Having just returned from a whirlwind two and a half days of Wired11 conference in London I’m chock-full of inspiration and lingering thoughts from wicked conversations.

Presided over by David Rowan and a rocking Wired team, the setting was picture perfect, taking up parts of the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel with all its old-world charm of booking offices, arrival halls and a busy-quiet atmosphere.

Some 300 people attended from the worlds of advertising and startups, tech, biotech and the media, with everyone in a beautiful mishmash of thoughts and conversations across all Olympic thought-disciplines.

While all talks were fascinating and taught me heaps, especially a few struck me: A young animator and children’s books author from India named Shilo presented some of the most magic illustrations and storytelling techniques for an iPad I have ever witnessed. She captured my imagination and sent me flying across worlds like few times before.

Aza Raskin’s talk about Massive Health and the company’s mission to lead health care through a design renaissance was amazing, as was Bjarke Ingels’ talk on smart architecture, taking the crowd through an epic journey of just how imaginative and thrilling architecture can be. Juliana of Ushahidi did, as always, a stellar job of presenting their mission to crowdsource information in crisis situations and help people better understand a world sometimes crumbling in chaos around them.

Face.com’s demonstration of their powerful facial recognition software and subsequent talks with Gil and Gregg got me thinking about how we at Refugees United could potentially leverage their brilliant work to help families reconnect. Hopefully more conversations on this will help us to clear the picture and dig out intriguing thoughts and possibilities.

Presenting the mission of Refugees United there was a true privilege, given that many of the talks were focused on scalable business solutions, next-step investment areas and so on. Digging deeper into the despair separation from loved ones awakens in refugees across the world allowed me to bring the conference “back to reality” as someone tweeted, when people realized that the entire world is not connected, is not scrambling for the next financial opportunity, but is rather scrambling to survive on hand-outs and what meager existence they can carve out of this life.

I spoke about the origins of Refugees United, how our encounter with Mansour and helping him find one missing brother in the south of Russia had spurred us on to create the organization; I spoke about how the, almost, real-life open-source evolution of RU came from the private partnerships we engaged with early on, leading to a different take on trying to solve this global problem. Speaking about some of the technical challenges Refugees United face in building an intuitive system to be used by refugees and agencies alike, maybe a few minds were set aglow – there’s nothing we love better than to hear from techies who can teach us how to do things better 🙂 

Finally, I showcased how UNHCR and Kenya Red Cross in refugee camps and urban areas are using our mobile tools to help refugees sign up, search and reconnect. Most of all, I spoke of the tragedy filling the hearts of every parent, sibling and child desperately trying to find their missing hope – and I hope it resonated with the people who came to listen. 

Thanks to the Wired team for making this such an enjoyable event. Here’s a link to the videos: wired.co.uk/11 

Christopher