2016: Storytelling – Creating Cultural Communities

How the tools of social communications have changed our cultural development and how we can learn the paths of future society. We all have friends we made on the internet, as lives and relationships are increasingly built online, what does this mean to communities and cultures?

Storytelling & Experience: Creating Cultural Communities from The Future of Humanity: Digital Divide Conference

Panelists:

Lee-Sean Huang (@leesean)

Jen Begeal (@jlbhart)

Miguel Sanchez (@MSanchezsWorld)

Moderator: Caitlin Burns (@Caitlin_Burns)

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Moderator: Caitlin Burns (@Caitlin_Burns)

Currently serving as Vice Chair of the Producers’ Guild of America’s New Media Council, Caitlin Burns is a Founder at Datavized, an Immersive Design and technology Lab focused on VR, WebVR and AR applications of Data Visualization. She is also an Entrepreneur in Residence for the US Fund for UNICEF.

For 10 years, Ms. Burns worked as a Transmedia Producer and Franchise Strategist for media companies dealing with emerging business models and multiplatform coordination. Past clients include Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney Fairies, Disney Descendants and Tron Legacy for Disney, James Cameron’s Avatar for Fox, Halo for Microsoft, Happiness Factory for The Coca-Cola Company, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for Nickelodeon and Transformers for Hasbro. She has also worked with Showtime, Pepperidge Farm, Diageo, The Canadian Media Fund, The Oregon Health Authority, Tribeca New Media Fund, UNICEF, FEMSA, Wieden+Kennedy, Reebok, Stratasys and the US Government.

Lee-Sean Huang (@leesean)

Lee-Sean Huang is the cofounder and creative director of Foossa, a community-centered design consultancy.

His work ranges from redesigning the experience of employee health and wellness at a Fortune 500 corporation to helping agencies of the United Nations better manage their institutional knowledge and refresh their public stories in changing times. He has taught senior organizers of the Service Employees International Union ways to rethink labor organizing in a networked age, advised a major social network on the multiple and shifting meanings of friendship, and conducted research supported by the European Union to build tools to scale online citizen debate and deliberation. He recently served as a coordinator for Letter for Black Lives, a crowdsourced open letter-writing and translation project to spark intergenerational and interethnic dialogue about racial justice. He is currently coordinating a collective intelligence project on big data and social innovation for communities of color.

Lee-Sean's career in designing participation and building movements began when he was a student at Harvard, where he studied Government and engaged as a community organizer and human rights activist. He later honed his campaigning and organizing skills running online-centered campaigns forAvaaz.org and Human Rights Watch. Prior to co-founding Foossa, Lee-Sean was the founding member of the design practice at Purpose, a public-benefit consultancy that builds movements and new power models to tackle the world's biggest problems.

Lee-Sean regularly writes, speaks, and teaches about design, storytelling, and social innovation. He is a faculty member at the MFA Design for Social Innovation Program at the School of Visual Arts. He also serves as a founding trustee and treasurer of the Awesome Foundation New York, an international network of donors who give micro-grants to forward the cause of awesome in the universe.

Jen Begeal (@jlbhart)

Jen Begeal is a Digital Storyteller experienced in developing cross-platform marketing campaigns for clients such as Current TV, Verizon Fios1 and A&E. Jen has been instrumental in the strategy and management of large scale social campaigns for entertainment clients including Universal Studios, Disney and Netflix. She currently heads StoryForward NYC producing monthly events promoting New York’s film, theater, gaming and technology communities. Jen is also an adjunct professor in the New Media department at Concordia College where she teaches classes on interactive media.

Miguel Sanchez (@MSanchezsWorld)

Miguel Sanchez i2s the Founder and Creative Director of Mass Ideation, a Bronx based Digital Creative Agency specializing in Transmedia Storytelling and Emerging Technologies. Prior to creating Mass Ideation, Miguel spent 8 years in the New York digital ad world creating high impact animated and interactive experiences for some of the biggest brands in the world. In 2009 he founded Mass Ideation where he began to lead teams in creating campaigns for brands like Pepsi, Lufthansa, Coke, Lexis Nexis, IHOP and Nickelodeon to name a few. Viewing Augmented Reality as an emerging technology with a lot of room for innovation in 2011 he created ARnews.tv to chronicle and promote the best practices, examples and companies working with the technology. Miguel continues to chronicle and work with AR, VR and MR to help brands tell more immersive stories.