissa Kazyss

Bio

Carissa Kazyss is Executive Directory (part time) of the Human Data Commons. She co-designs ParTecK, HDC’s annual flagship event and is a steward of the emerging ParTecK community, drawing on her background in network coordination and community development. Carissa has a MA in Integral Psychology and a Master’s in Natural Resources Management. She works at the nexus of personal and organizational development in her coaching and consulting work. Carissa is a contributor to a few emerging tech-related collaborations including the Digital Naturalness Project (digitalnaturalness.com).

Sunshine Coast

Rochelle Fairfield

Host / Convenor

Tuesday Sep 28 - 12:00 pm

Rochelle will be joining us as both host for Zak Stein’s presentation on Sept. 28 and convenor of the Community Open Space session on Tuesday, Oct. 12.

Bio

Rochelle is a generalist, having been led by curiosity, passion and opportunity to work in various roles in settings as diverse as the commercial fishing sector, academia, technology ethics, Zen and human consciousness development. Roles include deck-hand, skipper, president of the prawn fisherman’s association, project manager-facilitator, agile scrum adaptor, on-the-spot developmental coach, strategic planner, integral practitioner, and researcher. She has authored articles on power and gender, gleaned from experience transforming multi-stakeholder conflict in the commercial fishing industry and coaching women leaders in social services in Vancouver’s downtown east-side. Rochelle participated then mentored in Pacific Integral’s Generating Transformative Change program, and is a long-time Zen student of Diane Musho Hamilton. Along the way she completed an MA in Integral Theory and certification with Integral Coaching Canada. How people work together to accomplish something decent, beautiful and worthwhile, is currently the focus of her interest, practice, work and care.

MaRi Eagar

Moral Resilience and Regenerative Tech Design

Tuesday Oct 05 - 12:00 pm

We need to talk about the health crisis of the impact of moral distress and suffering…and how regenerative technology design can address it

There is a growing awareness of the urgent need to understand the impact of moral distress and suffering on individuals’ and society’s quality of life.

Moral distress is the conflict caused by transgressions of one’s moral code by an individual or leadership.  It occurs when we suffer and feel the pain of being separated from our goodness and from what we need to thrive.

Because moral distress is not discussed, people are unaware of how it impacts their own and others’ wellbeing. (For example, the link between moral distress and virality of spread of information: Social media posts that stir moral distress are reposted 6 time or more.)

Join MaRi Eagar from EcoNova in this presentation and dialogue about this very important and relevant mental and emotional health topic to explore how participatory and regenerative technology design can contribute to moral resilience and flourishing.

For free access to EcoNova’s research on the topic, you can watch the video on Vimeo here. Its one hour long and rich in content.

Bio

MaRi Eagar is a Canadian award winning innovation consultant, cultural creative and teacher of Gaia Dharma and Positive Ecotherapy. She was ranked Thomson Reuters Top 40 Social Influencers in Finance, Innovation and Risk, 2017

MaRi  is the founder and Chief Regeneration Officer of EcoNova Leaders, a regenerative business innovation and transformation boutique consultancy and Startup Regeneration™, our community of practice.

EcoNova  links regenerative business ideas and design thinking with action in the real world. We develop competencies for the training of regenerative business innovators, organizations and communities.

Starting her professional career as South African Chartered Accountant, MaRi holds a Masters degree in Leadership Development (cum laude) with her dissertation research on the application of contemplative practices for leadership development. A certified Positive Psychology Coach and Applied Positive Psychology Practitioner, she also studied and trained as a shamanic practitioner for more than 20 years.

Her global corporate experience working with executives and senior leaders include Deloitte, PHSA, BCLDB, MEC, ICBC, Da Vinci Institute for Technology amongst a few.

MaRi was the founder of the BC Blockchain Forum, with membership over 1,300 and contributed to the strategic development of the local blockchain ecosystem. Her area of interest was distributed and decentralized leadership and governance, culminating in an open source action project including blockchain community leaders interviews for Blockchain Radio and final presentation to the community in September 2018.

After she completed a two month regenerative retreat in Peru, she returned with a mission to establish EcoNova as a way to restore salka (undomesticated energy and natural mind), nurture imagination and cultivate regenerative work, life and play lifestyles. MaRi continues to focus on creating pragmatic solutions for people to reclaim cognitive agency and build future skills that are difficult to automate.

Vancouver

Soudeh Jamshidian

Tuesday Oct 05 - 12:00 pm

Rifting off Zach Stein’s talk on Sept. 28, in this session we will explore how the Covid 19 pandemic affected our lives, and discuss solutions for moving towards building a sustainable society.

Through the lense of Resilience Theory, we discuss the underlying environmental causes and environmental impacts of the Covid 19 pandemic as well as its impacts on social justice and our collective consciousness. We specifically evaluate how the pandemic highlighted technology’s impacts on our society.

We then discuss the lessons we have learned from the Covid 19 pandemic. How are we rebuilding our society now? What are the important considerations to build a more sustainable future?

Join me for the conversation. How did the Covid 19 pandemic affect your field? What solutions did you think of for moving towards a more just and sustainable society? We look forward to hearing your inputs and adding them to our solutions squad.

Bio

Dr. Soudeh Jamshidian is a social entrepreneur and environment expert. Soudeh’s professional life started at the age of 19 when she founded an environmental NGO in Iran. She has worked as a project manager, designer, and consultant for several United Nations agencies and International NGOs. Her journey has taken her to Iran, India, Afghanistan, Mali, and Canada to collaborate with local communities, policy makers, international organizations, and academics in various topics related to resource management. Working for the United Nations Environment Programme in Afghanistan inspired her to co-found Peace Geeks and create and moderate Vancouver Peace Talks since 2011. Soudeh’s passion for social justice, environmental management, and advancing peaceful technologies has inspired her collaboration with HDC. She sees technology as a cross-cutting issue that can make or break our modern society. She believes as the technology is transforming our societies, the society should have a say in building policies for managing Tech. Soudeh is the secretary of the HDC board.

Mihai Streza

ImagineXR! Immersive Technology and the (D)Evolution of Being Human

Tuesday Oct 05 - 12:00 pm

See Prav Pillay for description.

Bio

Mihai Streza, CEO and founder of wondder launched the company in 2019 with the aim of building a portfolio of VR experiences for HR and B2B training, taking it to the next level. Mihai is a computer scientist and serial founder with many years of experience in strategy consulting and early stage investing, with companies such as Roland Berger, Accenture and AQAL Capital. His firststartup, eRockIT GmbH, was chosen in 2012 by Wirtschaftswoche as one of the five sustainability startups you should know:
https://www.wiwo.de/technologie/green/mobilitaet-fuenf-cleantech-startups-die-sie-kennen-sollten/13544828.html

Prav Pillay

ImagineXR! Immersive Technology and the (D)Evolution of Being Human

Tuesday Oct 05 - 12:00 pm

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality together known as XR or Extended Reality is poised to change the world and what it means to be human. As with Social Media and the advent of the Smart Phone, XR technologies and the seeming inevitability of the Metaverse connected by existing infrastructure and Low Earth Orbit Satellites are set to affect change on a massive scale and in a more compressed time scale.

In these technologically mediated XRs, vast quantities of high-quality bio and psychometric data can be captured and algorithms focused on altering cognition and behavior are plausible. There is an inherent tension between our drive to deepen our ability to connect, learn and evolve towards our best individual and collective selves, and the significant financial rewards and effects of accelerating surveillance capitalism inherent in XR Technology.

Given these financial rewards and the ability to affect the very nature of the system that is Humanity, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sony, and many other corporate entities are investing considerable resources to develop and deploy XR technologies and applications across the private and military sectors.

Join fellow Parteckians in an audience-mediated dialogue with VR Entrepreneur Mihai Streza of Wondder and Transdisciplinary Media Artist, Pravin Pillay of ImagineXR! Together with the help of Rochelle Fairfield, we will explore the market, technological and social drivers propelling the development and adoption of XR technologies that are set to accelerate humanity on its (d)evolutionary path.

 

Bio

Prav Pillay is s an artist, researcher, and educator, He is also the co-founder of Humanitas Smart Planet Fund and a principal in Emergent Performance Consulting,

Prav’s creative practice explores and integrates collaborators, concepts, and tropes from a span of disciplines including organizational development, ecology, biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, semiotics, systems theory, computer science, engineering, and the neurosciences.

For several years, Prav was a co-facilitator of Media That Matters – a gathering of media change makers at Hollyhock – a leading educational facility on the west coast of Canada – and more recently served as the Artist and Community Strategist in Residence with R.A.V.E.N. (Respecting Aboriginal Values and Environmental Needs), a sessional instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and also an Executive in Residence with VIATEC – a technology incubator in Victoria, BC.He has given key-note talks on a range of subjects and appeared on expert panels across several disciplines at universities, conferences, and private educational institutions including Esalen in California.

Prav holds a B. Arts and Science from McMaster University, a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, an MBA from McGill University, an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan, as well as a permaculture certification from Seven Ravens Farm on Salt Spring Island. During his MFA, Prav sought to understand the nature of systems-based artworks and collaborated with engineers in Human-Computer interaction to conduct art-science experiments that played at the intersection of art, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

ImagineXR! is a recently hatched creative studio initiative through which Prav and his colleagues intend to deploy immersive technology to inquire into the quixotic and perplexing experience of being human.

https://www.pravpillay.net

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