Archive for the ‘Foundation’ Category

As announced last month, Sunrise Conference returned for a second year to provide community leadership training to those who want to start, run and manage local community groups.

This year’s speakers included James Murray, Nicola Jackson, Paul Thomas, Lucy Adams, Michael Burgess and Chris Worfolk.

If you missed the conference, don’t worry, we’ll be making all the talks available via Worfolk Lectures. You can follow Sunrise on Twitter to get the latest updates about when the videos will be available. You can also see the photos on Facebook.

A big thanks to all our speakers who gave up their time to share their knowledge and experience!

Prior to the Sunrise Conference 2011, we held a pre-filming event for those speakers who were unable to make it on the day. James Murray was on his way to Stockholm while Nicola Jackson was heading out to Uganda to do some volunteer work, so both had to pre-record.

In August, Simon Wellings delivered a talk to Leeds Skeptics in the Pub entitled “All you wanted to know about the credit crunch (but were too afraid to ask)” looking at the problems with the economy and how money reform could help.

Despite many of our members being unable to attend because they were at Leeds Pride, the August meeting of Humanist Community was both well attended and a fascinating evening.

The topic of conversation covered social justice, balancing freedom of expression with protection of people’s safety, world languages, equality and whether the sausages Gijsbert had been given were actually vegetarian or not – turns out they weren’t, so it was a good job we had such a good discussion about it and checked before he started eating!

Last week we held the 2011 AGM. It was an exciting room to be in, as we discussed the work which has been done over the previous year and some very exciting projects which are up and coming. Don’t worry if you missed it – our 2011 Annual Report is now available to download from our website.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of Sunrise Conference 2011, our second annual conference on community leadership and activism. Join us on Saturday 3rd September for a day of learning and sharing ideas and experience in running local community groups.

Sunrise ran for the first time in 2010, featuring talks, workshops, seminars and discussions from community groups leaders from across the UK.

This year’s event will be run as a virtual conference, streamed live across the internet so you can attend from wherever you are based. Best of all, registration to this year’s event is free, so it is accessible to everyone.

Registration is now open, so sign up today to reserve your spot.

Today, we’re proud to launch our latest project, Worfolk Lectures! The site is an online archive of academic lectures on a variety of ever expanding topics, all available to download or stream in full high definition.

Over the past twelve months we have been rapidly recording and editing together lectures from a variety of talks, conferences and events and after a long and hard slog, we’re finally able to bring this content to the world.

As well as issues with transferring and editing the content together, the final piece fell together in June when Dailymotion offered us a partnership agreement to allow us to host the content, in full HD.

There are already ten lectures available on the site and we will be releasing a new video every Friday in something we’re hoping to coin the Friday lecture. No prizes for guessing how we managed to come up with that name!

Speakers will include Professor A. C. Grayling, Processor Chris French, Dr Gijsbert Stoet, Dr Antony Lempert, Dr Terrence Kee and many others. You can follow us on Twitter to keep up with all the latest updates.

Having officially launched Atheist Stock out of beta last month, we’re pleased to announce the next stage of development – the Atheist Stock API.

The new API service will allow our partners to integrate with our site to allow them to offer our content to their users! It is easy to integrate with and comes with a full software development kit (SDK) as well as documentation to make everything as simple as possible.

We’re pleased to announce that free stock photography website Atheist Stock is now out of beta!

We launched the site in March 2010 and since then we’ve been working to add to the collection and road test the functionality. In October, we reached 1,000 images and the collection is still growing!

Given everything seems to be in working order and we’re now moving into the next phase of development, we’ve now removed the beta sticker from the website. If you haven’t had use of the thousands of available images, then perhaps now is the time to browse our collection.

This month at Leeds Skeptics, Dr Jim Wild made the trip over to talk about weathering solar storms – how coronial mass ejection from The Sun has a significant impact on The Earth and given it has the power to knock out our electricity grid, is something we need to be taking seriously.

It was one of the best talks we have had a in recent times with great feedback coming from those who attended. Big thanks to Jim for making the trip over, you can find out more about him on his website.