Wellington – Reports from on the Road

Back once again, this time writing from a Christchurch cafe.

This week I’m on the road, ending with a trip up north to be at the inaugural LIFEHACK event in Auckland. The time is almost here.

If you didn’t see last week’s post – I announced that we will be rocking the Wellington event at Massey College of Creative Arts. I’m still rather excited about this, and with less than 2 weeks to the Wellington event, we’ve got a few small things to pull together at the venue, but essentially we’re shaping up nicely!

I’ve had wonderful interest from volunteers, mentors and signed up a good friend as a National Judge, so I was pretty stoked last week to see how many people seem to be getting behind the idea and wanting to get involved.

Jason’s been cranking away finding us some great sponsors, so rest assured you’re going to be eating well at the event (nutrition is kinda important for good mental health after all…), but we do still have spots for a couple of spots for sponsors if you know anyone who would be keen to help us feed people well in the evenings – drop me an intro on wellington@lifehackhq.co

I’m lucky enough to be able to fit in a little time with Renea, our Christchurch co-ordinator this week, in between all the phone calls to bring the threads of our Wellington event together. I’m pretty impressed with this lady and her hustle – let alone the latest announcement about the Christchurch venue!

Having spent a day wandering the streets in Christchurch, I can see the seeds of the rebuild are starting to sprout, but there’s still a long way to go. What a great opportunity LIFEHACK could be to help water a few of those new seeds of ideas and solutions to help the whole of Christchurch connect, grow, heal and rebuild. Get involved if you’re down Christchurch way, and free on 19-21 April.

To give you a little flavour of what’s possible for LIFEHACKERS through the weekend, take a peek at Social Code – one of my friends’ projects which is using social technologies to help people quit smoking…

… I went off on a bit of a tangent for a bit there – I wanted to share a few more interesting looking apps which have a bit of relevance to LIFEHACK and I got lost for about 2 hours in research! Anyway, here goes with a mix of mobile and web apps; check out eMoods, PTSD, Work Out, Mindfulness App, eCBT, Smiling Mind, Breathing Zone, and Viary. There’s 100’s more in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, as well as ones littered across the internet in their online homes. Technology is unlikely to replace the power of human contact and offline experiences, but it has a huge role to play due to it’s closeness to our every day lives – it can be there 24/7, it can prompt and remind, it can collect data, and it can open us to information and connections like never before.

We’re going to have to delve into some interesting psychology stuff, probably take a look at what insights big data could give us, work out how new interfaces could enable better usability, but at the core of it all, we’ll be aiming to make people’s lives richer because of it – my advice is don’t take your eye off that during the weekend!

I’ll probably be reporting from Auckland during next weekend on Twitter, so feel free to jump over and get in touch here.

Sam

LIFEHACK, Wellington

Tweet Me – @samrye_enspiral