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October 26, 2007
POPTech: Our Hawthorn Inn Gang
The Hawthorn Inn in Camden Maine is a special place. I feel so strongly about this that I added the following post to the Trip Advisor website so people can hear about it and appreciate what the inn and its proprietor, Maryanne Shanahan, has to offer. Here's a photo of some of our gang and the happy faces. I wished that I had a chance to take this before some of us left, but that's how it goes. (I'm in black on the far left, next to Maryanne, the innkeeper/owner.)
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Posted by Mike at 06:43 PM | Comments (0) |
« POPTech: Read Ethan Zuckerman's Blog | Main | POPTech: Our Hawthorn Inn Gang »October 21, 2007
POPTech: Caleb Chung - Furby Inventor
Caleb Chung - toy inventor - isn't just a modern day Gepetto as his POPTech bio describes. After a few minutes of being on stage, it's clear that he also channels his inner Tom Hanks character from the movie, "Big." He's a playful man-boy in an adult body - inventing toys, and clearly a genius at that. He took the POPTech stage and immediately brought a laugh to the audience by making reference to his unusual name: he confides that he's half Chinese and half German, meaning that about an hour after eating, he gets hungry for power :)
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Posted by Mike at 07:34 PM | Comments (0) |
« POPTech: Carl Honore on the Slow Movement | Main | POPTech: Caleb Chung - Furby Inventor »October 20, 2007
POPTech: Read Ethan Zuckerman's Blog
Not many people are as amazing at blogging (POPTech or anything else for that matter) as Ethan Zuckerman. If you want an accurate and articulate description of almost every session, go here. Ethan and I are from the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, and live only a few minutes apart. He's amazing at listening, interpreting, and writing in human simulcast. He confessed that it's because he appreciates the value of unplugging from talking, and going into this "zone."
We all benefit from his gift.
I'm shifting to selective blogging from here on out so that I can listen more attentively, make mind-mapping notes by hand, and taking photos. My posts are going to have as many images as I can muster. Also, my brain is starting to seriously churn and assimilate what all this here at POPTech means. It's more a reflective mindful experience than a reporting one. I plan to bring more of that soon, but it takes time to incubate.
So if you would please excuse me, I'm going to listen more right now, and multi-task less.
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« POPTech: Not Just Mars and Venus | Main | POPTech: Read Ethan Zuckerman's Blog »October 19, 2007
POPTech: Carl Honore on the Slow Movement
Carl Honore is taking the stage about the Speed of Human Culture. I'm a great fan of Carl, and I highly recommend his book, "In Praise of Slowness" which is taking the Fast World by storm. He starts by talking about how people told him he’d love Maine because it’s so slow. I am noting that Carl is a very fast talker for a guy who espouses slowing down. He begins making his point about the perils of constantly being "plugged into" technology, by telling a a true story about a couple where the man realized things were very wrong... more...Posted by Mike at 05:27 PM | Comments (0) |
« Jessica Flannery of Kiva.org | Main | POPTech: Carl Honore on the Slow Movement »POPTech: Not Just Mars and Venus
Louann Brizendine, M.D., a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, is the founder of the Women’s and Teen Girls’ Mood and Hormone Clinic. Her message to us is that there is no such thing as the unisex brain, and that because of this there are new understandings about how men and women think,feel, and act as a result of our physiology. While all brains in the womb start out as female, after about 8 weeks males testes releases surges of testosterone that bathe the brain and dramatically alter its development. Similarly, female brains are awashed in progesterone and... more...Posted by Mike at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) |
« Chris Jordan's Visuals at the POPTech 2007 Conference | Main | POPTech: Not Just Mars and Venus »October 18, 2007
Jessica Flannery of Kiva.org
Jessica Flannery (www.kiva.org) is speaking during the "Innovation From the Bottom Up" session and is wowing the POPTech audience. Her enthusiasm is infectious; she's vibrant, passionate, and articulate about what she and her husband Matt have done to enable *anyone* to make a business loan (with as little as $25) to entrepreneurs in Third-world countries, enabling them to rise out of poverty. From Kiva's website: "Jessica first saw the power and beauty of microfinance while working in rural Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda with Village Enterprise Fund and Project Baobab on impact evaluation and program development. Jessica has spoken widely on... more...Posted by Mike at 04:35 PM | Comments (0) |
« POPTech Conference 2007 - "The Human Impact" | Main | Jessica Flannery of Kiva.org »Chris Jordan's Visuals at the POPTech 2007 Conference
Chris Jordan is using the medium of photographic arts to show us the sheer scale and magnitude of waste from consumerism. I just saw a photo of what two million plastic bottles (used in the U.S. every five minutes) looks like. The reason he uses photography to convey his message about the impact of human waste on our world is to try and move people emotionally, instead of just intellectually. It's working. Chris' current exhibit, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, is about the impact American consumerism and greed have on our culture and our planet: “Collectively we have given... more...Posted by Mike at 02:46 PM | Comments (0) |
« Is The World (Really) Flat? | Main | Chris Jordan's Visuals at the POPTech 2007 Conference »POPTech Conference 2007 - "The Human Impact"
I'm BACK! It's exciting to be here at the POPTech Conference. It's my annual pilgrimage to take in ideas and images from remarkable speakers from all over the world, in the tiny hamlet of Camden, a beautiful village with a delightful harbor halfway up the Maine coast.
This year's theme is "The Human Impact" - exploring some of the many ways human beings impact—and are impacted by—the world and each other. This is the description of the conference from the Poptech website:
The dialogue will cover a wide range of topics, from new ways of measuring humanity’s global impact and the promise of bottom-up solutions to global poverty, to the future of the oceans and the dialogue between Islam and the West.We’ll get a deep look at where ideas come from – reviewing startling new scientific insights into the mind and brain, and examine the origins of creativity, innovation, and the essence of human nature.
Next, we will turn our attention to where our ideas are made real: the “systems of civilization” that govern our lives. From human habitats, resources and material culture to the political processes that frame our shared agendas, we’ll take stock of where we are and where we’re going.
We’ll conclude by looking at the inspiring ways new ideas, technologies, and approaches are being used to transform the world—from the bottom up (versus from the top down).
As always, there will be incredible performances, spirited discussions and surprises woven throughout. We will leave Camden with a reframed sense of ourselves, the systems we rely on, and the dynamics of positive change.
It's my 8th year at POPTech, and it began with a homecoming of sorts at the Hawthorne Inn and the wonderful feeling created by the proprietor, Maryanne Shanahan. She is wonderful, and her inn is also a special reason for my journey every year to Camden.
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« "American Hostage" at the POPTech 2006 Conference | Main | On This Thanksgiving Eve »October 21, 2006
Metcalfe Does His POPTech Recap
Bob Metcalfe takes the stage. People behind me notice that with his backpack and sneakers, he looks like he's taking off somewhere.My goodness, he's lost 75 pounds in the last 7 months. He says he "zoned" into a careful diet and says he's not dying, just dying more slowly. We're waiting with baited breath. Bob apologizes to the speakers for surely getting what they said wrong. Since no one ever really changes their minds, POPTech is mostly pointless (audience laughs).
POPTech started with being an extension of the Camden Conference. It is now an entity all its own, as Bob charts the course of POPTech. I'm enjoying this as I'm a 7 year veteran of this conference. Being Human in the Digital Age, Online All the Time, Articicial Worlds, Sea Change, The Next Renaissance, The Impact of Technology on People, were just some of the headlines and themes of our beloved gatherings. Bob salutes POPTech curator Andrew Zolli, who gets a standing ovation. more...
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« More Networking at POPTech | Main | Metcalfe Does His POPTech Recap »"American Hostage" at the POPTech 2006 Conference
The POPTech audience sat in rapt silence as Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carleton told their story described in their new book, "American Hostage." In 2003 Micah and Marie-Helene were in Iraq chronicling the looting of historical articacts from archeological sites dating back thousands of years. Two days before being scheduled to leave, Micah and his Iraqi translater Amir Doshe were kidnapped by insurgent fighters loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in a crowded market in Nasiriyah.
A remarkable aspect of this story was told by Marie-Helene about how Micah's release was made possible by the grassroots, tech-enabled efforts by a wide social network that she and Micah's family enlisted both in America and among people on the ground (connected to the local clerics) inside Iraq. She made a particular point that - in addition to traditional channels - this network rallied a vast array of people to help conduct the delicate negotiations that rescued Micah and Amir (after a tense ten days in captivity) .
One thing that I said to Micah and Marie-Helene after their talk was how powerfully this came across - as a love story. There was one moment in particular during their talk where Micah described how his friend Amir was beaten while blindfolded in captivity. He had to stop for a moment, and you could feel the tears welling up as he tried to regain his composure before the 500+ (totally silent) people in our audience. Marie-Helene gently reached over and touched his hand in a tender gesture. I found myself feeling flush with emotion just witnessing that, as I'm sure others did too.
Another aspect of this story was how fragile events can be that can tilt destiny in one direction versus the next. Although Micah was essentially "undercover" in Iraq, mostly blending into the country with his olive skin and bushy mustache, what tipped his would-be captors that he was an "outsider" was a small digital camera that he had in his hand in the Nasiriyah marketplace. How strange that his destiny shifted in that one brief moment when the camera was spotted.
Micah's gratitude for his release was framed in the context of the terrible executions of two other hostages who preceded him: Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg. The Pearl reference struck close to home for me, since my office in Pittsfield, Massachusetts is also home to the Berkshire Eagle newspaper, where Pearl was a reporter before joining the Wall St Journal.
Later that evening, in a restaurant with Dan Costa, a senior editor with PC Magazine, we talked about how we wished our country could be more conscious of the thousands of soldiers who did not get out of Iraq alive like Micah Garen.
That being said, it was a wonderful experience hearing and later meeting Micah and Marie-Helene. I imagine that their lives will have a future filled with purpose as they raise awareness among people who get to hear their remarkable story.
Continue reading ""American Hostage" at the POPTech 2006 Conference"
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« "Faith" at the POPTech 2006 Conference | Main | "American Hostage" at the POPTech 2006 Conference »October 20, 2006
More Networking at POPTech
Earlier today I had the privilege of having a sushi lunch with two of the POPTech speakers, Kevin Kelly and Robert Freling. Both of these fellows delivered an amazing session that you can read more about in a previous blog posting, and it was a pleasure talking about everyday life stuff like photography and family, as well as some of the heady and thoughtful subjects that they spoke so elegantly about.
Speaking of networking, I have to introduce Bob to two of the most remarkable people that I know, Sally Goodrich and her husband Don, who live in Bennington Vermont, near my hometown in western Massachusetts. Sally and Don lost a son, Peter, who was on UAL Flight 175 which was hijacked into the WTC South Tower on 9/11.
This is an incredibly powerful story, as Sally and Don, in response to Peter’s death, took whatever compensation they received and decided to build a school for girls in Afghanistan. The school recently opened on the 5th anniversary of 9/11. More information can be found about their mission here on the Peter M. Goodrich foundation.
To make a long networking story short, last year I arranged for Sally to meet with Sanjit Bunker Roy, who was an inspiration in helping Sally with ideas to solve the energy and water needs of the school with using technologies like solar electrification. When Robert Freling and I talked about that initiative, he also wanted to know more about Sally and this remarkable project that she and Don had come to fulfill. (Sally and Don, if you're reading this, Robert would love to know more about you and somehow connect on the subject of solar power for the school.)
At present, there is also a documentary film in the works by my friend Rick Derby, an HBO award-winning documentary film maker (google the title "Rocks With Wings" or "Rick Derby"), who is putting his heart and soul into this project. More of this is unfolding day-by-day. I find it humbling and exciting that life manages to find a way for the people I described to come together, with seemingly orthogonal connections even making their way through avenues like folks I've met at POPTech.
(Additional note: There is an exciting notion to incorporate the music of Haale, who weaves Sufi inspired melodies with poetry by Rumi, a 13th century Afghan mystic, to be part of the Goodrich documentary. Go to Haale's website and find out if she's going to be performing near you - www.haale.com.)
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« "Taking On Superpowers" at the POPTech 2006 Conference | Main | More Networking at POPTech »"Faith" at the POPTech 2006 Conference
Martin Marty takes the stage. He is presenting on fundamentalism and religion in the world today. As a prominent pastor, teacher, scholar and interpreter of religion and culture, he has written more than 50 books and received 75 (!!) honorary doctorate degrees.Richard Dawkins is the other speaker. Richard – an Oxford biologist - also comes with remarkable credentials but from an entirely different perspective. His book, The God Delusion, criticizes religion for its intolerance. He says it's the scientist and humanist in him that makes him hostile to religions—fundamentalist Christianity and Islam come in for the most opprobrium—that close people's minds to scientific truth, oppress women and abuse children psychologically with the notion of eternal damnation. more...
Posted by Mike at 02:47 PM | Comments (0) |
« Incredible Dinners at POPTech | Main | "Faith" at the POPTech 2006 Conference »"Taking On Superpowers" at the POPTech 2006 Conference
Taking on Superpowers is the subject of the next talk featuring two past POPTech heavyweights, Juan Enriquez and Thomas Barnett.
Enriquez begins and we immediately delve into a remarkable presentation about nationalism, patriotism, and identity. He challenges us to consider the question of who we are as a nation. One question posed is – “How many stars will there be on the US flag 50 years from now?” 55? 65? Or fewer? We started with 13. Interesting note: No US president ever died with the same number of stars on the flag as on the day that he was born.
Will there be no border between US and Canada in 50 years? People assume continuity with regard to nations, when there is not and never really has been. He showed is a dynamic map illustrating the changing empires in Europe and the Middle East to illustrate the point. It was remarkable.
As an example, he discussed the British empire contraction from 1905 to 1955 by a factor of about 15. Over the span of those 50 years, they never dreamed of the contraction that unfolded. He says that the real danger to the United States is not “from the outside,” but that the real “danger” in the USA is from what happens on the inside.
No one is really talking to each other from each side of the left/right political camps in any serious form of collaboration. He says to remember that flags and countries can disappear just like companies. He says there is an enormous amount of churn in our institutions and that our national divisions can tear apart this country.
Message: Don’t take your country for granted. It is not guaranteed that it will stay. There are fundamental divisions and polarizations occurring with both sides becoming increasingly polarized and isolated. This has to stop – and to do so we have to start a serious conversation. One thing he closes with are trend graphs technology exports showing how we are now contracting, with countries like China expanding. We have a collapsing population of science and engineering graduates and long term, this will render us less relevant. He believes that we must fix our education system or there will not be 50 stars in the flag.
Later on he makes note that in the course of US history, New England states pressed the idea of seceding – 4 times. (Quebec isn’t the only province/state to want to leave.)
Now Tom Barnett takes the stage.
He starts be addressing the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. After ideology, what do we fight over? We now experience wars of the spirit, and wars of identity. Globalization as an irresistible and never ending progression will change the face of the globe whether we want it to or not.
One consequence: there are 3 billion new capitalists and consumers worldwide.
(I recall Lester Brown saying yesterday that China already consumes more basic resources than the US, like cement, steel, and building products. What happens if China catches up with USA per-capita consumption? If they spend their money the way that the US does (and we are selling them on this way of life), at 1.5B people, they will consume twice as much paper as everyone else and there go the forests. If they have the same number of cars per capita, they alone would need 99M barrels of oil/day (84M of oil per day is our present worldwide availability. Answer: It’s not possible for China to consume per capita as US. We will have to change or things will unravel. Claims on the Earth’s resources are unsustainable.)
Barnett’s talk is rapid-fire and intense from this point on about winning the war with failed nation states and the incredible underestimation about the time and resources needed to winning the peace in the aftermath of our Leviathan military being able to project force. This is a major aspect of his books that is far too complex to address here.
However, he closes with a compelling discourse about how critical the “other superpower” – China, will be in the future of the geopolitical landscape. They will be critical in every part of the world, including with regard to North Korea.
In short, there will have to be a powerful collaboration between the US and China for world stabilization.
In the follow up Q&A, Enriquez says that our national priorities in the US must shift. One way to effect that shift is to give every parent with a child, a proxy vote for each child, so as to change how we prioritize the future.
Barnett talks about the collaboration between the “New BRIT” of the future - Brazil Russia India and China. They are the new “core” for securing the peace in post-war failed states.
Continue reading ""Taking On Superpowers" at the POPTech 2006 Conference"
Posted by Mike at 11:14 AM | Comments (0) |
« "Green Shift" at the POPTech 2006 Conference | Main | "Taking On Superpowers" at the POPTech 2006 Conference »Incredible Dinners at POPTech
Last night I had the pleasure of sharing a dinner at Camden’s local Thai restaurant with Dr. Tom Barnett, POPTech’s next program speaker. Tom wrote a New York Times best-selling book, The Pentagon’s New Map, which outlined a new approach to globalization that redefines the dynamics of global politics and development. Visit his blog for everything from his take on subjects ranging from the Middle East, North Korea, and Iran to reading his experiences adopting a baby girl from China.
(Tom also has a new book called, Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating, which continues on with prescriptive ideas as a follow up to his first book.)
Later on that evening, I reflected on the remarkable folks who I’ve shared a lunch or dinner, or other social time here in Camden. They include Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Li Lu, a co-leader of the Tien An Men student protests, John Scully, former CEO of Pepsico and Apple, the performer Haale, Joseph Chamie from the United Nations, Sanjit Bunker Roy of the Barefoot College, Ira Glasser, former head of the ACLU, and others…
Only at POPTech. Incredible.
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« "Rodrigo and Gabriela" at the POPTech 2006 Conference | Main | Incredible Dinners at POPTech »October 19, 2006
"Green Shift" at the POPTech 2006 Conference
Thomas Friedman, Stewart Brand, Lester Brown, and Robert Freling are stunning the POPTech audience with a discussion about the dramatic shifts happening in the world from our consumption on non-renewable fuels, population growth, and geopolitical impacts from the relentless consumption of oil and rising prices.
The storytelling aspects of these powerful speakers is captivating. Two of them simply sat in a chair and talked without any fancy graphics and slides. The room is silent and the discourse is powerful and captivating.
Brand's and Freling's audiovisuals are remarkable. There is far too much content in from this quartet to capture for this blog in real-time. Suffice to say that their message about the current and (near) future implications of our global growing consumption of fuel (China, India, and the former USSR are consuming resources at exponential rates) is already creating an upheaval of life on this planet with inevitable impact on a dramatic scale.
Freling's talk evokes memories of last year's inspirational POPTech presentation by Bunker Roy on the work of the Barefoot College in India, which has trained two generations of villagers without any formal paper qualifications to become health-care workers, solar engineers, hand-pump mechanics and teachers in their communities. He is hopeful as he describes the role of technology in solving so many of the world's problems, using solar power examples in rural Third World villages. He is working with the Partners in Health initiative at the Clinton Foundation.
One thing I found surprising from Stewart Brand was the forecast on polulation growth to 8-9 billion, followed by a dramatic decline back down to 3 billion. For more on this, go to some of Brand's research where he references forecasts based upon U.N. population studies.
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Posted by Mike at 09:01 PM | Comments (0) |
« "Technology's Embrace" at the POPTech 2006 Conference | Main | "Green Shift" at the POPTech 2006 Conference »"Rodrigo and Gabriela" at the POPTech 2006 Conference
Oh My God - I have just experienced the most unbelievable pair of guitar players that I have ever seen in my life. I kid you freakin' not. Here, live on the stage at POPTech. You must find out more about "Rodrigo y Gabriela" at www.rodgab.com. The house was rocked!
Here's what some other folks around the world have said:
'This [the album] is assured, inventive stuff. The joy of Mex' - The Sun
'It it's rip-roaring, flamenco-flecked jazz-tinged rock'n'roll you're after, then you've come to the right place' - The Irish Times
This is a World Music album that swings' - Guardian
'Electrifying...they had us entranced and kept us in that state for the next 90 minutes' - The Independent
'This is brilliant' - Total Music Magazine
Album of the Month, ‘Inspirational’ - Guitar Techniques
‘Infectious’ - Indie London
'Fierce Emotion..raw excitment' - Guitarist Magazine
‘Stunning’ - Total Guitar
‘Spellbinding..It should leave you breathless.’ - IndieLondon
'Hotter than a bag of Mexican chilli peppers, a phenomenal live CD', - 10/10 DVD Fever
'Rodrigo y Gabriela leap musical boundaries like Grand National champions' - Songlines
‘They trade off one another with staggering effect.’ - Get Ready to Rock
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Posted by Mike at 07:44 PM | Comments (0) |
« "Emergence" at the POPTech 2006 Conference | Main | "Rodrigo and Gabriela" at the POPTech 2006 Conference »"Technology's Embrace" at the POPTech 2006 Conference
Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine is speaking about technology and its consequences. He describes that the processing power, the interconnections (synapses/links), the actions/clicks, and the memory of the collective (global) web, resembles the profile of the human brain.
I am reminded of the parallels and the way they’re described in Gaia Theory and the concept of the Global Brain. (Some of my favorite ideas on this subject are wonderfully expressed by the futurist Peter Russell.)
Kelly is also talking about technology by asking us the question, “What is it that technology itself wants?” He describes that it wants to copy, to replicate, and to increase its power density and efficiency. That it wants to be copied without restraint, and that it does not want to be prohibited.
I can hear echoes of “meme theory” which was presented last year at POPTech by Dr. Susan Blackmore in her book, “The Meme Machine.” It was a talk that I don’t think many folks fully realized in its implications. For more on memes, look into the book, "The Selfish Gene", where Richard Dawkins proposed the concept of the meme as a unit of culture, spread by imitation.
In the context posed by Kelly, technology has a mind of its own. I imagine the ego-centric human-centric view of consciousness would take this to be a rather scary concept. Who didn’t shiver when the HAL 2000 came to life in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” or when you recall the swarms of sentient machines trying to wipe out Zion, the last human city. But Kelly doesn’t pain a good/evil agenda of technology; that there are no “bad” technologies – they are simply what they are. And that technology is marching on, to the point that by 2020 to 2040, the processing power of the collective earth/Web will exceed the computing power of all the humans on planet.
I wonder what it will think?
P.S. Some interesting factoids from Kelly. At present, there are:
1 billion PC chips on the internet
1 million emails per second
1 million IM messages per second
8 terabytes per second of traffic
65 billion phone calls per year
20 exabytes of magnetic storage
1 million voice queries per hour
2 billion location nodes activated
600 billion RFID tags in use
Continue reading ""Technology's Embrace" at the POPTech 2006 Conference"
Posted by Mike at 04:58 PM | Comments (0) |
« POPTech Conference 2006 - "Dangerous Ideas" | Main | "Technology's Embrace" at the POPTech 2006 Conference »"Emergence" at the POPTech 2006 Conference
Brian Eno, the artist and musician took the POPTech stage to discuss the concept of “Emergence.” He’s referencing Daniel Dennett’s book, “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” which posits that complex systems emerge from simple building blocks, a bottom-up view of emergence as contrasted with the idea that systems come into being from the top-down.I didn’t realize that Dennett is the director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, which also happens to be my alma mater.
What struck me was the elegance with which Eno described looking at systems from this view and how the concepts posed by Darwin (and Dennett's interpretation) suggests that humankind consider itself with a sense of humility instead of ego. As a speaker, Eno is thought provoking and soft-spoken. It’s a nice way to begin a very reflective 3 days at this incredible event. He is encouraging us to consider the idea of emergence by thinking and feeling about things in a different way. I am conscious of the theme of this year's conference being about "Dangerous Ideas." It's fascinating that looking at our universe in different ways is and has been considered "dangerous."
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Posted by Mike at 02:53 PM | Comments (0) |
« The QSM 2006 SLIM User Conference | Main | "Emergence" at the POPTech 2006 Conference »POPTech Conference 2006 - "Dangerous Ideas"
Last night I arrived at the splendid Hawthorn Inn overlooking Camden Harbor here in Maine. After a 6 hour drive through the beautiful New England countryside, I finally arrived in this bucolic and quintessestial coastal town. I slept like a baby and woke early. Blogging at 5:30 am, the inn is quiet and peaceful. It's a reunion in many ways, being greeted last night by old friends, meeting new ones, and taking in the hospitality of Maryanne Shanahan who is the inkeeper at this lovely bed and breakfast.
This year, POPTech 2006's theme is, "Dangerous Ideas." The conference website describes it as follows:
What is a “dangerous” idea? It’s one that upends conventions, challenges assumptions and breaks taboos, reordering our sense of the world and our place within it. It’s an idea, as Victor Hugo said, whose time has come.Pop!Tech 2006, our 10th anniversary gathering, will again bring 500 extraordinary people together with more than 30 speakers, performers, iconoclasts and visionaries to think about the social impact of new technologies and the future of ideas. Here’s just some of what we’ll be discussing:
* The nature of risk in the connected age
* Bright green possibilities
* Globalization’s great surprises
* The role of faith and fundamentalism
* Pandemics and their prevention
* New approaches to education
* The creative imperative
* New frontiers of exploration
* What technology wants from us
* Our constructed selves
* Conflict, resolution and the possibility of peaceCheck out the roster of speakers, which includes New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Thomas Friedman, game design god Will Wright, ambient music pioneer Brian Eno, global health visionary (and newly minted MacArthur Fellow) Victoria Hale, legendary geneticist Richard Dawkins, renowned environmentalist Lester Brown, Tibetan education pioneer Losang Ragbey, chef and gastronomic invetor Homaro Cantu, and dozens more - and that doesn't even touch on the many incredible performers and unannounced special guests.
Like every Pop!Tech, the 2006 event will feature a rich mix of presentations, performances and one-of-a-kind surprises. Be prepared to be wowed.
All of these seem to be incredible topics that you don't hear discussed at just any conference quite like the way subjects are presented here. I always imagined that two of my passions, technology and the nature of conflict, were an unusual combination. It's really exciting to see that both of these subjects are on the headlines here. It's my 7th year at POPTech and it feels really good to be back at one of my "intellectual homes." Stay tuned.
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« Fortune 500 Executives Reconsider 24/7 | Main | Complexity's Rising Tide »November 27, 2005
Partisan Perceptions and Ingo Gunther’s Globes
A term often used in the modern theory and practice of conflict resolution is “partisan perceptions”. To some it carries a ring of academic jargon, but in practice it’s at the very heart of creating mutual understanding between parties in conflict, a vital step in moving toward resolution.Partisan perception refers to the fact that we all have unconscious and sometimes hidden biases about how we see the world, which drives our sense of “the truth”. These biases exist because “what we see” is shaped in large measure by the lens through which we view a situation. This lens is determined by our personal history and our beliefs, among many other things. For example, how might you see a rainforest? It may have one reality if you’re an ecologist or climatologist. But it’s entirely another if you’re a Brazilian land developer, a coffee grower, or a timber executive. (If you looked at a project deadline, what does it look like if you were a senior executive in charge? A project manager, someone in marketing, or a venture capitalist/investor?)
Ingo Gunther is someone who directly challenges people with the question of how they see the world. He is described as an artist, correspondent, and author. Ingo lives in New York, but was born in Germany, traveled throughout Africa, is an accredited correspondent at the U.N., and has worked in Japanese television South America and Asia. He also founded the first independent TV station in Eastern Europe, nine months before the reunification of Germany. Ingo is someone who has seen the world through many lenses. (An interesting interview from a writer in Japan is here.)Here is an example of a globe from Ingo’s “Worldprocessor” art exhibit. This one is called High Tension / Crisis Zones. The highlighted areas indicate where political crises have developed military aspects. When you look at information presented this way, you get a different perspective about our world and along with it, a different feeling.
more...
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Posted by Mike at 07:24 AM | Comments (0) |
« China and Technology | Main | Tom Demarco and Impossible Zones »October 21, 2005
Yochai Benkler of Yale on Open Source Collaboration
On the POPTech stage is Yochai Benkler of Yale talking about knowledge and the collaborative effort of groups, and that through a participatory process, creates an end result that can be the equivalent of a full-time PhD.What this brings to mind for me if the book, "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki." (a book given to me by my 7th/8th Grade students who I recently trained in the "difficult conversations" of peer mediation).
I can see this model in a self-organizing system of open source computing, where the collective meta-mind sets its own tone and pace of sharing knowledge which results in an application created for the collective good. (Or when a group of people guess the number of beans in a jar, and collectively estimate the number of those beans more accurately than any single person.) more...
Posted by Mike at 05:46 PM | Comments (0) |
« Space Travel as Inspiration and Vision at POPTech | Main | Yochai Benkler of Yale on Open Source Collaboration »China and Technology
Oded Shankar, author of "The Chinese Century - The Rising Chinese Economy and its Impact on the Global Economy", now has the stage at the POPTech Conference.Thus far Oded is discussing the massive trade deficit with China and the exports of manufactured goods to the U.S. Oded is also the Chair of Global Busisess Management at Ford Motor, which yesterday posted a quarterly loss of over $280 million. 50% of the content of Ford's new Rover Maverick truck is from China.
We think of China and manufactured goods, but I've been in recent talks with a company that is interested in having my team benchmark the development productivity of its software operations in the U.S., Europe, and - not India, but China.
What comes to mind for me is the blurring of offshoring and outsourcing in both maufacturing with knowledge work (which includes sofware design and development). The unifying economic force with regards to outsourcing of manufacturing and IT is the lower cost of labor. But what most technology companies fail to recognize is the difficulty of outsourcing or offshoring R&D, which poses difficulties that do not exist on work that is basically a ramp-up of low-cost, repetitive activities like production. more...
Posted by Mike at 12:34 PM | Comments (0) |
« POPTech in beautiful Camden Maine | Main | China and Technology »October 20, 2005
Space Travel as Inspiration and Vision at POPTech
Peter Diamandis is the Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation which recently awarded a $10,000,000 prize for private spaceflight. Peter's speech reminds me of how the Apollo space program inspired a generation of young people to pursue careers in science and engineering. (I remember my own starry-eyed wonder watching Apollo launches and how it set a course for my own pursuit of science.)
What I find remarkable about the energy of people like Peter is the passion behind the vision that he espouses. And when I think back on then President Kennedy's call to put a man on the moon, I am struck by the alignment of energy that our entire country experienced in that period. With an entire nation of people working in such mass collaboration, amazing feats were possible. Seeing Peter's photos reminds me of that spirit.
That's the kind of passion that surely is possible on several dimensions of scale when we find a way to create alignments in our work communities. Innovation thrives, and teams achieve things at warp speed, which is impossible when a community is fighting itself.
Peter closes with, "The most critical tool for solving humanity's most grand challenges, is a committed and passionate mind." Bravo!
Post script: Just when I thought I heard my dose of inspiration for the day, along came Marcia McNutt on deep ocean research using marine geophysical data to study the physical properties of the Earth beneath the oceans. Then came Dr. Carolyn Porco, who is the leader of the Cassini Science Imaging Team and a lead imaging scientist on the New Horizons Pluto/Kuiper Belt mission.
In her closing remarks, Carolyn talked about the positively spiritual experience invoked from bearing witness to the marvels of space, and her warm and inspirational message brought the entire opera house to its feet in thunderous applause. It was truly a highlight of the conference, as it brought out the soul of the POPTech community.
My oh my...
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Posted by Mike at 04:29 PM | Comments (1) |
« Outsourcing as Social Transformation | Main | Space Travel as Inspiration and Vision at POPTech »POPTech in beautiful Camden Maine
We live in an astounding age. Every day, accelerating waves of technological progress bring us another mind-bending discovery or capability, each promising a tomorrow less and less distinguishable from magic. And yet, these same breakthrough technologies also provide us with an unflinching, dazzling and often disturbing glimpse of the impact that we have on both the world around us and on one another. This year, through 30 extraordinary presentations, and more than a dozen engaging dialogues, PopTech will explore some of the greatest challenges confronting humanity, and the role that new ideas, and new technologies, will play in responding to each in the future.
Here in beautiful Camden Maine at the POPTech Conference. I was fascinated with the first two speakers, Graham Flint, a physicist, and Robert Hammer, a biologist. Graham is describing super-high resolution digital imaging - gigapixels. Robert is describing the taxonomy of cataloging species through barcoding.
The purpose? To preserve through high-resolution information, visual images of say, places around the world that are disappearing (e.g. areas of Rome, due to acid rain}, and species, which are losing their habitats.
I noted on the online chat that both are endeavoring to save information about that which is vanishing. An ironic and sad twist to "progress" in modern society.
And indeed, during the break I had a fascinating conversation with Robert, where his ultimate goal is to spark preservation and ecology. He was frustrated that, as a biologist, he can solve the cataloging of DNA problem, but the message about preservation and ecology is the one he really is trying to convey.
Any contributors out there would be greatly appreciated...
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Posted by Mike at 04:22 PM | Comments (1) |
« "Agile Metrics" at SD Best Practices Conference - Boston | Main | POPTech in beautiful Camden Maine »October 04, 2005
Outsourcing as Social Transformation
One of the subjects in Optimal Friction (the book), will be about relationship management, with the notion that healthy work relationships bring about better outcomes – not only on projects, but also between people, teams, groups, and companies. If you believe the adage, “Work is the place where we play out the energy of our relationships,” then you might view work as a sandbox of sorts, where the interplay and dynamics between people have a stage theater to play themselves out.With that, I just received an interesting book from my hosts at the POPTech Conference in Camden, Maine. (POPTech was conceived by John Scully (former CEO of Pepsico and Apple) and Bob Metcalfe (inventor of the Ethernet, and founder of 3Com), among others. Once I asked John if POPTech was really created by him and Bob as a way to get his friends to come to Camden, and he replied, “That’s about right.”)
Anyway, back to the book – it’s “Maximum City, Bombay Lost and Found”, by Suketu Mehta, a speaker at this year’s conference. According to the POPTech cover letter, it was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize and named Book of the Year by the Economist. It tells gripping stories of a city transformed by the pressures of globalization and struggling under the weight of massive growth and huge divisions between rich and poor. It’s remarkable that, before one of the seminal technology conferences in the U.S., I am receiving a book about life in India. more...
Posted by Mike at 09:13 PM | Comments (1) |
