Change is cool, at least that’s what the Obama campaign made it look like. For it was the magic word that was uttered from that teenager, to her grandmother in the dining room, all of course with varying degrees of definition, and whatever it might have meant for different people, it was quite significantly the sole driver of inspiration during the tough moments last year.

SIME 08 was all about defining the DNA of change. Succinctly put to the crowd and the panel of thought leaders was the question, are you a change maker? And the answers were to varying degrees, from “What the bleep” to “Yes, I am, hell”. And recently we were going through the digital knowledge from the last year’s show, we found a dusty tape that had something very interesting, and on digitized (though the shaky camera movements and the background noise was quite much to completely eliminate), we found some 60 seconds of raw sheer optimism.

Chairman of SIME, Ola Ahlvarsson had a quick chat with founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and Matt Bross, CTO of British Telecom, asking them what the DNA of change was.And to them it was about people / human optimism, about innovation at the speed of life inspired by people and not at the speed of technology.

Clearly, its about us, its about people and the optimism, and that is something that will only take different connotations. Change was one such connotation. SIME is proud to have been part of the global movement.

SIME Talks 8 - Nostalgia Edition: Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, “Human Optimism is the DNA of Change” from SIME on Vimeo.