After 12 hours on Saturday at Cultivate I just needed to withdraw for a while and take a break, so I did and went home to Sarnia and got to go to theStory BBQ and do some relaxing. My experience at Cultivate and organizing it overall was great. I learned a lot during the day from all kinds of different people by listening to their stories and their challenges and also sharing my own. I appreciated meeting Mike Todd for the first time and also Rob Abbot, two people that I’ve heard lots about and have never gotten to meet. They both have great stories and have done/are doing some great things where they are.
I would change a few things if I was to do it again. For starters I think I would do less segments. We did five this time, and I think I would cut it down to three or four. I didn’t like that I had to pull people away from conversation just to stay on schedule. I also thought the day was getting draining towards the end for a lot of people, so I think I would run a 9-5 conference instead of an 8-8 conference. I also think I would pre-plan out the different discussion groups instead of waiting for ideas, simply because people were not to keen on speaking out loud with their ideas. At the very least I would only leave a few open for suggestions and have most of them planned out ahead of time.
There was a lot I loved about it. The atmosphere was great. People were meeting one another and making connections and telling their amazing stories. I really appreciated how much people got involved, because like I said at the beginning of the conference, the whole day depended on them and what they put into it; we set it up that way. Food worked out well, a big thanks to the FRWY café manager Randy along with volunteer barista’s Natasha, Amber and Melissa who were a huge help in making sure all the food stuff worked without flaw. The stories and messages in the microphone were all well done. Gary from Next, Joe from theStory, Pernell from the FRWY, Jared from the Free Methodist, Wendy from New Directions, Mike from the Whatever, Kim from the Open Door and Melissa from the FRWY all did excellent jobs telling their stories and sharing their findings with everyone.
The mp3’s of the presentations and the open mic are all available on the website and will be made available as a podcast on this site also.
So thanks to all that came and made it a great day, it is a great possibility that it will happen again next year and I would love for you to e-mail me with any comments or suggestions if we do end up doing it. A big thanks to Pernell and Jared who came up with the idea and trusted me to run with it.
Mike Todd | here
Nathan Colquhoun | here and here
Pernell Goodyear | here
Leslie McKnight | here
Jared Siebert | here, here, here, here and here
Gideon Strauss | here
(Yes Jared never stopped blogging)
The mp3’s of the presentations and the open mic are all available on the website and will be made available as a podcast on this site also. They will be made available before the end of the month.
So thanks to all that came and made it a great day, it is a great possibility that it will happen again next year and I would love for you to e-mail me with any comments or suggestions if we do end up doing it. A big thanks to Pernell and Jared who came up with the idea and trusted me to run with it.
Thank you for putting such a great event, Nathan. Our family enjoyed it thoroughly.