Excitement around upcoming un-conference The Contact Summit continues to build momentum as more participants sign on for this innovative event that seeks to take social media back from being merely a marketing discipline and return to it the spirit of optimism and infinite possibility that will allow users to tackle truly world changing endeavors.
The Contact Summit, scheduled for October 20, 2011 at the historic Angel Orensanz Center in New York City intends to release the potential of peer-to-peer networking that has been retarded by government-enacted “blackouts,” the privacy policies of Social Web providers, the policies of central banks and the loss of real net neutrality.
Conceived and facilitated by Douglas Rushkoff, Contact will bring together technologists, artists, activists, businesspeople, funders, and other stakeholders in the networked future to hatch new ideas, develop and nourish exciting existing concepts, connect collaborators, and forge an ongoing community for innovating social media and beyond.Continue reading
“From the development of a new non-hierarchical Internet to the implementation of alternative e-currencies, the prototyping of open source democracy to experiments in collective cultural expression, Contact will initiate projects that realize the greater potential of the networking revolution – which is really just human evolution itself,” explains Rushkoff.
Contact will be a participatory festival for ideas and action, consisting primarily of meetings convened by attendees. Featured participants will deliver brief “provocations” on stage, sharing the greatest challenges they are facing in their particular fields. But their primary contribution to the day will be to join in the meetings convened by other participants, sharing their experience, insight, and even connections to help bring these ideas into reality.
Newly confirmed participants include:
Dennis Crowley – founder, https://foursquare.com/
Bre Pettis – founder, http://www.makerbot.com/
Clay Shirky – noted journalist and academic
Dan Gilmore – author of Mediactive and director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship
Danielle Laynard – founder, http://thirdrailventures.org/
David Weinberger – author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and Harvard Law School Fellow
Jeff Newelt AKA JahFurry – “NYC’s Favourite Freakscene Facilitator”
Richard C. Adler – founder of http://www.futureforwardinstitute.com
These amazing minds are added to an already impressive participant list that includes:
Marc Canter – founder Macromedia, founder Digital City Project
Michel Bauwens – P2P Foundation
Dave Winer – founder, www.Scripting.com, inventor of RSS feeds, father of the blog
Richard Metzger – founder, Disinformation and Dangerous Minds
Scott Heiferman – founder, www.Meetup.com
Eli Pariser – founder, www.MoveOn.org
Paul Hartzog, Founder, www.Panarchy.com
Steven Johnson – author, founder OutsideIn
Andrew Rasiej – co-founder Personal Democracy Forum
Micah Sifry – co-founder Personal Democracy Forum
Nathan Solomon – currency designer, Superfluid
Sam Rose
Art Brock – MetaCurrency.org
Neal Gorenflo – founder, Shareable.net
Micah Daigle – Dynamic Democracy Foundation
Genesis P-Orridge – musician, artist, founder Throbbing Gristle,
Thomas Benjamin – https://www.torproject.org/, http://cryptocracy.net/
Matt Cooperrider – Gov 2.0 developer – Collabforge
Ken Jordan – Evolver.net
Reverend Billy – Church of Life After Shopping
RU Sirius – editor, Mondo2000, h+ magazine
Caroline Woolard – founder, TradeSchool and OurGoods.org
Venessa Miemis – media activist and artist, founder Emergent by Design
The Contact Summit has already begun as a series of preparatory online discussions. These can be found at http://www.contactcon.com/contact-summit-forums.
At the epicenter of Contact will be the Bazaar – a free-form marketplace of ideas, demos, haggling, and ad-hoc connections. If you have visited the Akihabara, Tokyo’s ultra-vibrant open-air electronics market, or the under-the-highway open-air jade market of Kowloon, or even the Burning Man festival, you understand the power of combining commerce, physical location, and serendipity. A decidedly unstructured counterpart to the convened meetings and solo provocations, the Bazaar brings p2p to life, encouraging introductions, brokering, deal-making, food-tasting, and propositions of every kind. It is where the social, business, political, and spiritual agendas merge into one human agenda: Contact.
Content was never king. Contact is.