The Far-Flung LIFT Community Gathers in Geneva

What is LIFT? It’s a conference about innovation and information and communication technology – and the eff ects of those on human beings. It is not a conference of geeks. OK, it is mostly geeks, but not just ITC geeks. There are anthropology geeks, for example. Science fi ction writer geeks. Designer geeks and contemporary artists. More and more robotics and entrepreneur geeks. Gamer geeks. Also, UN and NGO geeks, both on-stage and leading workshops. There is plenty of geek chic with dark-rimmed glasses, as well as classic suits and heels. The diverse tribes of geekdom at LIFT do share one quality. According to the current defi nition, the common denominator of “geek” is “expertise to the point of obsession”. The word itself comes from the Middle High German for “fairground freak”, as in the type of sideshow carnie who used to rip off a chicken’s head with his teeth to draw a crowd.

I’ve been to LIFT four times and I’ve never seen that. But I have witnessed a lot of expertise to the point of obsession. The following personal favourites may suggest how a diverse conference like this can stimulate thinking.

Is “minimally invasive education” better for children? At LIFT2007, Sugata Mitra, now Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, talked about his 1999 “hole in the wall” experiment: Mitra, then at IBM in Delhi, fi xed a PC into the wall of a slum and watched children, who could not speak English and had never seen a computer, work out for themselves how to surf the web.

 If, as the old joke has it, men are just dogs with car keys, then what eff ect are mobile phones having on us? In 2007, Lara Srivastava, a Senior Policy Analyst at the International Telecommunication Union, talked about some of the ways communication technologies are changing human interaction. Even with four years’ worth of water under the bridge, it’s still awesome. 

How are people in the developing world using fi rst world technology? In 2009, Cameroonian sociologist Baba Wame demonstrated the growth of a particular kind of Internet café in his country where women are schooled in using on-line dating tools to fi nd “rich” husbands in Europe. 

Up to now, information technology has largely conformed to the expectations of the West. How will that change as the rest of the world gets into the act? At LIFT2010, Basile Zimmermann, a professor at the University of Geneva’s Department of Chinese Studies, compared Western and Chinese search engines and social networking sites to suggest what happens when technology intersects with culture. Zimmerman listed the many adaptations the Chinese have had to make to English language centered technology. What will “our” technology look like, he asks, when China is in the design seat?

And how will this technology affect our perceptions of the world around us? Also in 2010, artist/designers Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada demonstrated gadgets that give humans a small taste of animal superpowers: simulators that allow you to see the world as ants see it or to feel the geomagnetic sensitivity of birds, elaborate appendages that let you arm-wrestle the world’s (proportionally) strongest animal, the rhinoceros beetle.

Note that, although inspiring, none of these speakers are household names in the tech community. LIFT wants it that way. “Most of the time people come to listen to the ‘stars’ but go home talking about the guy they’d never heard of,” says LIFT co-founder Lauren Haug. The program is designed to be broad and surprising. Participants at LIFT are interested in what can be done with technology – and, especially, in what technology is doing to us. Implications rather than applications, as LIFT’s editorial manager and co-founder, the appropriately named Nicolas Nova, puts it.

“Rather than talking about the latest gadgets on the market, we look at how they may change the possibilities for designers and entrepreneurs and the way people learn, work, live and collaborate,” Nova explains. Nova himself has an impressive tech background: a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from EPFL, the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne, where he also worked as a research scientist at the Media and Design Lab; an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Sciences and a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction.

Still, high-tech stars do feature prominently at LIFT. Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the Internet”, inventor of the IP protocol and now holding the improbable title of Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, gave the concluding speech in 2009. The influential author, Don Taspscott opens this years’ conference with his favorite: “How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.” Robert Scoble, inevitably described as “the tech world’s Über-blogger”, will report on the current best ideas and start-ups in Silicon Valley.

All speeches are on the LIFT website. Sharing video for free, of course, has become a proven marketing technique: the exclusive TED Conference in Monterey, California has put it to good use with the now-famous “TED Talks”. It was LIFT that came up with the idea, although the team seems little concerned about getting credit.

“Yeah, we did it first,” shrugs Laurent Haug. A graduate of the University of Lausanne, Haug spent most of his early career developing and implementing technological solutions to solve business problems, first in a start-up, then at Arthur Andersen and Pictet. “But we are in a domain where it is really hard to claim ownership of ideas because, as soon as you do something, you do it in front of 1000 people.”

Other LIFT contributions to the conference world are the informal “workshop” and “Open Stage”. About half of LIFT’s content is “community-managed”, that is, participants propose talks that are reviewed by the organizers and online community and, if approved, become either workshops or mini-presentations on Open Stage. Workshops allow participants to explore the issue being discussed and, inadvertently, to network. As usual, Global Issues Players are leading a number of them this year. For example, Paul Conneally, Head of Media and Public Communication for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, is leading one on how digital communications like Twitter and text messages are empowering disaster “victims”.

And Matthias Luefkens, Associate Director in charge of digital media at the World Economic Forum, is doing one called “Discover your digital identity” that promises to “strip naked your online persona”. The people who will get to go up on the “Open Stage” haven’t been announced yet, but it’s a bit like an aspiring comic getting a shot at the New York Comedy Club.

“We did a workshop at the first LIFT in 2006 and have added more to every subsequent event,” says Nicolas Nova. “Most other conferences are now doing them. We also did Open Stage first. Maybe the other conferences aren’t copying us, maybe it’s just in the zeitgeist, but it’s good to be at the front of this kind of trend.”

LIFT itself is a fast-evolving, living organism. It was born in Geneva by accident, because the young founders and their friends of like mind happened to be living around here. (Although they attended university in Lausanne, Haug and Nova are both French.) The group found that they were all interested in the opportunities then emerging from new technology but that their different fields were divided into sub-communities with little interaction. Volunteering their time, Haug, Nova and Co. decided to create a conference, in English, and invite everyone they knew. With a little help from their friends (Laurent Haug calls LIFT a “human-centric” organization), that first conference, in 2006, drew 350 people.

“People came from different spheres based on the profiles of the founders,” says Nova. “Laurent was more into start-ups and social media. I was more into academic research in humantechnological interaction and design, gaming, and new forms of interfaces. Other people were involved in PR and marketing. These were the kinds of sub-communities that first aggregated around LIFT.”

LIFT2007 doubled in size and, since then, the organizers try to keep attendance at 1000. (For one thing, serving fondue for 1000, the traditional first-night at LIFT, is already enough of a challenge.) LIFT has also evolved with the industry and with the addition of new sub-communities, says Nicolas Nova. “In 2007-2008, we began to see participants who were interested in foresight research, even policy research, and NGOs. In 2009, there were more and more designers. And now it’s really about innovation of all kinds, with people who see LIFT as way of understanding the processes that could be put in place to change the way they do things.”

“LIFT never has the same content or even the same format twice,” says Laurent Haug. The team is in a perpetual state of self-examination. Should the conference continue its broad focus or narrow it down? Should it stay at three days or be shortened to two? Should there be more or fewer workshops? Should there be a formal question/answer session or informal mingling with speakers afterwards? To answer such questions, the team seeks feedback from the LIFT community. A typical call for input - “Can you recommend women speakers?” - went out in October, generating a huge response ranging from names to complaints about the lack of women at LIFT (about one-fourth of participants, but 40% of speakers) and in the industry as a whole. “Every year, we try to balance our program between men and women,” Laurent Haug responded on the LIFT blog. “Not because we want to follow a quota, but because usage of technology is our focus, and women represent 52% of US internet users, 40 percent of US video gamers (55% for social games), 57% of Facebook users.”

“This is where being a Web community event is different to a traditional event,” says Yves Cretegny who became LIFT’s first CEO on February 1, 2010. Cretegny was previously CFO and Head of Innovation for Palexpo, Geneva’s largest convention center, where the massive Geneva Motor Show and ITU Telecom shows are held. “We are in continuous interaction with our community through small events and the website. We can use input all year round to create content that will be aligned with what will surprise and satisfy our community.”

In November 2009, I saw this trial-and-error approach upclose at a workshop exploring whether LIFT2010 should ask participants to text-message their comments to speakers. At the end of the evening, the method was judged too time-consuming, so the idea was dropped. A different method will be introduced at LIFT2011, whereby participants can get the slides on their mobile phones and post comments directly to the moderator or speaker.

Another new feature of LIFT2011 will be “co-creation workshops”, small gatherings of people selected (along criteria such as nationality or profession) to work on, say, how a particular company might implement new technology or make the most of trends. LIFT LAB, the company’s research and consulting arm, is organizing the co-creation workshops as a plus for some of their clients. For a young, four-person outfit, LIFT LAB has an impressive client list, including the French Ministry of Industry, the Louvre, McKinsey, Nespresso, Orange, Palexpo, Swisscom and UBS.

Yves Cretegny, whose job it is to take LIFT to a higher professional level, notes that the company has become a mix of online activities, blogs, social media and a series of events, some organized spontaneously by participants under the LIFT brand as “Lift@home” gatherings. “We realized last year that we had created a global community rather than an event. It is important for us not to think of LIFT as something that happens in February and that’s it,” he says.

Because the content at the annual meeting in Geneva is broad, LIFT holds smaller, more focused events throughout the year. LIFT has held three meetings in Korea, LIFT Asia, about the development of technology specific to that region, and others, in Marseilles and Lyon, looking, respectively at the Web and the gaming industry. Another new direction is the LIFT Inside events, providing content inside larger shows. In March, Robolift will explore innovation in robotics, artificial intelligence and networked objects as part of the robotic service tradeshow InnoRobo in Lyon. Later in the Spring, LIFT is scheduled to host a session with Umberto Eco at the Geneva Book Fair about the impact of digital reading devices.

The Lift@home community-organized events have also turned out to be a surprising resource for keeping tabs on the zeitgeist, as Nicolas Nova would put it. Organizers are expected to file reports on their events to the website. A recent Lift@home in Japan looked at hacking and citizen interaction with the city. Another, in Moscow in November, looked at trends in Human Enhancement Technologies and Smart Environments. Response to others in Holland, Brussels and Vienna was so enthusiastic that the LIFT team is now considering holding official LIFT conferences in those cities.

The explosion of these events suggests that LIFT has taken on a life of its own, becoming even more “planet-centric” than its creators could ever have imagined. Not that they object. “Diversity,” they say, “is the key to innovation.” LIFT’s far reach promises to continue supplying us with reports on changing technology and turning up ever stranger and more wonderful stories of how human beings around the globe are reacting to it. “Sugata Mitra recently told me about a retired British schoolteacher who has been video-tutoring Indian kids in English through the Internet,” muses Laurent Haug, “Apparently, there are now all these slum kids in Delhi with Oxford accents. I love this kind of phenomenon, that only technology could create!”

by Sarah Meyer de Stadelhofen