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
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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…

In today’s program, Andrew Zolli, announced the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative. This initiative is the second iteration of our commitment to being “carbon negative”. This is not your parent’s carbon neutrality. The idea of being carbon negative means that you are offsetting in excess of your carbon emissions.

Representatives of each benefiting project in Pop!Tech’s listings are participating in this year’s Pop!Tech conference as “Pop!Tech Carbon Fellows.” Fellows include:

* Robert Freling, the Executive Director of The Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF), an organization dedicated to helping rural communities in the developing world power a brighter future through innovative uses of solar energy. SELF is bringing solar powered irrigation to Benin’s Kalale District in West Africa where over 80% of the villages do not have a source of surface water. The villages are provided with a source of clean renewable energy, eliminating the need for diesel & gas powered pumps.

* Dr. Sarah Otterstrom, the Executive Director of Paso Pacífico, a non-profit organization seeking to build wildlife corridors along the Pacific slope of Central America by supporting private landowners and small-scale farmers in sustainable land use and conservation activities. She is currently working on the restoration and conservation of endangered forest ecosystems in the Rivas Province of Nicaragua. This project also reduces the vulnerability of local communities to extreme climate events while improving ecosystem services and the viability of endangered species.

* Stefano Merlin, the Director of Ecologica Network and President of Instituto Ecologica, which coordinates several socio-environmental programs including the Bandeira Switching Non-Renewable Biomass Project in the North of Brazil. This project addresses the problem of deforestation and reduces the quantity of biomass decaying which, in turn, cuts down on green house gas emissions.

When you visit the Pop!Tech Carbon Initiative website, you can input some information to get your annual carbon footprint. The average American’s carbon footprint is 9.44 tons of CO2. Mine was 14 tons and to offset that amount towards Paso Pacifico would work out to be only about $77 dollars)

How do you compare to that average?

Also, Mark Anderson of Wired Magazine just wrote a story about the program as a part of Wired coverage of the event.

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

Last weekend, new media artist and Pop!Tech 2006 speaker Hasan Elahi was interviewed on NPR’s Studio 360 hosted by Kurt Andersen about Hasan’s website art project, Tracking Transcience.

The website has tracked Hasan’s life in all its mundane glory, in real time, for more than 5 years now. He began the project in response to his experience in an airport where he was wrongly identified and detained as a terrorist and was constrained to report on all of his whereabouts and movements on the days around 9/11 to the FBI. After he was freed of all charges, he decided to voluntarily track his movements online.

Pop!Tech Host and Curator, Andrew Zolli is also on the program to discuss the impact of Hasan’s work and its context in a world with a changing view of privacy.

Listen to it here on iTunes, or visit the Studio 360 website and listen to the episode online.

AND stay tuned for Hasan’s upcoming Pop!Tech Pop!Cast of his 2006 presentation. Check Pop!Tech Pop!Casts for more information.

Everyone here at Pop!Tech is excited to let you know that today we released our first twenty-two Pop!Casts, freely available online video and audio presentations available in both streaming and downloadable formats, on our newly refreshed website.

Available at www.poptech.org/popcasts, the Pop!Casts feature some of the very best presentations from the 2006, 2005 (and eventually 2004) conferences, and we’ll be releasing new ones ever two weeks throughout the rest of the year.

The first set includes fabulous recent presentations by:

Thomas Friedman — Pulitzer Prize winning author and New York Times Columnist.
Serena Koenig — Global health leader and Director of Haiti Programs for Partners in Health
Richard Dawkins — World renowned biologist and evolutionary theorist
Zinhle Thabethe — Renowned AIDS activist from South Africa
Sinikithemba Choir Performance — South African Choir of Zulu men and women who provide support to persons with HIV/AIDS
Bunker Roy — Founder of the Barefoot College in Tilonia, India
Carolyn Porco — Chief Imaging Scientist on the Cassini Mission to Saturn
Erin McKean —Editor-in-chief of U.S. Dictionaries for Oxford University Press and self-proclaimed “word geek”
Juan Enriquez — Leading futurist and bestselling writer on the future of nations
Neil Gershenfeld — Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms
Jonathan Coulton — Singer/Songwriter and the official Pop!Tech Balladeer
Thomas Barnett — Strategist and expert on national security and best-selling author
Jesse Sullivan and Todd Kuiken —Jesse Sullivan and his doctor, Todd Kuiken, work together to make Jesse the world’s first bionic man
Martin Marty — One of the most prominent interpreters of religion and culture
Chris Anderson — Editor in Chief of Wired magazine and author of “The Long Tail”
Theo Jansen — Dutch “kinetic sculptor” who creates wind-powered robotic “animals”
Marcia McNutt — Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute director
Reggie Watts - Human Beat-Box Polymath Musician and Comedian
Marianne Weems — Artistic director of the new media theater ensemble The Builders Association
Homaro Cantu —Inventor, entrepreneur and molecular gastronomist
Lester Brown — Preeminent environmentalist and head of the Earth Policy Institute
Kent Nichols — Co-Creator of the wildly popular website and podcast AskaNinja.com

The Pop!Casts are being made available to the public with the help of our friends at Lexus with production support from Yahoo! To encourage their distribution, we’re releasing all of these as open-source, non-commercial Creative Commons licensed content.

You can also subscribe to Pop!Casts within iTunes. With one click you can get them delivered to your iPod automatically!

VERY SPECIAL THANKS to Jakob Trollback for designing the Pop!Cast opening titles, Betsy Henning and AHA! for their beautiful written descriptions, Hamilton Hughes Design for their as-always elegant design work and visual refresh of our website.

Tell your friends, neighbors, colleagues — these are truly worth sharing with anyone who appreciates the innovative ideas and people that change the world.

Architecture for Humanity has announced that they have selected a winning logo from their online design competition. They gathered 65 jurors from across the globe to select finalists from more than 800 entries. The coolest part of it all…the whole competition was conducted on Flickr. You can see the work of all the finalists online. And it’s really interesting to read visitors’ comments on each logo.

The winning entry was made by Oregon based designer Michael DiTullo with his simple design featuring a nice dimensional measurement reference.

Here were the criteria established by AFH:

Criteria

We are looking for a logo that will reflect both the mission and spirit of the organization. A good fit for us would include the following:

1. The logo should be able to be understood globally and inoffensive to all cultures.

2. A logo that is not overly representational as our work overlaps so many aspects of design i.e. Definitely no houses, no people, no people in houses and no houses in people.

3. Neither the mark nor the logotype would use the abbreviation “AFH.” there are too many organizations with abbreviations in the development and reconstruction world you end up getting lost in alphabet soup. Please use our full name, ‘Architecture for Humanity’ in the logotype.

4. The logo must be replicable for all Architecture for Humanity chapters. Therefore the logotype must accommodate everything from ‘Architecture for Humanity Roma’ to ‘Architecture for Humanity San Francisco.’ It is also suggested that entrants also explore chapter logos using both the local dialect and English. (ie. Architecture for Humanity Tokyo should be able to be read in Japanese and English)

5. The design should be able to be reversible and use both light on dark and dark on light.

6. The logo will be used for a myriad of print and online applications. It must be readable from use on silkscreened T-Shirts to dodgy fax machines in far off countries.

AFH following a growing trend in using sites like Flickr and YouTube to generate content such as Davos’ recent call for submissions. The competition, as it opens its doors to the outside design world, is wonderfully in line with its open-source architectural mission.