On 1 October 2018, we travel up the coast of the South Africa to prepare for the LongRideToFreedom.com. Along the way, we will be doing the following.
- Reverse mapping the new route for the Long Ride To Freedom from Johannesburg to Cape Town – an annual marketing event hosted by Leaderless, The Ecommerce Forum of Africa and other disruptive companies to help educate people about disruptive technologies and how to shift from one job to another. We will also meet with local tourist offices to help prepare for the annual event.
- Full-day ecommerce seminars in 10 major locations. Half the day will be spent educating groups of people about the different facets of ecommerce and the other half will be spent teaching people about the different ecommerce platforms – notably WooCommerce, Shopify and Magento.
- Identify areas where we will build the Decentralised Innovation Hubs we want to establish.
- Meetings with local farmers along the way to help build a Blockchain application that will bypass supermarkets and push the growth of ecommerce.
On the latter point. We have started engaging with our agricultural clients at Vane to help connect the dots as we travel up the coast of South Africa. The reason we have chosen this route is because it connects the dots along a fibre optic route that will connect one Decentralised Innovation Hub to the next with the help of the Fibre Council of South Africa.
We don’t know exactly what the future of the digital world holds for us as humans but what I personally believe is that it will affect everyone’s jobs and if it goes unguided, we can either see the demise of our species or we can use the digital world to buy us time in order to return to our values and principles whilst pursuing our true passions.
The name Long Ride To Freedom comes from Nelson Mandela’s book The Long Walk To Freedom. A long ride, because here we will invite cyclists, motorobike riders and four wheeled enthusiasts to join in an uplifting event across the country where we begin to educate people about the digital world, how it affects all of us and how we could use it to our advantage.
Yes, the Long Walk To Freedom was a story about a man fighting to free his people but more than this, it was about his own internal journey to fight his own demons and this is what the Long Ride To Freedom is all about – each individual fighting his or her own internal battles along their own journey to bring out the Madiba in themselves. We will travel, we will meet, we will connect and build bridges using technology.
Much as many don’t like change, The Fourth Industrial Revolution will force change upon all of us. So, what if we can we convert trucks into electric trucks and use one drop of petrol less that lines the pockets of corrupt governments, cleans up our planet and eases up the cost of food? What if we have robots do the job we hate doing and tax them to pay for our infrastructure? What if we can remove one small stress at a time by smoothing out the ecommerce delivery process so that we can deliver healthy food directly from the farmer to the consumer and slowly but surely remove the need for addictive pharmaceutical companies?
And what if all we needed to heal as humanity is time, good nutrition and communication?
