1. HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN MAKE HISTORY?

(CLAY SHIRKY)
And that is the kind of discipline that it takes to make really mature use of this media. Media, the media
landscape that we knew, as familiar as it was, as easy conceptually as it was to deal with the idea that
professionals broadcast messages to amateurs, is increasingly slipping away. In a world where media is global,
social, ubiquitous and cheap, in a world of media where the former audience are now increasingly full
participants, in that world, media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by
individuals. It is more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups.

And the choice we face, I mean anybody who has a message they want to have heard anywhere in the world,
isn't whether or not that is the media environment we want to operate in. That's the media environment we've
got. The question we all face now is, "How can we make best use of this media? Even though it means changing
the way we've always done it." Thank you very much.

2. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD? (HUGH EVANS)

Now, global citizens -- they understand this. We live in a time that favors the global citizen, in an age where
every single voice can be heard. See, do you remember when the Millennium Development Goals were signed
back in the year 2000? The most we could do in those days was fire off a letter and wait for the next election.
There was no social media. Today, billions of citizens have more tools, more access to information, more
capacity to influence than ever before. Both the problems and the tools to solve them are right before us. The
world has changed, and those of us who look beyond our borders are on the right side of history.

So where are we? So we run this amazing festival, we've scored some big policy wins, and citizens are signing
up all over the world. But have we achieved our mission? No. We have such a long way to go.

But this is the opportunity that I see. The concept of global citizenship, self-evident in its logic but until now
impractical in many ways, has coincided with this particular moment in which we are privileged to live. We, as
global citizens, now have a unique opportunity to accelerate large-scale positive change around the world. So
in the months and years ahead, global citizens will hold world leaders accountable to ensure that the new
Global Goals for Sustainable Development are tracked and implemented. Global citizens will partner with the
world's leading NGOs to end diseases like polio and malaria. Global citizens will sign up in every corner of
this globe, increasing the frequency, quality and impact of their actions. These dreams are within reach.
Imagine an army of millions growing into tens of millions, connected, informed, engaged and unwilling to take
no for an answer.

Over all these years, I've tried to reconnect with Sonny Boy. Sadly, I've been unable to. We met long before
social media, and his address has now been relocated by the authorities, as often happens with slums. I'd love
to sit down with him, wherever he is, and share with him how much the time I spent on Smoky Mountain
inspired me. Thanks to him and so many others, I came to understand the importance of being part of a
movement of people -- the kids willing to look up from their screens and out to the world, the global citizens.
Global citizens who stand together, who ask the question "Why?," who reject the naysayers, and embrace the
amazing possibilities of the world we share.

I'm a global citizen.

Are you?

Thank you.

3. HOW SOCIAL NETWORKS PREDICTS EPIDEMICS (NICHOLAS CHRISTAKIS)

And there are three ways, I think, that these massive-passive data can be used. One is fully passive, like I just
described -- as in, for instance, the trucker example, where we don't actually intervene in the population in any
way. One is quasi-active, like the flu example I gave, where we get some people to nominate their friends and
then passively monitor their friends -- do they have the flu, or not? -- and then get warning. Or another
example would be, if you're a phone company, you figure out who's central in the network and you ask those
people, "Look, will you just text us your fever every day? Just text us your temperature." And collect vast
amounts of information about people's temperature, but from centrally located individuals. And be able, on a
large scale, to monitor an impending epidemic with very minimal input from people. Or, finally, it can be more
fully active -- as I know subsequent speakers will also talk about today -- where people might globally
participate in wikis, or photographing, or monitoring elections, and upload information in a way that allows us
to pool information in order to understand social processes and social phenomena.

In fact, the availability of these data, I think, heralds a kind of new era of what I and others would like to call
"computational social science." It's sort of like when Galileo invented -- or, didn't invent -- came to use a
telescope and could see the heavens in a new way, or Leeuwenhoek became aware of the microscope -- or
actually invented -- and could see biology in a new way. But now we have access to these kinds of data that
allow us to understand social processes and social phenomena in an entirely new way that was never before
possible. And with this science, we can understand how exactly the whole comes to be greater than the sum of
its parts. And actually, we can use these insights to improve society and improve human well-being.

Thank you.

4. SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE END OF GENDER (JOHANNA BLAKLEY)

Well, I actually don't think that's going to be the case. I think that media companies are going to hire a lot more
women, because they realize this is important for their business, and I think that women are also going to
continue to dominate the social media sphere. But I think women are actually going to be -- ironically enough
-- responsible for driving a stake through the heart of cheesy genre categories like the "chick flick" and all
these other genre categories that presume that certain demographic groups like certain things -- that Hispanics
like certain things, that young people like certain things. This is far too simplistic. The future entertainment
media that we're going to see is going to be very data-driven, and it's going to be based on the information that
we ascertain from taste communities online, where women are really driving the action.

So you may be asking, well why is it important that I know what entertains people? Why should I know this?
Of course, old media companies and advertisers need to know this. But my argument is that, if you want to
understand the global village, it's probably a good idea that you figure out what they're passionate about, what
amuses them, what they choose to do in their free time. This is a very important thing to know about people.
I've spent most of my professional life researching media and entertainment and its impact on people's lives.
And I do it not just because it's fun -- though actually, it is really fun -- but also because our research has
shown over and over again that entertainment and play have a huge impact on people's lives -- for instance, on
their political beliefs and on their health. And so, if you have any interest in understanding the world, looking
at how people amuse themselves is a really good way to start.

So imagine a media atmosphere that isn't dominated by lame stereotypes about gender and other demographic
characteristics. Can you even imagine what that looks like? I can't wait to find out what it looks like.

Thank you so much.

5. THE POWER AND DANGER OF ONLINE CROWDS (JAMES SUROWIECKI)

One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that, once you are linked in the network, the network
starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else. That's one of the things
that defines what a network is. A network is not just the product of its component parts. It is something more
than that. It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an emergent phenomenon. Now, this has all these benefits:
it's very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of communicating information; it gives you access to a whole host
of people; it allows people to coordinate their activities in very good ways. But the problem is that groups are
only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the wisdom of
crowds, or the paradox of collective intelligence, that what it requires is actually a form of independent
thinking. And networks make it harder for people to do that, because they drive attention to the things that the
network values.

So, one of the phenomena that's very clear in the blogosphere is that once a meme, once an idea gets going, it
is very easy for people to just sort of pile on, because other people have, say, a link. People have linked to it,
and so other people in turn link to it, etc., etc. And that phenomenon of piling on the existing links is one that is
characteristic of the blogosphere, particularly of the political blogosphere, and it is one that essentially throws
off this beautiful, decentralized, bottom-up intelligence that blogs can manifest in the right conditions.

The metaphor that I like to use is the metaphor of the circular mill. A lot of people talk about ants. You know,
this is a conference inspired by nature. When we talk about bottom-up, decentralized phenomena, the ant
colony is the classic metaphor, because, no individual ant knows what it's doing, but collectively ants are able
to reach incredibly intelligent decisions. They're able to reach food as efficiently as possible, they're able to
guide their traffic with remarkable speed. So, the ant colony is a great model: you have all these little parts that
collectively add up to a great thing. But we know that occasionally ants go astray, and what happens is that, if
army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule -- just do what the ant in
front of you does. And what happens is that the ants eventually end up in a circle. And there's this famous
example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days, and the ants just kept marching around and
around in a circle until they died. And that, I think, is a sort of thing to watch out for. That's the thing we have
to fear -- is that we're just going to keep marching around and around until we die.

Now, I want to connect this back, though, to the tsunami, because one of the great things about the tsunami --
in terms of the blogosphere's coverage, not in terms of the tsunami itself -- is that it really did represent a
genuine bottom-up phenomenon. You saw sites that had never existed before getting huge amounts of traffic.
You saw people being able to offer up their independent points of view in a way that they hadn't before. There,
you really did see the intelligence of the Web manifest itself. So, that's the upside. The circular mill is the
downside. And I think that the former is what we really need to strive for.

Thank you very much.

6. HOW TO MAKE A SPLASH IN SOCIAL MEDIA (ALEXIS OHANIAN)

This is how the Internet works. This is that great big secret. The Internet provides a level playing field. Your
link is as good as your link, which is as good as my link. With a browser, anyone can get to any website no
matter your budget. That is, as long as you can keep net neutrality in place.

Another important thing is it costs nothing to get content online. There are so many publishing tools available,
it only takes a few minutes to produce something. and the cost of iteration is so cheap, you might as well.

If you do, be genuine. Be honest, up-front. One of the great lessons Greenpeace learned is that it's OK to lose
control, OK to take yourself a little less seriously, given that, even though it's a very serious cause, you could
ultimately achieve your goal. That's the final message I want to share: you can do well online. But no longer is
the message coming from just the top down. If you want to succeed you've got to be OK to lose control.

Thank you.
7. ONLINE SOCIAL CHANGE: EASY TO ORGANIZE, HARD TO WIN (ZEYNEP TUFEKCI)
Now, some people have argued that the problem is today's movements are not formed of people who take as
many risks as before, and that is not true. From Gezi to Tahrir to elsewhere, I've seen people put their lives
and livelihoods on the line. It's also not true, as Malcolm Gladwell claimed, that today's protesters form
weaker virtual ties. No, they come to these protests, just like before, with their friends, existing networks, and
sometimes they do make new friends for life. I still see the friends that I made in those Zapatista-convened
global protests more than a decade ago, and the bonds between strangers are not worthless. When I got
tear-gassed in Gezi, people I didn't know helped me and one another instead of running away. In Tahrir, I saw
people, protesters, working really hard to keep each other safe and protected. And digital awareness-raising is
great, because changing minds is the bedrock of changing politics. But movements today have to move
beyond participation at great scale very fast and figure out how to think together collectively, develop strong
policy proposals, create consensus, figure out the political steps and relate them to leverage, because all these
good intentions and bravery and sacrifice by itself are not going to be enough.
And there are many efforts. In New Zealand, a group of young people are developing a platform called
Loomio for participatory decision making at scale. In Turkey, 140Journos are holding hack-a-thons so that
they support communities as well as citizen journalism. In Argentina, an open-source platform called
DemocracyOS is bringing participation to parliaments and political parties. These are all great, and we need
more, but the answer won't just be better online decision-making, because to update democracy, we are going
to need to innovate at every level, from the organizational to the political to the social. Because to succeed
over the long term, sometimes you do need tea without sugar along with your Twitter. Thank you.