community

^{Lift tshirt in the Maldives, courtesy of long time Lifter Paul Hintermann.}.

We decided to start documenting Lift's impact on the life of its participants. Did the conference boost your projects, did it change your life? If yes, please send us your testimonial, we want to know!

Our passion is to create an environment where great things happen. Our carefully designed events offer a unique opportunity to connect with the world's brightest minds, and see tomorrow's ideas ahead of everybody else.

The problem is that most of the time, great things happen without us knowing, as participants meet again outside of the conference, to start new companies, new projects, or start dating ;) We are on a mission to find your stories, please let us know what difference Lift has made in your life!

• Have you created a new project or start-up at Lift?
• Have you met incredible people you started a project with?
• Have you raised money for your idea?
• Have you met your business partner, soul mate or true love at Lift?
• Anything else that happened and would like to share with the community?

Let us know, thanks!

What happens when barriers to use of technology are lowered? What can we learn from the Ushahidi open source community and the technology landscape in Africa about the opportunity and the limits of open innovation? In her speech, Juliana Rotich answers these questions, based on her experience as director of a African non-profit tech company which specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, interactive mapping and data curation.

Trois demies-journées de Lift France 2011 sont consacrées à des ateliers, pendant lesquels les participants partagent, coproduisent, mettent en scène des idées et des projets. Ces ateliers sont proposés par... vous ! L'appel à propositions se clôt le 18 juin.

Si vous avez soumis une idée, si vous hésitez encore, si vous n'osez pas, si vous avez l'idée mais pas encore pris le temps de la soumettre... Venez en discuter avec l'équipe Lift, à Paris ce jeudi 16 juin. De 12h30 à 14h30, le temps d'un déjeuner, les ateliers se présenteront, puis échangeront entre eux et avec l'équipe Lift pour enrichir leur proposition et préparer leur méthodologie d'animation. Le but : promouvoir votre atelier pour que la communauté Lift le retienne, donner envie aux participants de s'y inscrire, puis le réussir sur le fond comme sur la forme.

Ca se passe où ? A l'Appart SFR, 7 rue Tronchet dans le 8e arrondissement, le 16 juin 12h30-14h30 (métro Madeleine ou Havre Caumartin). Merci de vous inscrire par un simple mail à lgueydon@fing.org !

Vous voulez voir les premiers ateliers validés ? C'est ici !

A vos propositions pour l'Open Program de Lift France 11 :
Soumettez vos idées d'ateliers et de projets innovants. Profitez de la notoriété de lift et de sa communauté pour faire connaître vos initiatives, projets.

2 possibilités pour participer à l'Open Program :

• Proposez un atelier et la thématique sur laquelle vous souhaitez impliquer la communauté de Lift (brainstorm, discussion, visite,...)
  Des exemples d'atelier : "Découvrir et protéger son identité numérique", "Réaliser une carte open source avec GPS",...




• Présentez une innovation de rupture : un projet qui change radicalement les termes de référence d'un marché d'un secteur, d'un morceau de société,...Toute idée qui surprend, qui dérange, soutenue par des exemples, scénario, prototype ou réalisation.

En savoir plus sur l'Open Program.
Envoyez votre proposition avant le 18 juin !

The Lift France 11 Open Program submissions are now open. You can submit your ideas for workshops and innovative projects. Get active and take the opportunity to share your experience, brainstorm with your fellow Lifters and get exposure.

The Open Program consists of two initiatives:

• Workshops: Explore a topic in detail in a workshop in which you engage people in a collective and participative activity (brainstorm, discussion, platform, simulation, short walk). Past workshops included "Discover and protect your digital identity", "Producing an open-source map with GPS", "Where is the Future Hiding?" and "Why we (still) need Art in a media rich environment".




• Disruptive Projects presentations: we are looking for radical and game-changing projects in various domains: a business model, a service, a platform, a technological device that would make a huge difference. We are interested in unorthodox, surprising, dangerous ideas, backed up by examples, scenarios, prototypes or actual realizations.

Learn more on the open program page. Please send us your proposal before June 18!

One of our biggest motivations at Lift is to connect people. And it's always very motivating to see these connections result in concrete collaborations, new projects.

We were delighted to read on Marcel Kampman's blog about his encounter with Andy Mayer, the CEO of Yoommee during the CERN visit at Lift11. And that Yoomme now joins Project Dreamschool and will build it's online platform. Great news! Good luck for this partnership, keep us posted :)

We are currently redesigning the Lift landing page and would love to get some feedback from the screen designers and information architects among you!

We want the new Lift landing page to

• focus more on content and improve community- and social media features
• enable you to comment and share stories immediately from the landing page
• include a community heartbeat highlighting the most commented stories and new community members
• make the landing page multi-event, as we have already confirmed the hosting of 4 conferences in 2011 !

Please have a look at the mock-up, it shows you the all elements we need to integrate, and let us know your thoughts, thanks!

We have identified that our community comes to the conference looking for two types of content: inspiration/new ideas and concrete/actionnable ideas. We have rebuilt the program of the conference with that in mind, spreading the sessions into different days to allow those who might want to skip sessions to do so more easily. We will also sell day tickets for even more flexibility.

And we need your help: we need to name each day (to display on the program and to put the day tickets on sale), and we would like to hear your propositions. This is the program:

Wednesday Feb. 2, 2011
09:00 Co-creation workshops
11:30 First time participants welcome
14:00 Session: Inspiring stories (1/2)
16:00 Session: Re-organization, the changing workplace
20:00 Lift Fondue

Thursday Feb. 3, 2011
09:00 Workshops
11:00 Session: Engaging users with games
14:00 Session: Building and managing communities
16:00 Session: Community mining, new forms of business intelligence
20:00 Open dinner

Friday Feb. 4, 2011
09:00 Workshops
11:00 Session: Trends and ideas from around the world
14:00 Session: New frontiers
16:00 Session: Inspiring stories (2/2)
22:00 Closing party

Day one is about discovery. Day two about actionnable content you can reuse in your daily life. Day three is about prospective, potential and speculative futures.

So how would you name those days?

Day 1: Discovery day
Day 2: Concrete day
Day 3: Prospective day

What do you suggest?

Who are the three people who blew your mind lately? In a discussion, on a web video, in an article, someone you heard your friends talk about. Can you reduce all the ideas you came across to three names and share them?

We are looking for speakers for the "Stories" and "New frontiers" sessions. Over the years, we had the inventor of Nespresso, an adventurer who walks for 17 month away from technology, a professor who became the first cyborg, the father of the internet talking about interplanetary networks, a Serbian blogger who was the only journalist covering her country's war crime trials, and many more.

You can see the common thread here: passionate people with exciting, unique lives and projects. Does that ring a bell?

See one of the best Lift08 talk: Kevin Warwick on "Implant technology" (aka becoming a cyborg for dummies)

Working with a 6000+ members community is a fascinating and demanding process. Fascinating because you can really unleash virtually unlimited energy to achieve your goals. Demanding because you need to keep up with everything that comes your way, check the links you receive, assess a lot more info than you would normally have to deal with if you had worked alone.

^{Massive antennas seen downtown Portland. Gathering what data?}

Now this is cool: following our call for network analysis specialists, we got many recommendations I wanted to share to contribute back to the discussion. I believe this transparency - and the ongoing debate it will contribute to generate - will outweigh the risk of having other events dig into our list of potential speakers ;) Do you think it's the right bet?

• Riyaad Minty from Al Jazeera (recommended by Esra Dogramaci), where he currently works as part of the New Media team, specialising in mobile and social media.

• Charles Armstrong (recommended by Mike Stenhouse), ethnographer and business innovator, serves as CEO of Trampoline Systems, a software vendor providing network analysis solutions for large organisations.

• Bernie Hogan (recommended by Thibaut Thomas) is a research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.

• Jukka Pekka Onnela & Peter Gloor (recommended by Sachin Gaur).

• Karen Stephenson (recommended by Frank Boermeester) to talk about the future of social capital.

• Emmanuel Lazega (recommended by Antonio Casilli), Professor of sociology at the University of Paris – Dauphine, senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France, director of the Observatory of Intra- and Inter-Organizational Networks, and director of the Research Master in Sociology at Dauphine.

Now to the hardest part: inviting the right person who can deliver a good speech in front of 1000 people. Have you seen any of them on stage recently?