We Asked Some Of Australia’s Best Young Minds To Pitch A New Idea; You Can Now Vote For Your Favourite

Last weekend we invited 200 incredible (read: incredibly intimidating) young Australians to Canberra and hosted a huge three-day unconference for them to share their ideas. As opposed to a regular conference — where people wear suits and prepare PowerPoints and compare business cards with varying amounts of Patrick Bateman-style dread and anxiety — Junket was a bit of a loose affair.

We picked a broad group of ridiculously impressive people from the arts, sciences and cultural spheres, shook ’em all together with equal doses of caffeine and alcohol, and let them design their own program of events. It resulted in 57 considered hour-long sessions about politics, sexuality, diversity, economics, and science packed into a single day, a whole lot of inspiration, a Beyonce dance class, and this: 41 tangible pitches about an idea or business venture that could really help with one of these topics.

Teaming up with the folks at The Telstra Imaginarium, we asked delegates to cram their genius into a 60-second elevator pitch (inside an actual elevator) and they didn’t disappoint.

In the videos — which have just gone online — The Project producer Tom Whitty suggests an AirBnB-style app for victims of domestic violence in need of emergency shelter; engineer Yassmin Abdel-Magied pitches a resource guide on how to be a better ally to people of colour; Young Australian of the Year Drisana Levitzke-Gray advocates for a program to bring Auslan into the mainstream; and both actress Jess Tovey and former GetUp director Simon Shiekh raise the possibility of a virtual reality tool to better teach kids about climate change.

Also, DJ and chef Andrew Levins gets pelted with chocolate for some reason.

You can vote for your favourite before December 2, and the delegate with the most popular pitch will receive a technology prize pack from Telstra valued at over $1,300.

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Check out the entries and vote here.