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Roger Malina brings the first conclusion to Lift France 11 and comes back on some of the most inspiring speeches of the conference.

Information technologies today interrupt and distract us, dividing our attention across a range of activities and devices. This feels like an inevitable state of affairs, but Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues in his talk that it is not. Drawing on recent work in embodied cognition, contemplative practices, and interface design, he describes how we can create and use information technologies in a more thoughtful, meditative way, to help us work in a more sustained, creative and focused manner. He also explains what contemplative computing might mean for individuals as well as corporations, institutions and civic actors.

^{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.

In her speech, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino gives an update on the methodology and results employed in the Homesense experiment: a project that rethinks how we design smart homes and investigate how we interact with technologies at home. This project applies open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home.

The present-day approach towards a sustainable society is doomed to fail. The focus on sophisticated technology - electric and hybrid cars, energy-efficient devices, solar panels and wind turbines, for instance - has little or no effect because these green technologies require large amounts of energy and resources for their manufacture, which makes their development highly dependent on a continuous supply of fossil fuels. What we need to solve our problems is exactly the opposite: less sophisticated technology. There is a lot to learn from the past. While they often worked surprisingly good, most of low-tech solutions have been completely forgotten. In his speech, Kris de Decker explains that reverting to past technologies does not mean that we should go back to the Middle Ages. Rather, it means combining old tech with new knowledge and new materials, or applying old concepts and lost knowledge to modern technology.

We're in a world where exponential change is the new normal. Old economic structures are being challenged by newer ones and networked technologies are changing the way we can distribute resources. For a world with so limited resources, it's amazing how much idle-capacity we have at the moment. This does not only apply to natural resources such as minerals and forests, but also applies to human resources, such as knowledge, skills, and tangible resources such as tools and equipment. In his presentation, Edial Dekker dives deeper in the role of social layers connected to the 'social object' of distributed resources and the effects that it has on the network. The talk will touch the concept of a trusted network, the rise of the micro-entrepreneur and why it challenges us to rethink the way corporations and organizations are structured.

Open Prosthetics is a movement and a community that looks to find economically feasible ways of producing medical devices for underserved medical populations and to give patients a way to participate to (even large and sophisticated) projects that develop technologies in their name. By facilitating the exchange of knowledge, Open prosthetics has allowed projects to develop that make prosthesis more available, while others focus more on new possibilities that would never find a market before that (such as specialized, customized, or even fancy replacement limbs), or even new ways of producing high-end research (lego hands for prototyping...).

This talk explores some of the issues that emerge around networked information-collecting objects in our public spaces, and to frame a taxonomy of such objects from the unobjectionable (due to local effect and a clear public good associated with them) to those that ought to be causing us significant concern (no public benefit, global impact, pernicious second-order effects).

Adam is a long-time friend of Lift, he shared his work with us on several occasions in Geneva, Marseille and Korea. Watch his previous Lift talks:
"Everyware: Further down the Rabbit Hole" Lift07
"The read/write City" Lift Asia 07
"The Long Here, the Big Now" Lift Asia 08

A leading researcher on globalization, global cities and new technologies Saskia Sassen discusses the current hype around smart cities. She reminds us that “It is the need to design a system that puts all that technology truly at the service of the inhabitants—and not the other way around.”

Want to get more information? Check these related articles:

A propos de S. Sassen et de « l’urbanisme open-source » sur Technogéographie (in French)

An interview with Saskia Sassen about "Smart cities" by Nicolas Nova