Middle of the Map Forum

Last week I went to the Middle of the Map Forum, and I highly encourage anyone who has the opportunity to go next year.  It was packed with excellent speakers, active and engaged panel discussions, and just smart people in general.  And they're all from Kansas City!  Which makes it extra cool and useful.  The topics of the panels were wide-ranging, from education to business to health to social media.  In my opinion, that diversity of thought helped keep the conference fresh from start to finish.  It also made it easier to fit discussion topics into the broader context of reality, instead of just whatever silo they were coming out of.

The Forum started off with talks by John McDonald, founder of Boulevard Brewery, and Adam Jones, the hippie millionaire who runs Foundation Architectural Reclamation and owns half of the West Bottoms.  John and Adam are both graduates of the Kansas City Art Institute and are old friends (they call each other Jonesy and Johnny Mac), and it was extremely interesting to hear them describe how they've watched Kansas City grow over the last couple of decades.  They both seem like extremely nice, personable, socially conscious, genuine dudes, which made it even more interesting when Adam Jones was asked for his general advice on life and he responded immediately and forcefully that you should "take no prisoners."  John McDonald seconded that notion, and followed up by saying that "sometimes you just gotta rip it off."  For me, it drove home the idea that you can be a nice guy, you can have a vision and a positive attitude, but you still need to have that force of will to get things done.  You have to be willing to go all out to get your way.  If you're only willing to go halfway, then you should expect to succeed halfway.  Oh, and Adam Jones had heard about our demolition derby car project!  That was cool.

The first panel was on Emerging Education and featured a variety of people who work with education in some way.  This included a variety of folks, including "traditional" educators like a principal and a superintendent, but also the President of KCAI, the head of a non-profit called MindDrive, and a practicing artist/community activist.  The discussion in this panel revolved around a lot of the things that public librarians think about:  how to use education to break the poverty/crime cycle, how to inspire youths to want to learn, and how to provide opportunities for these kids beyond the normal.  The panel also discussed how to create awareness of some of the circumstances faced by some urban youth, and how some kids who grow up in affluent areas have no idea what is going on just a few miles from them.  One specific takeaway that was mentioned that I thought was really cool was a suggestion by Linda Buchner of MindDrive that mentoring be written into the job descriptions of some educators and related professionals (librarians?) to provide the one-on-one time that kids are not getting enough of.

Following that panel was solo speaker Jeff Cintimano of Microsoft, on whom I somehow managed to take not a single note.  If memory serves, his talk was mostly about different pieces of hardware and software that Microsoft is either currently selling or will be selling soon.  Mostly what I remember is that he had a hard time with his presentation software while at the same time trying to talk up different software, which I thought was the kind of thing that only happened on TV.

After lunch was a talk by Dr. Stephen Kingsmore of Children's Mercy Hospital.  Dr. Kingsmore is an excellent example of how it's not always a brand new idea that is needed to effect a large, positive change.  Sometimes it's taking an idea that is already out there and figuring out how to speed it up, make it more efficient, make it cheaper, or just plain do it better.  Dr. Kingsmore has somehow (he explained it but I failed to follow it) managed to speed up greatly the process of mapping the genome of individual human beings.  This means that when infants are born, they can be screened for genetic disorders before they begin to exhibit symptoms.  This is important for a number of reasons, among them that when infants begin to exhibit symptoms certain diseases can already be very far along, so it is critical to move that diagnosis as close to birth as possible.  Did you know genetic disorders affect 1 child in 20?  They are shockingly (to me) common.

The final discussion panel on Thursday was on Innovative Business.  Panel members included entrepreneurs, seasoned businesspeople, and the guy from Sly James's office who is in charge of Google Fiber.  One of the first points that the panel made was that "economic development" is no longer synonymous with "real estate." A city has to ask itself what is needed for innovation, and in 2013 it is not new buildings or even necessarily tax breaks (that came from the mayor's rep, lest you believe it's some tech hippie talking).  In other words, "community is the new currency."  The panel agreed that you need to create an energetic environment to which people are attracted.  Adam Arredondo (creator of Local Ruckus and also KC Startup Villiage) pointed out how he recently met three entrepreneurs in their early 20s who had relocated from Boston to KC, which is exactly opposite the traditional pattern of internal immigration in the US.  I found this discussion incredibly interesting, since creating community and an energetic environment is one of the things we as librarians strive to do every day.  The fact that other people are realizing that that's important says to me that libraries are perfectly positioned to play a large role in this new environment.

All that was on Thursday!  It was a really interesting and fruitful day.  I had planned to have a similar experience on Friday, but on my way to the conference life intervened in the form of a fender bender on 39th St.  That plus thinking I had a meeting at Central at 12 when it was really at 1 conspired to limit my attendance on Friday to one speaker and one panel.

The speaker I got to see on Friday was Sandy Kemper, brother of KCPL director Crosby Kemper and all-around badass.  That dude has biceps that look like bowling balls.  He also started a company called C2FO that sells something I don't understand but makes millions and millions of dollars.  He's also been involved with education companies and mentoring.  Oh, and he started this thing called The Collectors Fund which is basically his way of taking the risk out of art collection so that rich people will do it more, and thus increase their support for the arts.  Or, as he puts it, allowing "things that are uniquely created to be heterogeneously consumed."  Sandy Kemper may or may not be Batman.

One audience member asked Sandy what exactly education companies sell.  He thought for a minute.  "Confidence," he replied.  The questioner considered this for a second and then asked, "how much does that cost?"

One of the major themes in Sandy's talk was the willingness to take risks.  He pointed out that when he would try to start business when he was younger, with his equally young (and equally rich, he points out) friends, most of them refused to be associated with risk because it meant they could possibly have to be associated with failure.  This, he says, is why people go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. If you're not willing to take risks, you'll never realize big gains.  You'll only see what you have slowly erode.

The final panel that I saw was called Curating Responsibility, which (you should be picking up on a theme here) was made up of a diverse range of artists and administrators who talked about how to successfully engage the community using new and traditional methods.  Or, in other words, how to "connect the outside to the inside."  I was particularly attracted to points that Judy Koke,  Director of Education and Interpretive Programs at the Nelson made.  She talked about how she wanted people to be able to use the Nelson differently than they have in the past, to get beyond the things they have done to death for the last 80 years.  She said that it's important to be able to "fail spectacularly" and have it be OK, which I completely agree with.

There is so much more that I would like to write about this conference, but I'm not going to.  Other awesome projects that were discussed were Rad School, Bread! KC, the MoBank Poet, TEDxYouth, Oddly Correct, and a hundred other things.  It was exactly what a conference should be:  a thought-provoking series of discussions interspersed with opportunities to do some extremely targeted networking.  I highly recommend it.