Join us at Contact, a participatory festival hosted by Douglas Rushkoff to explore the emerging forms of culture, commerce, collective action and creativity being catalyzed by social media technologies. More info and registration at
http://contactcon.com/, on twitter @contactcon
The Contact Summit will be a participatory festival for ideas and action geared toward realizing the greater potential of our peer-to-peer networks to foster social, political, economic, and evolutionary goals that many earlier pioneers of the internet and social networking championed. As Rushkoff noted in his blog, “I want to fold the some of the wilder edges of digital culture back to the center, and restore a bit of the spirit of optimism and infinite possibility embodied by Mondo2000, BoingBoing and Fringeware. I also want to help activists, craftspeople, and others on the decentralized landscape connect to the technologists who can make their visions a reality.”
In addition to the exciting participants signing on for Contact Summit, now $10,000 will to be awarded to each of the three most compelling and achievable ideas presented at the Contact Bazaar. The $30,000, staked by an anonymous donor, will encourage presentation of innovative networking and technology solutions to our greatest collective challenges at the Contact Summit.
The content of the Contact Summit will be split into four main tracks:
TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY:
Can we build an alternative Internet that can't be turned off?
Alternatives to top-down registries and corporate-controlled access
Decentralized social networking platforms.
Privacy, identity, and security.
BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS:
New net-based currencies and transaction networks
Net-enabled Local Activism and Job Creation
ARTS & LEARNING:
What Factors Facilitate Collective Intelligence?
What constitutes a digital education?
New models for collaboration.
GOVERNMENT:
Proxy voting to expert friends
Open source democracy
"Filter Bubbles" and how to prevent them
The running of the event will consist of three main parts:
Provocations: Selected participants will deliver brief “provocations” on stage, sharing the greatest challenges they are facing in their particular fields.
Meetings: Attendees will convene meetings to share their own ideas, get advice, find collaborators, and move forward.
The Bazaar: A two-hour midday Bazaar, when the entire venue becomes an open marketplace of ideas and demos. Participants will be assigned tabletops to demo or share their ideas and projects to other participants and the awards judges.
Judges will be selected from among Contact’s Featured Participants to view projects in the different track areas above. Winners will be announced at the evening extension of the Bazaar, where demos will continue along with libations and entertainment.
