PopTech 2008 Kicks Off Today

Sadly, I'll miss PopTech this year, one of my favorite conferences. Kicking off today, PopTech is an annual event held in Camden Maine every October.

The event brings together a network of 600 remarkable thinkers, doers, leaders and global change agents in science, technology, social innovation, business, environmentalism, globalization, media, education, and more. I covered it fairly extensively last October, including photographs of key speakers, authors, artists, academics and entrepreneurs.

This year's theme is scarcity and abundance, diving deeper into the 21st century dynamics between systems based on scarcity and those based on abundance. They'll range from digital social networks to environmentalism, from biology to business, from peacemaking to politics.

Over the course of the next few days, they plan to chart the core scarcities that humanity will face in this century, and how a wealth of new innovations, new bottom-up approaches to collaboration, and new insights into collective wisdom might hold the key to addressing them. Below a sample of some of the speakers from last year. You can tune in to live video and audio streaming for sessions throughout the day.