• Howard Rheingold
  
• Paul Saffo
• Lucy Bernholz (immoderator)
  

A disruptive technology is one that causes significant changes in the way that individuals live, businesses operate, or society behaves. Passenger jet airplanes, the microcomputer, the Internet, and the cellphone are some prominent examples from the second half of the last century.
What technologies today are truly disruptive, and which are a continuation or acceleration of ongoing trends?  Which ones are just a flash in the pan? Consider:

• The $100 laptop computer project
• Citizen journalism 
• Municipal wireless
• Cooperative/sharing economies

Do these technologies represent serious disruptions that should be leveraged for maximum social good?  Are they really a continuation of long running trends?  Or are they pipe dreams that aren't technically or politically feasible?If these technologies have seriously disruptive potential, how can the nonprofit sector take advantage of the disruption?  How should the disruptions shape our goals and the means we use to achieve them?

photo of Howard Rheingold.

• Angela Glover Blackwell
• Daniel Ben-Horin (immoderator)
  

• Conference Notes from Conversation with Angela Glover Blackwell
• See a video of this session at ForaTV

The Digital Divide is often spoken of as an equipment divide--numbers of computers per families and those kind of statistics--but it's much more nuanced than that. One could argue that there's been a tremendous increase in equipment access for the economically disadvantaged in this country over the last 15 years and that at the same time the complexity of successful technology implementation has increased even more quickly. We now seem to have something that is in the ballpark of basic access on a broad scale, and then we have real  access on a far more limited and economically privileged scale. The divide between these categories is less stark than the divide between someone one owns a computer and someone who doesn't, but it is no less injurious to educational and economic advancement and to social confidence.

Angela Glover Blackwell, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, founded PolicyLink in 1999. A renowned community building activist and advocate, Blackwell served as senior vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation where she oversaw the Foundation's Domestic and Cultural divisions. She gained national recognition as founder of the Oakland (CA) Urban Strategies Council, where she pioneered new approaches to neighborhood revitalization.  She is the co-author of Searching for the Uncommon Common Ground: New Dimensions on Race in America published in 2002 by W.W. Norton & Co.

Very recently, Policylink was a founding partner of the Louisiana Rebuilds project and staffs the project's Drupal site for Katrina victims. In conversation with Daniel Ben-Horin, President of CompuMentor, Angela will examine the question of what it will take, on an equity and policy level, to create ubiquitous real access, defined as access to, not just shared institutional computers,  but to personal, home-based computers and the education and support necessary to fully utilize them.

• Tantek Celik 
• Taylor McKnight 
• Chris Messina
  
• Ian Kennedy (immoderator)