A day-and-a-half summit, where today’s executives and tomorrow’s leaders from our business, education and civic communities connect, communicate and collaborate on issues vital to a thriving Atlanta region.

And YOU CAN GET INVOLVED! [The following is from a @colabsummit email blast.]

For this inaugural summit, we’re launching a social innovation experiment through our LABS, to capture the ideas, dreams and hopes of what we want the future of greater Atlanta to be. And we’re asking for your help.

We need your vision, your dreams, and your ideas (lots of them) on how to solve six challenges directly related to our three main themes at (co)lab: Attracting & Retaining Talent, Cultivating Innovation and Transforming Education.

To get us started, dozens of local thought leaders, content experts and storytellers have spent weeks framing these six challenges, writing compelling briefs and creating powerful videos that will make you laugh and cry.

Here’s how you can help.

At this moment, you have immediate access to IdeaString, a digital collaborative ideation platform where together we can solve six core challenges facing the Atlanta region. We encourage you to learn about these challenges, login to IdeaString, and contribute your best ideas.

The top ideas posted onto IdeaString will be presented at (co)lab during the closing keynote, following Thomas Friedman. And all ideas will be collected into a final report that will be sent to all (co)lab partners, attendees and change agents across the greater Atlanta region.

Our goal is to catalyze great thinking and bold solutions that none of us working independently could achieve. So get in there, add your brilliant ideas and help us transform our greatest challenges into exciting opportunities. Together, we can dream and build a truly greater Atlanta region.

To access IdeaString: [as a non-attendee, AND as a powerful solution seeker!]

We invite you to share IdeaString with friends, peers, co-workers and other passionate citizens. If they are not registered for (co)lab, have them fill out this quick form to be added to IdeaString: IdeaString registration

CHALLENGES

How might we design our communities to attract and retain the creative class?
How might we better celebrate and amplify our arts and cultural assets?
How might we foster partnerships among business, universities and governments to spark innovation and entrepreneurship?
How might we make our cities and our region smarter, more efficient, more connected and more collaborative through technology?
How might we raise Metro Atlanta’s current High School graduation rate to 90%
How might communities rally around our students to help develop the next generation of leaders?

This week, I enjoyed the gift of introducing my friend Grant Lichtman at Tuesday’s SAIS Lunch-n-Learn. He asked that I do so with the first three paragraphs of his introduction to The Falconer: What We Wished We Had Learned In School.

School prepares us to be successful. We aspire to be happy.
– Robert Landis, Falconer Class of 2001

We are not teaching our children, our students, and our co-workers what they really need to know. The lessons aren’t out there on some shelf or Web site. They won’t be found with more money and more programs to push more stuff in more different ways at our kids and our employees. It’s not about computer-to-student ratios, distance learning, high-speed links to the Library of Congress, or lecture podcasts. It’s not a pricey self-help guru claiming that his “new thing” is new, seven cookbook steps to success, or ten simple mileposts to make a million for your company.

Those tools help, but they are the dressing, like ornaments on a Christmas tree. We need to pay attention to the tree itself. Look at the people who invented computers, who designed the Internet, who overcame the Depression, who envisioned the best sellers, who challenged racism, who explored the ocean depths, who built the Panama Canal, who created the management-consulting firms that you hire to tell you how to run your business more efficiently. I want my children and my employees and my co-workers and my friends to exhibit qualities like invention, courage, creativity, insight, design, and vision a lot more than I want them to know the capitals of South America or the sequence of presidents and kings, fractions, computer science, art history, running a cash register, or throwing a football.

In short, I want us to spend more time teaching how to generate and recognize elegant solutions to the many problems facing our world.

School could – should – be more about generating and recognizing elegant solutions to the many problems facing our world. Content and skills could – should- be wrapped in contexts of citizenship, character, and caring. Not separate programs. Integrated programs. Systems programs.

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What a pleasure it has been to help host Grant in Atlanta this week. After talking for almost two hours about the scope of educational transformation we envision at Unboundary, and after introducing Grant to the studio, we shot our weekly video interview – happily recorded not over Skype, but in the same room, sitting with each other.