ElectricSheep is a collection of short interviews – about 10 minutes each, of people in Brussels (mainly) who are actively engaged in the city's transformation into a more participative, inclusive and sustainable ecosystem.
After years of good service for a big high tech firm, Olivier has decided to devote his energy to his passion: wildlife. He chose not to give in to fear mongering or confrontation. His method: rather than oppose the forces of capital, Olivier considers that entrepreneurship is one of Nature's most powerful ally.Unanimous.eu
Our relationship to food is a complex affair, and thus, encouraging people to become conscious about its ethical dimensions is always going to be touchy. Alice Codsi and Joris Depouillon have courageously decided to take on the challenge, and they do it with passion, and humour. They worked essentially for free on this project for two years before finally receiving some modest financing, and finding a sustainable business model: helping cities to activate local initiatives for reducing food waste. Today, they work from their small office at the beautiful Greenbizz incubator, near Tour and Taxis. Their ambition is to live up to their European dimension and get consulting gigs beyond the near vicinity of their Brussels headquarters.
VR is a controversial subject. Already, you have those who, like me, had a taste of it a few years ago, and got hit by a splitting headache as a result. For them, thanks to the power of modern GPUs, the problem is solved – even if there are still a few incurables. Others, and I was part of them, too, think that the VR headset is the ultimate device for cutting someone from their environment and let them live exclusively in their private, limited bubble. The truth is more complex, compared to traditional media, VR offers an incomparably richer experience. For the first time, the medium vanishes and the phantasm of direct communication from person to person, from mind to mind, is suddenly within reach. The danger of isolation and manipulation is not less important, but the potential for human progress is huge. Everyone has to try VR and thanks to the web, cardboards and smartphones, it has become very easy.
Pierre-Alexandre Klein is a neuroscientist by training, but at some point he realised that "there were more pressing problems to solve than human cognition", namely our collective capacity to move together as a species towards a more distributive society and a much more sustainable way of living. Today, he works at the Civic Innovation Network, his most recent endeavour, on disseminating the concept of an Impact Joint Venture, or IJV for short. An IJV represents a set of processes, and economic and social impact incentives that allow corporations, local governments and citizens to work together on improving a specific aspect of community living. Together with his team, they have already launched, in collaboration with a wide range of local actors, almost of dozen of IJVs in Brussels, each representing a concrete, documented opportunity for citizens and the public and the public sector to cooperate for a brighter, fairer future.The Civic Innovation NetworkThe OpenWall of ongoing IJVsA video interview of Pierre-Alexandre about the CINA video presentation of the CIN
Anis has a vision for the workplace of the future, and he is slowly but surely making it a reality. The Transforma Brussels Innovation Center has its root in his experience with The Hub Brussels which unfortunately ceased its operations a few years back. Since then, together with his business partner, Paul-Henry Schijns, he grew his personal concept of a co-working space around a few major ideas, like open innovation, co-creation, intra- and extrapreneurship or "logistics-as-a-service".TransformaBxl