What is HeroCamp?

HeroCamp was inspired by a talk given at TED 2008 by Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, the academic behind the Stanford Prison Experiments, on his new bookThe Lucifer Effect. Through his years of research, Phil has come up with the thesis that there is good and evil in all of us and it is bad barrels, not individual bad apples, that lead to evil acts. That is, most people will act according to the accepted norms around them. If it is acceptable to act racist, people will act racist, and so forth.

As Tara Hunt, one of the organizers of HeroCamp, listened to Phil, she was inspired to put the call out via Twitter that what we need is a gathering of Heroes that want to help create other Heroes in the world. This resonated with a large number of people who gathered over lunch at SXSW interactive 08 to discuss how we would approach this. HeroCamp is the result.

HeroCamp is a 4-day long collaboration of people coming together over the question: “How do we inspire others to be heroes?” In order to narrow down the question, we chose to look at ways of creating this program for school kids (haven’t narrowed the age range yet). We have been lucky enough to be joined Matt Langdon, who works with Dr. Zimbardo on a workshop entitled The Hero Workshop as well as renowned collaboration educator,  Jay Cross. There will be experts present, but everyone will have a say and plenty of chance to offer their own ideas and experiences to the mix. The four days will be run, basically, BarCampstyle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcamp

For the schedule of events: see the schedule

The goal? To create a program that can be run by anyone: a parent, a school kid, a teacher, a concerned citizen…anyone. Therefore, the program we design must be:

1. simple
2. inexpensive or free to run
3. fun

We’d love for you to be part of this…so please REGISTER and come join us October 23-26, 2008 in Houston, TX.