CONTACT: Towards Social Organism

CONTACT:         Toward Social Organism

From the actions of the Egyptian government to the policies of Facebook, the monopolies of central banks to the corporatization of the Internet, we are witnessing the potential of a peer-to-peer networking become overshadowed by the hierarchies of the status quo.

Contact seeks to explore and realize the greater promise of social media to promote new forms of culture, commerce, collective action, and creativity. Bringing together technologists, artists, activists, businesspeople, funders, and other stakeholders in the networked future, this summit will hatch new ideas, connect collaborators, and forge an ongoing community for innovating social media and beyond.

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 seek to initiate mechanisms that realize the true promise of the networking revolution.

The first summit, to be held October 20 at the historic Angel Orensanz Center in New York City, 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.

Topics already in discussion include:

        TECHNOLOGY

                Can we build an alternative Internet that can't be turned off?         

                Alternatives to top-down registries and corporate-controlled access

        BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

                New net-based currencies and transaction networks

                Net-enabled Local Activism and Job Creation

        CULTURE

                Arts networking initiatives

                Decentralized social networking platforms

        GOVERNMENT

                Proxy voting to expert friends

                open source democracy

                "Filter Bubbles" and how to prevent them

        MEANING

                What Factors Facilitate Collective Intelligence?        

                The Reclamation of Public Space        

Confirmed Participants so far include:

        Douglas Rushkoff - media theorist, author

        Mark Pesce - inventor, technologist, futurist

        Marc Canter - founder Macromedia, founder Digital City Project

        Michel Bauwens - P2P Foundation

        Dave Winer - founder, Scripting.com

        Genesis P-Orridge - musician, artist, founder Throbbing Gristle

        Rachel Rosenfelt - founder, The New Inquiry

        Richard Metzger - founder, Disinformation and Dangerous Minds

        Scott Heiferman - founder, Meetup.com

        Venessa Meimis - media activist and artist, founder Emergent by Design

        Sam Rose - the Forward Foundation

        Nick Philip - designer, Imaginary Foundation

        Eli Pariser - founder, MoveOn.org

        Caroline Woolard - founder, OurGoods.com

        Steve Johnson - author, founder OutsideIn

        Micah Daigle - founder, Dynamic Democracy Forum

        Esther Dyson - founder, Edventures

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 big human agenda.

Contact hopes to revive the spirit of optimism and infinite possibility of the early cyber-era, folding the edges of this culture back to the middle. Social media has come to be understood as little more than a marketing opportunity. We see it as quite possibly the catalyst for the next stage of human evolution and, at the very least, a way to restore p2p value exchange and decentralized innovation to the realms of culture, commerce and government.  

Content was never king. Contact is. Please join us, and find the others.