12 Interesting Things I Learned at The Feast

Photo: Rachel Feierman, Creative Commons The Feast was a day-long social innovation conference that took place on Thursday, October 16th at Scandinavia House in New York City. There were 12 presentations and summarizing each one would make for a very long article, so I’m simply going to touch on twelve interesting things that I learned:

The Earth is Not Flat

The great thing about Arianna Huffington, besides everything, is that she practices what she preaches. She champions opinionated journalism and she herself is an unapologetically opinionated journalist. In fact, she probably would have been proud of that first line because it’s not objective and it doesn’t claim to be. To her, objective journalism is dishonest.

NetSquared Year 3 Conference, Part I

Photo: ReefRaff, Creative Commons, Flickr< I attended the NetSquared Year 3 Conference on May 27-28, 2008 in San Jose, CA, right after Memorial Day weekend. I had spent the weekend in Berkeley, CA at my friend Sammy’s wedding so I was a little shaky for the meet and greet on Monday night, but Jean Russell…

N2Y3 2008 Mashup Challenge

The N2Y3 2008 Mashup Challenge featured 21 teams competing for funding for initiatives ranging from saving endangered languages to ending genocide. On the first day of the conference each team was permitted two minutes to describe their projects, many of which focused on themes like government transparency and corporate accountability, and all of which rely…

Interview with Stephen Colbert at the Y

“I love playing a high status idiot.” Raucous laughter. It’s hard to tell if Stephen Colbert is being funny when a packed crowd of white people in flip-flops dies laughing at everything he says. Such was the scene at the 92nd Street Y last night where I heard him speak with New York Times columnist…

The WebbyConnect Conference in Laguna Beach

I just finished listening to none other than blog superstar, Arianna Huffington, give her keynote at the first annual WebbyConnect conference in beautiful Laguna Beach, CA. Prior to this appearance, I never really knew anything about her. I haven't spent much time at her site, www.huffingtonpost.com. Sure, I was familiar with her and of course…

Revolution of the Nerds: WIRED’s NextFest

Normally composed of gadget obsessed, glasses-clad Gamers, the color of geek has suddenly gone green. This would account for the fact that this year’s Wired NextFest, the Future of Technologies Fair held at the Los Angeles convention center, devoted 18 of its 165 exhibits to "CleanTech." In fact, tucked in right next to booths on…

Construction, Pricing and Lazy Consumers

Photo:peterandringa, Creative Commons, Flickr I come from a family of construction and real estate gurus, so naturally the panel on green buildings at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference not only intrigued me, I even knew a little bit about the subject. Luckily it took place on the first morning of the event. The take-away is simple.…

Just the Beginning

Most presenters at AlwaysOn’s GoingGreen conference agreed that we are just beginning to scratch the surface of green opportunities out there, whether referring to distributed power generation or water innovation. And there are many, many smart people scratching, scraping and digging away at the opportunities. While many of the presented ideas were longer term solutions…

Michelle Dow Bio

Michelle Dow: Director, The Corporate Citizenship Company Inc. Michelle leads the US operations of The Corporate Citizenship Company, a specialist management consultancy helping companies to succeed as good citizens worldwide. She leads client relationships across services including: corporate social and environmental strategy, reporting and benchmarking; social and economic impact assessment; stakeholder engagement; and communications.  Recent…