Digibury: Places, peace and poetry

It might have been a cold and dark December night, but that didn't dent the enthusiasm and passion of our tip top presenters and audience at Wednesday's Digibury.

Held once again at The Gulbenkian Cabaret Stage, we hunkered down to enjoy three very interesting and diverse talks, pulling in themes including ways in which social media creates poetry and how big data helps street cobblers in Pakistan.

Three enlightening talks:

#1: Dark matter, DNA and terrorism

There are some problems in life that most of us never really need to worry about. For example, can you fit the Big Bang into a museum... or can people really experience gravity 'surfing'? But if you're Kate Kneale or Zara McKenzie from Marine Studios and HKD Ltd, these are not only everyday challenges, they're problems that need to be solved. Drawing on their present work on a new Climate Change gallery for the Singapore Science Centre and the refurbishment of the Hong Kong Space Museum, we learnt how.

#2: Peace Through Prosperity

When we first became aware of Kubair Shirazee's work, we immediately wanted to know more. And this presentation didn't disappoint. In his fascinating talk, Kubair explained how the charity he co-founded, Peace Through Prosperity, helps prevent radicalisation of the most at-risk communities in society by way of micro-entrepreneurship, big data and analytics... and very hard work. The result? Creating real opportunities for peace and development in conflict zones.

#3: Crowdsourced poetry

Dan Simpson is a spoken word poet and compère, poetry projects and event organiser, workshop facilitator and writer. His poetry deals with love and literature, science and stars, people and PAC-MAN: all that good geeky stuff. He also does crowdsource poetry, which was exactly what he talked about in his presentation.

Been inspired? Got something to talk about? Submit your idea here and you too can be a Digibury speaker.

Next Digibury event: January 8 at The Gulbenkian.