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The Beginning Is Here: A Report From Rushkoff's Contact Summit

Recently media theorist Douglass Rushkoff hosted the first Contact Conference, a gathering of political and technical types, at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, an 1849 German Reformed synagogue that's a mashup of a miniature cathedral and a steampunk...

Recently media theorist Douglas Rushkoff hosted the first Contact Conference, a gathering of political and technical types, at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, an 1849 German Reformed synagogue that's a mashup of a miniature cathedral and a steampunk saloon. After the building's caretaker greeted us, Mr. Rushkoff, quoting Jane Jacobs, reminded the audience that "new ideas need old buildings" an apt segue to a primarily user-led conference, convened with the explicit purpose of building "what comes next."

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What comes next, apparently, is peer-to-peer everything. The overwhelming consensus, even among the scheduled "provocations" (which were great, but not terribly provocative) offered by Mr. Rushkoff's heroes (all of us in the room are his heroes, he says) is that, we, the people, will "continue to turn away from big media, big finance, big food, toward one another."

The Wall Street Occupation seemed at its apex, just over two miles away, and a reference to that hopeful and insane movement is integral to the first gesture made by Scott Heiferman, the founder of Meetup.com and that day's first provocateur. Scott tells the audience that his favorite Occupy sign is: "The Beginning is Near", but that he takes slight issue with it — he thinks it should read "The Beginning is Here." The crowd agrees.

The Occupation's proximity seems to be powering the emotional and spiritual vitality of the whole conference — though it's Pepsi who's actually keeping the lights on, a fact that's glossed over despite the community's insistence on self-reliance, and aversion to centralized power.

Addressing this could be a next step for future iterations of Contactcon. Though the conference's main course is a series of attendee-led meetings around topics as brilliant and diverse as Building a Debt Escaro and Web Service as a Collective Bargaining Tool, Creating a Pattern Language for Data as an Alternative to Website Domains, and Advocating for Nuclear Fusion, the process by which attendees announce and are slated for upcoming meetings is highly centralized, and inefficient to boot. This oversight in process is confusing, because there are existing models (and software!) for organizing leaderless conferences.

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But no one seems too perturbed. Working groups are announced, and everyone gets to work. There's a lot to be done; apparently, we're just at the beginning.

Mahfouda is the founder and CEO of the social transit company Bandwagon.

Read more at ContactCon and here:

The First 21st-Century Movement: Douglas Rushkoff on Occupy Wall Street and Reclaiming the Internet from Corporations
Contactcon Conference: the cry for freedom
ContactCon YouTube channel
What the Contact Conference Was Really About by Vanessa Miemis
Connecting at ContactCon by Joanne McNeil

Image by Steven Brewer