While I gather my thoughts, and put my own feedback together, I thought I'd share my 10Layer cohort Jason Norwood-Young's feedback to Philipp Moehring and Reshma Sohoni:

Hi Philipp

Please pass this on to Reshma as I don't have her email address.

I'd just like to briefly let you know what Guy and I thought of Seedcamp. When we initially signed up, we had in mind to look for VC through Seedcamp, but before the event we'd changed our strategy to try and fund ourselves for as long as possible. I think this was advantageous as we weren't really pitching to the mentors and could happily admit all the large holes in our current business plan and get real, honest and excellent advice.

I think it was also to our advantage that we are for the most part just "slideware" at the moment, as we're able to implement the advice from the mentors immediately without having gone down wrong roads to having to change existing business practices.

For these two reasons I suspect we experienced Seedcamp quite differently from the other startups.

So how did we find Seedcamp? My measure of its success would be the amount of change it has created in our business, and by this measure it was highly successful. In particular, our marketing message and pitch was dramatically honed; our pricing structure will have a severe review; our funding time-frames and the entire way we think about funding have changed dramatically.

Our weakness is that we take our strategy by thinking about the product and the customer. While this is still vital, we don't think enough about the business - it's a typical weakness for us idealistic startups. Seedcamp gave us access to people who think about the business first - its sustainability, profitability, risk reduction, and market perception. We feel significantly more skilled after Seedcamp (although still far from considering ourselves to be experts).

While every mentor was valuable and excellent, Sheraan and Stefan stood out in terms of strategy, Andrea was amazingly open and gave us an immense wealth of information, and Gareth was incredibly insightful. I'm sure Guy has his own list of stand-out mentors.

The most incredible thing about Seedcamp is it was exposure to experience that it would have taken us months to achieve, and probably immense expense. You guys brought us this amazing resource, for free, compressed into a day, and I cannot express my gratitude enough for what you've done for us and our business.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Kind regards
Jason
10Layer

As an ADD entrepreneur with a background in cognitive psychology, when I stumbled onto Mike Stopforth's bio which says "I am a social media entrepreneur, writer and professional speaker based in Johannesburg, South Africa. My projects include social media consultancy Cerebra, Afrigator and the 27dinners. " something clicked for me.

I'm a great believer in the power of play, of getting sucked into the zone where you're creating for the sake of creating, instead of pulling in artificial responsibilities. Letting go and learning for the sake of learning allows us to access our less unconscious competence. You know, that state of being that lets us access creativity, good ideas, and is mostly pretty zen. I've recently found myself being pulled into the overly serious world of business, where urgency takes precedence over quality, getting stuff done is more important than doing the right thing, and flat cash is more important than people or communities.

I've been watching closely how we are fundamentally flawed in the way that we attach value to tiny pieces of paper (now plastic) and instead of valuing humans, or the task for the sake of the task, we value the outcome and what it gives us. Essentially we are stifling and choking the creativity and relationships that we hold sacred in exchange for shiny trinkets and bauble.

The way we symbolise things brings with them a shared social meaning.Viktor Frankl's insights into the human mind pushes through this further to show that we are essentially meaning making machines. We assign meaning, and then appropriate a pattern to this meaning.

So, with the meaning of business and companies being so severe, I read Mike's bio, and the one word that popped out at me was "projects". Projects are light, they're fun, they're meaningful, and they have the opportunity to become something that they did not start out as. Projects create the freedom to experiment and play, they invite learning and opportunity.

I have no idea if Mike went through a similar conscious stream or not, but I want to thank him for adding that bit of meaning to my life.

This does however mean that I now need to change all my signatures and bio's.

Last week, shocking revelations concerning the activities of the ANC Youth League spokesperson Nyiko Floyd Shivambu came to the fore. According to a letter published in various news outlets, a complaint was laid by 19 political journalists with the Secretary General of the ANC, against Shivambu. This complaint letter detailed attempts by Shivambu to leak a dossier to certain journalists, purporting to expose the money laundering practices of Dumisani Lubisi, a journalist at the City Press. The letter also detailed the intimidation that followed when these journalists refused to publish these revelations.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the reprisals against journalists by Shivambu. His actions constitute a blatant attack on media freedom and a grave infringement on Constitutional rights. It is a disturbing step towards dictatorial rule in South Africa. We call on the ANC and the ANC Youth League to distance themselves from the actions of Shivambu. The media have, time and again, been a vital democratic safeguard by exposing the actions of individuals who have abused their positions of power for personal and political gain.

The press have played a vital role in the liberation struggle, operating under difficult and often dangerous conditions to document some of the most crucial moments in the struggle against apartheid. It is therefore distressing to note that certain people within the ruling party are willing to maliciously target journalists by invading their privacy and threatening their colleagues in a bid to silence them in their legitimate work.

We also note the breathtaking hubris displayed by Shivambu and the ANC Youth League President Julius Malema in their response to the letter of complaint. Shivambu and Malema clearly have no respect for the media and the rights afforded to the media by the Constitution of South Africa. Such a response serves only to reinforce the position that the motive for leaking the so-called dossier was not a legitimate concern, but a insolent effort to intimidate and bully a journalist who had exposed embarrassing information about the Youth League President.

We urge the ANC as a whole to reaffirm its commitment to media freedom and other Constitutional rights we enjoy as a country.

Blog Roll

http://thoughtleader.co.za/siphohlongwane
http://rwrant.co.za
http://vocfm.co.za/blogs/munadia/
http://vocfm.co.za/blogs/shafiqmorton/
http://blogs.news24.com/needpoint
http://capetowngirl.co.za
http://thoughtleader.co.za/sentletsediakanyo
http://thoughtleader.co.za/davidjsmith
http://letterdash.com/one-eye-only
http://boyuninterrupted.blogspot.com
http://amandasevasti.com
http://blog.empyrean.co.za/
http://letterdash.com/brencro
http://6000.co.za
http://chrisroper.co.za
http://pieftw.com
http://hamishpillay.wordpress.com
http://memoirs4kimya.blogspot.com
http://thoughtleader.co.za/azadessa
http://watkykjy.co.za
http://fredhatman.co.za
http://thelifeanddeathchronicles.blogspot.com/
http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/common-dialogue/
http://clivesimpkins.blogs.com/
http://mashadutoit.wordpress.com
http://nicharalambous.com
http://sarocks.co.za
http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/stompies/
http://helenmoffett.book.co.za/blog/
http://01universe.blogspot.com
http://groundwork.wordpress.com
http://iwrotethisforyou.me
http://fionasnyckers.book.co.za
http://attentiontodetail.wordpress.com
http://blogs.women24.com/editor
http://www.missmillib.blogspot.com
http://snowgoose.co.za
http://dreamfoundry.co.za
http://www.vanoodle.blogspot.com
http://www.exmi.co.za
http://cat-dubai.blogspot.com
http://alistairfairweather.com
http://www.zanedickens.com
http://www.nickhuntdavis.com
http://guysa.blogspot.com
http://book.co.za
http://baldy.co.za
http://skinnylaminx.com
http://blogs.african-writing.com/zukiswa
http://www.mielie.wordpress.com
http://blogs.timeslive.co.za/gatherer/
http://thoughtleader.co.za/sarahbritten
http://stii.co.za
http://blogs.news24.com/FSB_AP
http://twistedkoeksuster.blogspot.com
http://whensmokegetsinyoureyes.blogspot.com/
http://trinklebean.wordpress.com
http://commentry.wordpress.com/
http://matthewbuckland.com
http://blogs.news24.com/colour-me-fran
http://gormendizer.co.za
http://helenmoffett.book.co.za/blog/
http://www.harassedmom.co.za
http://ravingfans.co.za
http://khadijapatel.co.za
http://simon.co.za/speakza
http://gnatj.com
http://moralfibre.co.za
http://www.exmi.co.za
http://fsi.org.za/
http://synapses.co.za
http://www.macgeek.co.za

It's only fitting that my first post for the year is around something that probably framed the year for me. I went through to Geekretreat 2009 and it was great, there were a bunch of us that got together talk about a bunch of stuff, and then partied. A lot of fun, and interesting, however it may have missed the origional purpose that the triad of Heather Ford, Justin Spratt and Eve Dmochowska were trying to convey.

Although excited about the retreat, I went with an initial feeling that maybe, due to workload or focus, my time could possibly have been spent better staying in JHB and closing down some projects that are deadlining for the end of January. It became clear quickly that the retreat was very different from last year. A large part I contribute to a mental space, an understanding of what to expect, better focused topics, and a theme running through of a focus on technology in education.

Various projects were showcased which peaked interest:

* P2PU - A peer-to-peer university project with a focus on informal education, run over the internet, with set syllabus.
* Cognician - A software based thinking guide that walks through the structure of a problem to enabled critical and systemic thought.
* Personera - An interesting project that piggyback's on Facebook in order to put together a profile of pictures etc, in order for you to create personalised calendars, wallpaper or gifts.

There were also a number of incredible conversations which were started.

* Andy Volk did a presentation on how his group runs a services based company, which also develops product. A model that several of us at the retreat had been looking at as a way to fund product without the involvement of venture capital.

* Stefan Magdalinski showed us how he liberated government data and handed it to the people who own the data, the people.

More important than the presentations and the projects were the connections made, made between people in the NGO space, and the education space with others that can help them. There have been a few projects that have rolled out of this. Resources have been allocated, and the geeks are helping each other wherever possible.

This retreat was one of binding a community around a purpose, the organisers should be proud. The people were amazing, and the outputs are good. What happens now is up to the participants, the connectors have done a fine job of putting the right people together, and I'm honoured to have been included.

External links:

From Cognician - http://cognician.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/geekretreat/ http://cognician.ning.com/profiles/blogs/geekretreat-an-inspirational
Elaine Rumboll's Blog
Eve D's Blog
Peter Flynn's Blog
Jarred Cinman's vies on the retreat