Tag Archives: Austin Convention Center

Mountain of Legos

IMG_5617

After posting my last blog page from the Lego Kids Fest, there was still a little time left before the event was over for the day.  Lucky for me, there was a small mountain of Legos to dive into.  The kids had built a giant blue city with about 90 towers, so I contributed by building a long blue wall to front the city and keep out the kids who wanted to play Godzilla for the night.  It sort of worked and kept the destructive ones from crushing all the towers.  The whole plan failed when the time for the event was up.  The adult proctors began ripping the city to pieces in preparation for the next morning so tomorrow’s kids could have a fresh mountain of blocks to build from.  I hope they have fun and make a city as majestically constructed as the one tonight.  ðŸ™‚

IMG_5619

IMG_5618

Crowdsourcing

The conference I went to last week got me thinking a little bit about crowdsourcing. By a Merriam Webster definition found in a Wikipedia article, “crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.”

One of my favorite speakers at the conference was Jessica Jackley . Back in 2005, she founded a company called Kiva, which is a “non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty.”

The concept is a bit hard to understand at first, so if you have time, check out this YouTube video of Jessica’s Ted Talk in 2010.

I was amazed by her story as well as her ability to share her passion for helping others. To be honest, I am not sure if this will inspire me to be a better person or to use the Kiva website to help out someone in need, but I thought I would share the information with you so you can make your own decision.