EFTA00317455.pdf

19 April 111 CONFIDENTIAL DRAFT WWW.WWW ESRI Theater, Redlands, CA & Mission Inn, Riverside CA 18 September - 20 September, 2012 GE Corporation: Host, Beth Comstock Jack Dangermond, ESRI: Host, Understanding World (GIS/Landsat) Richard Saul Wurman: Founder & Creative Director Jon Kamen/@Radical Media: Trans-Media Design Producer Beth Comstock: Guide, Global Innovations & Healthcare Herbie Hancock & Yo-Yo Ma: Guides, Musical Directors John Brockman: Guide, Physics & Math Sciences Philip Burke: Guide, Conference Artist Kenneth Hertz, Membrain llc: Marketing & Entertainment Additional insight and assistance from Nicholas Negroponte In 1984 I observed a convergence of three areas of focus in our society: EFTA00317455  • Technology business, • Entertainment industry, and • Design professions When these three interests came together with passion and quality, an explosion of new media, innovations, and understandings of new patterns emerged. In 1984 I invented TED to explore this personal journey. The journey will continue in 2012. Now more than ever, understanding converging patterns is crucial to understanding both our natural and man-made worlds. I have created WWW.WWW as a means of understanding the complexity of the myriad of patterns inherent in all these convergences. The first bold W is for the world itself. World Waste Wealth Water War Well-Being Wildlife Web Weather Wind Words Wonder Wilderness EFTA00317456 Work Warming Wit Wanderlust & the Waking Dream Issues related to these fields constitute daily headlines around the world. Some predict doomsday, others solutions. Understanding Precedes Action. At WWW.WWW, the patterns and pairings between these various disciplines will be explained, discussed and visualized. The gathering will be comprised of informed, immersive and improvised conversations between the greatest, most interesting and curious minds in the world. The structure will be that of jazz: there shall be no speeches, but rather unrehearsed conversation between carefully selected pairings of great minds, sometimes from the same field, sometimes from different disciplines and divergent points of view. The pairs of individuals will be asked questions to find commentary, out-of-the-box observations, questions, successes and failures. Discussions will be inventive and unpredictable. These improvised conversations will flow in a path throughout the gathering. Parallel with these conversations will be actual performances given by the greatest musical EFTA00317457 pairings in the world. The gathered group of geniuses will constitute a new form of jazz: Intellectual jazz. It will be an active gathering of great minds. There will be a surround of visual reinforcement content, data, statistics and images that will extend the understanding and make the complex clear. These images will be displayed and triggered by key words in the conversations. This event will be deeply guided but not rehearsed. The conversations might last 3 minutes or 30 minutes. There will be no set time. It will be orchestrated depending on the energy of the conversations the discovery of patterns by what I hear by perhaps questions from the audience with the possibility that the players on stage might reappear later on or might be grouped with others. This will need appropriate investigation in order to make these decisions on the fly. Possible Pairings In a classic improvisation or conversation the two participants might come from the following: • two radically different points of view • two extremes in scale or magnitude of a similar subject • two similar areas which amplify in depth a similar subject EFTA00317458  • two radically different scales from a line of inquiry or research • from the same field or differing fields • from the same field and have differing points of view • they could be young and old • they can be a young bloomer or a late bloomer. For example: a pairing could be a cosmologist and a microbiologist. The cosmologist focused on developing the means to discover the presence and measurement of the most distant objects in space based on their light, heat or various wavelengths. His/her focus would be on the tools that one develops to measure objects and the relationship of objects to each other by how they change their paths perhaps by gravitational pull, like planets around a star, color of wavelength of light or directionality. The microbiologist, on the other hand, would explain developing the means to measure the heat, chemical make up and growth patterns at the level of the neuron, small genetic material, virus or protein case and the effect that these have on regular and irregular growth patterns as in cancer. So at these two extremes of scales of inquiry about measurement observation and discovery where the question between them would be an intellectually amplified realization of their journeys. EFTA00317459 The musical pairings are obvious: as with great minds come great conversations; great artists give great performances. These pairings will be: • jazz and jazz • jazz and classical • classical and classical I devoted a TED conference about a decade ago to the theme of `Leeks and Geezers' where I invited presenters who were either under 30 or over 70. Two of the people under 30 were Sergey Brin and Larry Page and the over 70's included the likes of Stanley Marcus, then 92, and Eva Zeisel, now 104. The result was a complimentary tension that ran as a thread throughout this gathering. In 1984, Americans saw the emergence of `Japan, Inc'. Now we see the emergence of China and India, Germany reassessing itself and Brazil trying to boldly step onto the world stage. The issues of wellbeing and wealthcare; wind and weather, water and war will all speak to each other. In 2002 I published a book with bios of 1000 American individuals as my personal "facebook" before Facebook was invented. Of course it is 8 years out-of-date and only includes Americans. However, it represents 1000 creative and interesting individuals, some of whom will certainly be included in the list of invitees. The index also provides a group of the many disciplines that will be addressed as EFTA00317460 well as their date of birth. Several individuals appear under multiple categories. These categories will assure diversity of age, gender, points of view and of course subject matter. Form WWW.WWW content will be sent to subscribers as an enterprise iPad app that will be updated within 10 days of the event with additional edited conversations that occur during the gathering at breaks and meals. I have held conversations with the head of World-Wide marketing for the iPad. Still and video images will be included in the update. The app will be available and searchable for 60 days after the conference. It is estimated that there are currently 14 million iPads in the world (source: Wall Street Journal, 11 Feb. `11), with an estimated 30 million to be sold in 2011 alone. The broadcast of this as an app allows for the time shift necessary for WWW.WWW to be viewed around the world. I am investigating the possibility of broadcasting the entire conference as a live stream in 3-D to selected IHAX theaters across the country and perhaps the world. TIME WWW.WWW will take place from the afternoon of 18 September through the end of the day on 20 September, 2012 www.wwwconf.com EFTA00317461 The Orchard Newport, RI 02840 401.848.2299 [email protected] EFTA00317462