Highlighted photos from TEDxNOLA, a one-day conference that addressed the question: how can creativity save a community? View all the photos on Flickr and Facebook.

TEDxNOLA was a local, self-organized conference convened in New Orleans to explore the pivotal role that crisis plays in the development of groundbreaking ideas. On August 27th, 2010 during the week of remembrance of the 5th Anniversary of Katrina, Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre hosted intellects and achievers to examine how crisis forces us to rethink, reinvent and reinvest. How can creativity save a community?

View all the photos from TEDxNOLA on Flickr and Facebook.

Mitch Landrieu, Mayor of New Orleans

James Carville

Gary Solomon, Jr., The Solomon Group

John Besh, John Besh Restaurants

Lisa P. Jackson, EPA

Matt Wisdom, Turbosquid

A short recap from a week of panels, mixers and conversations from @CEPICDublin at the CEPIC New Media Conference and Congress.

The view from the front, CEPIC, Dublin, Ireland

Some didn’t have high hopes for CEPIC this year.

But I did. I was excited about the opportunity to meet a lot of industry professionals that I know only by name, email address or avatar. I was excited to participate in a panel about “The Future of Stock Photography”, led by Ellen Boughn, along with Shannon Fagan, Dittmar Frohmann and Cathy Yeulet. I was excited about our mixer “Before the Future”, hosted by Ellen, Shannon, Lee Torrens and I to bring together a diverse set of thinkers in the photography industry and create thoughtful and valuable conversations and connections between people driving the future of the photography industry (thank you to our sponsor Jonathan Ross and Spaces Images). And of course, I was excited about enjoying the good times that comes when you bring quality, creative, leading professionals together.

And that’s what happened, largely. Along the way, I learned that photographers prefer talking about photography than economics (I shouldn’t have been surprised by that). I learned that comparing quality stock photography to manufacturing is a little controversial, even if it’s the truth that nobody will admit, and even if it’s meant as a praise to the innovators in the industry. I met a lot of people trying to push along using traditional stock photography industry business practices, but I also met many innovative, forward-thinking people that really want to be the change the industry needs.

During my part on “The Future of Stock Photography” panel, I brought up five main points for conversation that I truly believe stock agencies need to consider when planning for the future:

• How can agencies aggregate and curate the crowd?
• How can niche agencies thrive?
• Can agencies use social media to attract contributors and sell images?
• Can agencies reach and make money from non-traditional stock buyers?
• What core value does an agency create and deliver?

Although we didn’t solve any of these questions, I hope that the discussion that ensued is one that will continue on in people’s minds and decisions as they plan for their future in the industry.

Also, view my slides on Slideshare, embedded below.

But beside that, like all conferences, CEPIC was time to mingle, engage, say hello to new and old friends, and enjoy a bit of space from our day-to-day business issues and focus on bigger issues. And enjoy a pint of Guinness or two :)

CEPIC Congress, Dublin, Ireland

CEPIC, Dublin, Ireland

Jerome Lacrosniere of Imaginechina and Shannon Fagan at “Before the Future”, CEPIC, Dublin, Ireland

More from CEPIC and Dublin:

• Ellen Boughn, To Russia With Love*…from CEPIC, with links to many other notes and photos from CEPIC.
• My photos on Flickr, of CEPIC, Dublin, and the Before the Future mixer.

The details behind the panel discussion “Making Yourself Uncomfortable” at TribeCon 2009 last week in New Orleans, LA.

Last week at the inaugural TribeCon, a conference about the power of communities, I got the chance to participate on a panel called “Make Yourself Uncomfortable: How to Rawk a New Community” with Sloane Berrent, Shannon Lane and Carl Nelson:

You want to expand your professional circle, transition into a new career, learn something new, or go to a new city and meet the locals. But how? By introducing yourself to new online and offline communities to meet new people and open up opportunities. In order to do that you’re going to have to make yourself uncomfortable.

Making yourself uncomfortable is a powerful way to identify and take advantage of current and new opportunities. In this panel, we’ll share personal stories, hard-earned lessons and practical advice on how to find and explore the edges and cores of new-to-you communities. We’ll provide tips on how to break through being uncomfortable and transitioning to a whole new outlook in order to use communities for personal and professional growth. (details)

But TribeCon was about a lot, lot more.

Recapping TribeCon
To understand what TribeCon 2009 was about, start by reading Matt Catrett’s solid summary about Tribecon and viewing my pictures from the day.

But while it’s easy to read about the event and see what happened, the spirit of TribeCon is a little more difficult to absorb without having been there.

To me, TribeCon wasn’t just a conference, but a celebration, a shared experience, a family get-together between people with evil plans for how to create, build, lead and contribute to meaningful change in their communities. Yes, it’s a business conference, complete with talks and panel discussions about serious issues in business and government, but TribeCon was guided by a vibe and a sense of “realness” that allowed us to talk serious business without an overbearing sense of seriousness.

And for that, here’s my personal thank you to Chris Schultz, Tiffany Starnes and the crew of volunteers, attendees and speakers that made it happen.

Thank you. Already looking forward to TribeCon 2010 and to the next time I’m in New Orleans.

And to provide a great example of how and why making yourself uncomfortable is powerful, I’ll soon share a great story about a recent journey…

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The slides for the panel discussion “Making Yourself Uncomfortable”:

beCamp, Charlottesville, VA

Friday and Saturday I participated in beCamp here in Charlottesville, VA (I might win the award for least distance traveled for my four block walk to the event). For the unitiated, beCamp is a variant of BarCamp, an open, participant-driven event, where the schedule, content and discussions are created and led by the participants for the participants. Often called an “unconference”, BarCamps are based on the idea that the real value in conferences often come from the adhoc hallway conversations between people, and are thus structured to facilitate that kind of interaction throughout the entire event.

In short, my first beCamp was a great experience. Since beCamp is focused on software and web development, as one of the few non-developers in attendance, I definitely did not have the deep experience or expertise in being able to actually create the technologies we discussed, but hope that I was able to bring some knowledge and insight into creating business based on these technologies.

By the nature of concurrent sessions on different topics, I could not make all the panels. But from what I did attend, what did I takeaway?

• Once you get passionate and intelligent people talking about topics they love, the conversations are great. In many sessions the idea sharing and discussions could have gone on far longer than the alloted times.
• Structure matters: the level of engagement and conversations are a direct impact from the open, participant-led planning for the topics.
• Web 3.0: great discussion kicked off by Ahson around a range of topics and issues regarding the evolution of the web, evolving standards, microformats, the semantic web, advertising revenue models, paying for services, location-based services, delivering targeted, localized services, and other related topics. My take: the Web 3.0 model is to deliver personalized services and content using context and location-based information aggregated about the user.
• Marketing Small Businesses Online: discussion led by RJ at OpenSource Connections, mostly about using people and the web to deliver messages and leverage trusted influencers. Online and offline, it’s still hard to reach people we do not know with our messages.
• Cloud Computing: discussion led by Eric Pugh at OpenSource Connections about the opportunities to use cloud computing for creating applications. In short, the resources are there to create highly scalable yet inexpensive infrastructures for web applications. As a web user, I’m excited about the potential for new, innovative solutions to online and offline user problems. As a businessman, I’m excited about the potential for fast-evolving businesses and high rate of business transformations created by the low barriers of entry and resulting intense competition in the area. It’s a great time to start a new business.
• Raising Capital for your Business & Selling your Business: great discussion led by Kyle Redinger at DeParis Redinger. A lot of interest from potential entrepreneurs in learning about raising capital, one of the few sessions that I was able to provide some knowledge of my own, hopefully I was helpful.
• Facebook / OpenSocial Development: discussion led by Ashish, a lot of conversation about developing applications for social networks and issues of data portability and developing across a range of popular and niche social networks. Developing for OpenSocial is not yet as easy as it should be, some gaps still exist in companies implementing the structure.
• Google AppEngine: discussion led by Ashish about the AppEngine infrastructure and framework. As a non-developer, I was most interested in getting the opinions from developers about whether AppEngine is a big deal: my takeaway is that it’s a great opportunity to create highly scalable applications without having to worry about a lot of typical infrastructure concerns, but the vendor lock-in is a huge concern due to the inherent lack of application portability.
• And lastly, there are some great, committed, tech-focused people in Charlottesville.

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Photos: a couple more from beCamp up at Flickr.