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We try to find the most extraodinary new performers to Pop!Tech, and this year was no exception. Thank you to all the wonderful musicians that helped make the conference so special.
After hearing that Rodrigo and Gabriela’s CD sold out at the Pop!Tech store in a milisecond, we set up an Amazon store so you can buy all the artists albums online.
Check out the Pop!Tech Music Store
You can find more information on the 2006 perfomers at their websites below:
Late October, 2006.
Camden, Maine, USA. The sleepy fishing village off the coast of the Atlantic awakes to a cool, crisp fall morning. It is the height of autumn; the leaves are just past peak, the fiery reds of the maples are giving way to auburn brown. Nestled into the rugged Maine coastline, the Main Street in Camden is home to quaint shops and seafood restaurants. Just north of downtown the streets are lined with stately mansions, 20th century sea captain homes turned into quintessential New England bed and breakfasts.
Kalale District, Benin, Africa. The air is hot and humid; late October marks the onset of the extended dry season, and months of uncertainty. In Kalale, 95 percent of the people rely on subsistence farming as their primary means of survival, but because they lack access to water for irrigation, they can only farm during the rainy season. With no access to electricity, residents suffer from poor diets, little income and almost no education. Life in Benin is hard, and often short: life expectancy in this western Africa country is just 53 years.
In geography, climate and culture these two villages couldn’t be farther apart. Yet what happened in one village over three days will have lasting consequences for the other. If that sounds like hyperbole, it is not.
This year Pop!Tech partnered with the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) and Lexus to offset double the carbon emissions generated as a result of the conference, making Pop!Tech 2006 not just carbon neutral, but "carbon negative". The offsets will help fund SELF’s goal to provide solar electricity to 44 villages in Benin, bringing clean, renewable energy to homes, schools, health care clinics and micro enterprises, improving the quality of life for these residents in fundamental yet profound ways.
Carbon, Cubes and Calculations: How to Create a "Negative" Meeting
As a futurist who knows as much about new math as well, old math (which is to say, very little), the idea of calculating the collective carbon emissions of 530 Pop!Tech attendees was more than a little daunting. Good thing there’s a growing community of folks who not only specialize in this kind of environmental arithmetic, but they actually enjoy it. The GHG Protocol was an invaluable resource, providing not only personal advice and guidance but also online tools which made calculating carbon emissions seem (almost) easy.
Deb Johnson and her team of student volunteers at the Pratt Design Incubator tackled the challenge of "visualizing" the carbon impact for the audience. Using Google maps to determine the mileage from each attendee’s home zip code, they estimated the number of metric tons of carbon each attendee emitted if they flew or drove to Camden. Then, in order to show how "big" a metric ton of carbon would be, they converted that into cubic feet (I’ll spare you the gory details, but let’s just say it involved lots of decimal points); this number was then printed on each name badge. Deb’s team cleverly represented the relatively size of our carbon impact using a variety of cubes, which provided both a great visualization (and a workout for Andrew).
In order to personalize the experience and get the most accurate carbon calculation for the meeting as possible, the design gurus at Pinkergreen Designcreated a "carbon card" which gave attendees the opportunity to add up their personal carbon emissions.
"Pay" it Forward
To make Pop!Tech "carbon negative" we calculated the carbon emissions of all attendees, taking into account the air & vehicle travel for each person as well as the total energy consumed at the Camden Opera House over the three days of the conference: a total of nearly 400 metric tons. Through the generous support of corporate sponsor Lexus, Pop!Tech will purchase double the amount carbon offsets (at a rate of $10 per ton) from SELF, bridging the gap (both literally and metaphorically) between the villages of Kalale and Camden.
Being carbon neutral (or negative) does not provide a free pass to guiltless consumption. However, by creating carbon neutral meetings and events with the help of organizations such as SELF, negative environmental impacts can create positive social effects.
Thank you to the fabulous team who made Pop!Tech’s carbon negative program possible:
Lexus, for its generous financial support; Bob Freling for explaining the difference between tons and tones; Deb Johnson and her team at the Pratt Design Incubator for dozens of hours of creative genius; my colleagues at FringeHog and Pinkergreen Design for designing and donating the carbon cards; and last but not least Beth Cohen, for her patient leadership herding both futurists and designers.
You can watch Coulton’s video here:
All of Jonathan’s songs are released under the Creative Commons License.
A great piece from BusinessWeek by Jessie Scanlon about Will Wright and the 2006 Pop!Tech conference:
The welcome letter to this year’s Pop!Tech conference contained a kick-ass quote from Harvard Psychologist Dan Gilbert, which we felt framed the question of Dangerous Ideas perfectly:
The most dangerous idea is… the idea that ideas can be dangerous.
We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That’s the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we’re in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it’s time to make a run for the fence.
This superb quote was taken from the equally amazing Edge.org, run by the literary-agent-cum-third-culture-mastermind John Brockman. It was part of Edge’s 2006 Question to their network of thought leaders, posing “What Is Your Dangerous Idea?”. Due to an editing oversight, the credit to John and Edge.org got cut from that letter, but we wanted you to know where it came from. John continues to be an inspiration to me and to the entire Pop!Tech community.
Every year, Pop!Tech identifies a talented group of highschool and college students who receive full scholarships to attend the conference. This year, we partnered with the National Geographic Society to do something very special with this program: after a nationally competitive search, we selected a group of talented young people (David Hopkins, Jonny Stepakoff, Alize Van Reeth, Abigail Chance, Nikki Finlay, Ali Driesman, Katie Hynd and Carly Wright) who apprenticed to a professional photographer and then photographed the entire conference, including making special portraits of some of the speakers.
The results were astonishing, as you can now see for yourself in this fantastic online slideshow. Congratulations to the students, and thanks for making such a wonderful document of the conference.
Sharing the wisdom of African Architecture: “Osafa is a Wikipedia-like platform where the source code of construction projects, i.e. floor plans, building descriptions, drafts/photos and commercials calculations are being shared under an open licence, ready to be reused or adapted, without licence fees. We want to apply the success factors of Open Source Software to the intellectual wisdom of African architecture.”
One of the many highlights of Pop!Tech 2006 was a special appearance by the Ninja of AskANinja.com:
Pop!Tech’s cool-quotient with 13-to-15 year old boys just skyrocketed.
You may have noticed that this blog has been silent for a few days - that’s because we were too busy putting on Pop!Tech 2006 to blog Pop!Tech 2006.
Fortunately, and in particular due to our first ever live stream of the event, the blogosphere took care of that for us, better than we ever could:
This just scratches the surface — there’s lots more to follow!
Peter Durand, Director of Alphachimp Studio creates works of art inspired by the Pop!Tech Speaker’s presentations in real time.
The resulting images give a life to the ideas generated that resonate long after the participants have gone their separate ways. Ben McConnell, author of Creating Customer Evangelists, describes the experience as such:
Having Alphachimp create a visual document of your meeting or conference is like being handed a photograph that explains the meaning of love. Alphachimp Studio’s visual guides explain in moments what took days or weeks to understand.
This year, Peter has kindly offered to donate his posters to the Pop!Tech Auction benefiting the annual scholarship program.
There is an online archive of all the images with wiki text and a link to the speakers’ bios and websites here
You can also download a zip file of the entire 2006 Pop!Tech poster collection here
Pop!Tech's mission is to inspire people everywhere to change the world by fostering visionary conversations about science, technology and the future of ideas.
Pop!Tech Pop!Casts: Now you can take the energy and inspiration that is Pop!Tech with you anywhere. Pop!Casts let you join the conversation and engage in the extraordinary work that had its start in Camden, Maine. Are you ready to accept the challenges issued by the thinkers and innovators who move Pop!Tech audiences, year after year?
