GLOBAL EXPERT HIGHLIGHTS UNIVERSITY’S CITY-WIDE NEW MEDIA EXPERIMENT

Andrea Saveri, expert consultant on future forecasting for organisations and communities, is coming to Leicester next month to highlight a pioneering city-wide experiment in new media networking.



De Montfort University’s Amplified Leicester project is designed to boost the innovation capacity of Leicester and share new skills which are fast becoming essential in 21st Century workplaces and communities.



Launched last year, the year-long project comes to an end next month and is marked by the Andrea Saveri’s keynote speech on 15 April at the new Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre in Leicester.



Andrea Saveri is an independent foresight and strategy consultant based in Berkeley, California.



Professor of New Media at DMU, Sue Thomas, is leading the Amplified Leicester project and said: “Andrea is going to talk about how communities that thrive in the future will be the ones who can create new patterns of learning, relationship, and value creation using new media technologies.



“Her keynote is entitled 'Amplified Leicester and the Resilience Imperative' and she believes the forces of globalization, economic crisis, climate change etc have presented communities around the world with what she calls a resilience imperative.

“Andrea says the building blocks of community resilience rest on strategic use of digital media as a way to: develop network power and cooperative systems and that Amplified Leicester offers a rich opportunity to examine community prototyping and learning in action and to examine how networked resilience will shape the future of community and regional life.”

Admission is free of charge. Register early to avoid disappointment at http://www.amplifiedleicester.com

The event will also offer a series of workshops and showcase the work of the community members involved in the project, who include a school coordinator, councillor, business trainer, house-husband, and librarian among others as well as Police Inspector Bill Knopp who has already prompted all of Leicester police stations to set up and use twitter accounts.



Amplified Leicester has established three mini projects including the Leicester Family Project by local writer Farhana Shaikh. Contribute at http://leicesterfamily.org/



Professor Thomas said: “We’ve been exploring diversity and innovation by building a network across diverse communities. We think it’s the first project of its kind in the world and we hope it’s the beginning of a really exciting era which might see whole communities working together in an entirely new way across social media like Twitter and Facebook.”



Amplified Leicester is a research project established by DMU’s Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT)

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