WHO
In the spirit of “Dangerous Ideas”—the theme of 2006’s Pop!Tech summit—more than 500 attendees plus writers, editors and designers worked around the clock to capture the event in a 300-page printed “Artifact.” The Artifact Project was fed by a stream of real-time blogging, wiki editing, digital photography and sketching, delivered to designers Brian W. Jones and David Stychno (the first participants in Project Maverick, a “career accelerator” founded by John Bielenberg and his partners at C2) and printed within days on an HP Indigo press for distribution to attendees. “I’d never heard of a real-time book before this was proposed,” says Bielenberg, “and the concept was intellectually challenging.” Logistics were also a challenge for the team—Bielenberg describes it as “a triage unit crossed with a design studio”—that laid out 100 spreads a day to create the Artifact.

WHAT
So the question immediately arises: Why is this an Artifact and not a book? “The reason we used that word rather than calling it a book is that we wanted people to think about something else,” Bielenberg says. “We didn’t want this pigeonholed as a certain kind of project.”

Pop!Tech, a three-day gathering of about 500 scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, authors, innovators and explorers, seems an uncannily appropriate subject for such an approach … notwithstanding the more traditional medium of print chosen for the final product. Founded by former Apple CEO John Sculley and 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe as a way of fostering unique conversations about forces and ideas shaping the future, Pop!Tech has a decidedly technological bent, with recent conferences often focused on media that enable the rapid dissemination of information and ideas. Of course, technology is enabling more than rapid turnaround, so it was only fitting that the Artifact also be personalized, with each attendee’s copy featuring his or her name and an estimation of how much carbon that person expended getting to and from the summit.

WHERE
Set in an antique opera house in the seaside town of Camden, Maine, each annual Pop!Tech conference is organized around a theme; 2006’s Dangerous Ideas speakers included New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman, musician and producer Brian Eno, and Will Wright, creator of The Sims. With such high-powered presenters, getting the word to the right mix of attendees for transmission to the greater world is tricky. “Curating the audience,” is the way Bielenberg describes the process of ensuring that attendance doesn’t become an exercise in elitism—about half of the seats are allocated for anyone to sign up for online (alas, the 2007 event is sold out). Popularity is posing a challenge: “In the future, we’re going to have to have more ways for people to participate,” says Bielenberg. The Artifact was a step in that direction.

WHEN
Annually in October, at the height of the New England autumn. 2007’s summit—theme “Human Impact”—will be held Oct. 17–20.

WHY
“Inspiring people to create a better world by fostering visionary conversations about science, technology and the future of ideas” is the Pop!Tech mission. With each wave of technology breaking ever faster on global society, anticipating issues and strategies becomes more critical. Capturing the outcomes of Pop!Tech’s “visionary conversations” for later consideration and appraisal was the purpose of the recent Artifact. While it took the form of a book, there’s no telling what the next medium will be.