Mikaela Jade is a former park ranger turned tech entrepreneur and CEO. She leads Indigital, ideas that came to her in the shower ten years ago and that she pursued with no previous tech experience.
She joins Shirley Chowdhary for this week's ep of The Leadership Lessons, highlighting how her own story shows the possibilities in pursuing the best ideas, regardless of your background or previous story.
For Mikaela, the possibility was to use augmented reality to tell Indigenous stories. Still working as a park ranger when she came up with the idea, she knew there had to be better way to share traditional, Indigenous perspectives at cultural sites.
“My heart just broke every time we put a metal, aluminum sign in the ground in front of these cultural places that are so significant to the community that live there, and whose country it was,” she says.
“But also, to all the visitors that were coming. The signs would say things like: “This is an Aboriginal site” and that would be it…not incorporating the traditional perspectives of the site at all.”
Mikaela is a proud Cabrogal woman, had the opportunity to see augmented reality for the first time at a university event, and it’s spurred her on to create to use the cutting-edge technology.
“What if we could use this technology where instead of reading a sign when you go to a place, couldn’t you just put your phone up and an elder could appear in holographic format and tell you the right story, for the right reasons, in the right language, at the right place, at the right time?”
Based in Kakadu at the time, Jade tells Shirley that everyone thought she was mad to pursue what then seemed to be such an outland-ish idea. “I had no idea was I was doing! No idea what I was doing from a tech perspective."
The Leadership Lessons is made possible thanks to the excellent support of Salesforce. It's produced by Agenda Media, publisher of Women's Agenda. You can check out our other podcast, The Women's Agenda Podcast.
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