What’s the net impact of Pop!Tech?  I’ve been thinking about my time in Camden, Maine a lot lately - never more so than while I attended the 2007 Net Impact conference this past week in Nashville (see, pun very much intended.)  In all seriousness however, my trip to Tennessee prompted the following questions: what is the impact of Pop!Tech and what will it do next?

These questions are not accidental; the Net Impact conference’s theme this year was, in fact, What Will You Do Next?  With 1800 attendees and up to 16 sessions at a time (!) there is no one answer from Net Impact.  Despite the wide variety of experiences among attendees, the conference managed to communicate a clear theme: get it done. 

Part of that theme stems from the fact that Net Impact attracts mostly MBA students - they are all about starting a business or at least working with organizations that address social and environmental problems.  I saw MBAs eager to be the next Claire Broido Johnson (of SunEdison) or Paul Hudnut (of EnviroFit) - two perfect examples of people who are “doing it next” through their work. 

(Side note: check out Paul’s excellent blog, What’s a BOPreneur? and his report from Net Impact.)

Pop!Tech, on the other hand, is just beginning to dip into the “get it done” arena.  This year’s conference, The Human Impact, seemed to be a departure from previous events.  Quite a few attendees described previous Pop!Techs as gadget-fests, featuring the latest innovative products and concepts.  This year’s conference, on the other hand, gave a lot of stage-time to problems, mostly environmental degradation and persistent poverty.  I’m not sure the old-school Pop!Techies were happy with this shift, even though the conference did a marvelous job pointing out the innovative tools, models, and ideas that are indeed changing the world - and featured some great “get it done” types, like Jessica Flannery and Van Jones (among others.)

So, getting back to my original question, what is Pop!Tech’s net impact?  In many ways, it remains to be seen - it depends how the Pop!Tech Accelerator and the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative work, among other things.  These two initiatives are forays into the “get it done” space.  If they are successful, then Pop!Tech’s impact will grow.  If they hit some roadblocks, however, Pop!Tech may have jeopardized its hardcore audience in its effort to take its program to the next level.  (Side note: I’m confident that Andrew and co. can make it work.)

What will it do next?  For starters, Pop!Tech can continue its excellent programming.  I’d like to see invites to next year’s meeting go out to folks like Paul Hudnut and Claire Broido Johnson, for starters, as well as other get-it-done speakers at Net Impact - Cindy Cooper, Tim Prestero, Ben Powell, Cleve Justis, etc.

Ultimately, these are two vastly different conferences, but they can learn from one another.  Net Impact, in my opinion, can take a page from Pop!Tech’s book and sharply reduce the number of sessions and speakers - quality over quantity!  Not only that, but mandated, controlled networking - like Pop!Tech lunches - are the sorts of things that sets a conference apart from a series of lectures interspersed with a bag lunch.  Can you do Pop!Tech for 1800 MBAs in 2/3 of the time at 1/3 of the budget?  No - and I’m not asking Net Impact to.  But as Pop!Tech can learn from Net Impact, it goes the other way as well.

by Robert Katz, World Resources Institute

Paris was one of the Global Bloggers attending this years conference. Below is her wonderful post-conference thoughts from her blog Ride the Wave
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I am so grateful to collaborate with Hamid Tehrani in sharing my experience of Poptech with an Iranian audience on Global Voices Online Farsi. However it is in the time after the conference that I am able to truly reflect and share my experience to both Iranian and American audiences, and as a citizen of both of these countries, to speak to all people about the things that are closest to my heart.

We are the ones who can solve the worlds’ problems. To solve these problems we must first recognize that there are people who share with us a dream for a better world. The first step is to hold on to the dream that there can be peace, and I realized that at Poptech there are many people who share this dream with me. For example, Zainab Salbi was a great source of inspiration when she spoke about the role of women in maintaining peace within society. She founded Women for Women International, responding to a need to make sure that the world is safe for women. Women hold together the family structure, and if women are being raped, killed, or offered food in exchange for one of their children, a society can only fall apart. Her organization makes it possible to give these women a chance, and a choice.

Van Jones is another world-changing thinker that is bringing his dreams to life. He realized that people living in poverty were not being given chances to succeed the way more affluent, educated kids were given chances. He recognized that he could combine solutions to social inequality and environmental destruction. He explains that by creating green jobs [jobs that are beneficial for the environment], he could work in creating educational, rewarding work opportunities for people–creating “green pathways out of poverty.” He worked to create the Green Jobs Act, an initiative that identifies jobs and skills needed to grow renewable energy and energy efficiency industries, while creating a way out of poverty for low income adults.

The solution that Van Jones brings to life is the type of thing I dream of seeing happen between Iran and the US–exchange of culture, tools, ideas, and technology that improve our understanding of one another, and help us all toward achieving a safer planet. Rather than fighting about how we disagree on certain things, we should keep our focus on the problems that relate to us all, and find solutions to those problems. Our environmental problems are a global concern, and our emphasis as citizens of this planet should be on generating global solutions to bigger the issues that impact all of humanity. We have a choice: to focus on “the other”, creating labels such as terrorists, militants, freedom fighters… or we can find solutions, collectively, for global exchange, interconnection, and peace.

Excuse the delay in gathering the latest blog posts about Pop!Tech 2007. There has been so much wonderful traction on the web about the conference, so thank you to everyone who took the time to share your impressions, questions and even criticisms of the event. Pop!Tech in its purist form is about having a dialogs with people and your posts help us to do just that.

Here is just a sampling:

Christian Science Monitor, Sounds Iranian,TreeHugger, NPR, Conferenza, TrueTalk Blog, MobileActive, NextBillion.net, Wired, Down The Avenue, amGlobal, Boing Boing, Core77,Tiago Doria, MedeaMaterial , Paris Marishi, Emily’s Window, Boston Globe, and Fast Company
.

And you can also find more sites that have posted about Pop!Tech over at Technorati.

Phew…Day 2 was a big one. And there has been some really great pick up on the web. Our blog partners at Pop!Tech 2007 have done an outstanding job in sharing the Pop!Tech experience with the rest of the world (and that includes the rest of the non-English speaking world!)

Here are some of the posts about Pop!Tech 2007:

Rob Katz’s offers his expert coverage and great a one-on-one speaker interview for WRI/NextBillion.net

Andrew Mack synthesizes the day’s topics for AmGlobal (with awesome image choices!)

All Together Now with Zinhle Thabethe, Krista Dong, Jeff Fisher, and Paul Shuper - Core77

Joel Johnson of Boing Boing covers Christian Nold’s BioMapping

Live from Pop!Tech: John Shearer–Powercast Sends Power Through Air - TreeHugger

Fast Company’s Live from Pop!Tech bloggings

Tiago from Brazil brings Pop!Tech to Portuguese speakers

MedeaMaterial has been posting speaker by speaker in Spanish

Paris Marashi’s (This Iranian American Life) blog are available in English and Farsi

Mark Anderson keeps the Wired readers waiting for more

Nicole Dyer, editor of PopSci , blogs about Fish Texting, the Nigerian Space Agency, and living dinosaur

Ethan Zuckerman of My heart’s in Accra has 10, count them, 10 thoughtful posts from today.

Down the Avenue - Renee Blodgett

Summit on the future of the corporation - The Obvious?

Pop!Tech 2007: Off to a great start - TrueTalk Blog (Tom Guariello)

There is plenty more where that came from…

With this year’s Pop!Tech focusing on “The Human Impact” and exploring (amongst others) themes of human nature and technologies that transform the body and our understanding of the mind, you might want to take a look here is a look at some of the ways that humans can (and will?) “become” technology.

2005 speaker and the world’s first bionic man, Jesse Sullivan is one example:

Individuals who resist the artificial intelligence development often believe that this technology bodes nothing but evil, especially if research falls into nefarious hands. Others are grateful for this research. Witness Jesse Sullivan, an electrician who accidentally touched an active cable that contained 7,000-7,500 volts of electricity in 2001 and, as a result, lost both arms at the shoulder. Since then, he’s become the recipient of a ‘bionic arm’ created by scientists at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. His experience, while truly unique, may help others lead active lives in the near future with these life-like prostheses.

This article features some of projects that are pushing the limits of “hacking” your own bodies.

Via::FreeGeekery.com

Katie Fehrenbacher, who has been writing for the popular tech site GigaOm, has launched a new blog called Earth2Tech. The brand new site, which launched this week, is unique in that it can be broken up into three parts:

1. Clean Tech startup news coverage
2. Reviews of eco-initiatives from Big Business
3. Resource page for eco-entrepreneurs

This looks like a promising site and is already filled with some great posts about things like “The World’s Most Important Mushroom”…well, really, you are probably sold by now.

Is anyone else out there confused about what the heck RSS is?

This is the best explanation we have found so far by a social design consulting company called Common Craft. These guys produce short videos that explain prevalent but widely and wildly misunderstood tools and concepts on the internet. Using their trademark “Paperworks” technique, they create fun and extremely helpful introductions to social networking software, Wikis, and RSS. You can also commission your own Paperworks instructional.

With the words Wiki and RSS thrown around all the time now, these videos serve as a nice intro for the novice, or for “experts” who want to teach others about the benefits of these tools.

Click To Play

Click To Play

This is a great resource to go along with the recently added “New to Podcasts” feature on the Pop!Tech Pop!Casts page, which is a primer of sorts, for those who have some questions about what podcasts are, how to get them, and what you can do with them.

Here is a cute little “map” of Online Communities.

I hear that the Blogipelago is lovely this time of year - but beware the Bay of Angst!

Via::SwissMiss

Thanks to Fast Company writer, Linda Tischler, who did a great little write up about the Pop!Tech Pop!Casts on their blog.

You can see it here.

Linda calls attention to the fact that it is becoming increasingly harder to score tickets to the conference and, rest assured, Pop!Tech will continue to make the content as widely available as possible to keep the conversation open to everyone. Our favorite quote from the Fast Company blog post:

“Can PopTech! scalpers be far behind?”

Imagining seedy scalpers prowling the charming streets of Camden whispering “you need two tickets?…I got two tickets…” — it tickles me.

It’s been about over a week since we have made our very first batch of Pop!Tech Pop!Casts available online and we’ve had some great movement since then.

We are featured on the homepage of iTunes, we’ve been linked around the web (Thanks to everyone who have been moved to write about the release of the Pop!Casts). All in all - not a bad start. And that was only with our first 22 podcasts.

We have two more to share with you today:

Brian Eno - Musician, producer and artist Brian Eno shows how simple things can give rise to complex things—in art and life. See how he uses Darwin’s ecological model of the world as a roadmap for human culture now and in the future.

(I still admire him for his lovely purple velvet jacket)

Rodrigo y Gabriela - The Mexican acoustic guitar duo sensation Rodrigo y Gabriela put fast fingers to strings for a performance that will put you on your feet and keep you moving. There’s no better way to say it: they rock!

(They inspired me to pick up my guitar again, but I quickly realized that my playing compared to theirs is like those of a monkey with socks on its hands)

There are also some new features on the Pop!Casts page to make it easier to share these amazing talks and performances with your friends. Now you can send an email, share a permalink or embed the Yahoo! Video player on your website or blog.

Enjoy! And there is PLENTY more to come.