Pop!Tech 9
Oct. 19-22, 2005

Seeing What’s There
Graham Flint
Bob Hanner

It’s Alive!
Norman Packard
Theo Jansen

Mind and Body
Todd Kuiken
Jesse Sullivan
Ze Frank

Explorer’s Club
Peter Diamandis
Marcia McNutt
Carolyn Porco

People, Place, and Planet
Mark Lynas

East Meets West
Oded Shenkar
Rebecca MacKinnon

Serious Games
Edward Castronova
Ivan Marovic
Steven Berlin Johnson
Davy Rothbart

The Participation Revolution
Nicholas Negroponte
Yochai Benkler
Ingo Gunther

Habitats
Suketu Mehta
Robert Neuwirth

Big Fixes
Cameron Sinclair
Bunker Roy
Neil Gershenfeld

The Future of Ideas
Sam Harris
Susan Blackmore

What Do We Know?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Robert Trivers

Summary
Bob Metcalfe

The Future of Africa
Panel Discussion

Ivan Marovic is one of the founding members of Otpor, the Serbian political student group. Ivan was an engineering student at Belgrade University and one of the student organizers who helped bring down Slobodan Milosovic. He was one of the most public of the organization's members, speaking often at rallies and marches. He was drafted into the Yugoslav military forces a few days before the September 24 election and served with the equivalent of the coast guard in Belgrade.

Ivan has since been involved in exporting student democratic movements around central Europe and was a key player in Ukraine's Orange Revolution. Ivan recently partnered with a US company called BreakAway Games, that teaches players how to use strategic non-violent resistance to force regime change.

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Ivan continues to work with Otpor and is a trainer for The Center for Non-Violent Resistance in Belgrade.

http://www.pbs.org/weta/dictator/otpor/whoswho.html
http://www.ex-yupress.com/vreme/vreme72.html

From Cool Hunting:

During the Serious Games Summit, Douglas Whatley, CEO of BreakAway Games, showed their upcoming fall release, A Force More Powerful. It's a nonviolent strategic simulation game. The basic goal was to create a tool that enabled social movements to learn nonviolent strategic planning for implementation in oppressed societies. The project was sponsored by ICNC (International Center on Nonviolent Conflict). It will be distributed in multiple languages and easily accessible to other countries.

From Worldchanging:

"A Force More Powerful" clearly blurs some boundaries: it gives new leverage and scope to powerful worldchanging strategies like Gandhi's ideas of satyagraha through a video game format which convergences entertainment with proven tools like stimulations and role playing. So not only do we get more effective worldchanging but also for twice the fun! A great way to open up new channels and audiences for activism. Bravo. Of course, I have no idea if or precisely how it works in practice -- please let us know if you've played with this game -- but I'm glad the game exists because it represents just another reason why it's getting harder for tyrants to maintain their traditional stranglehold on power, and another case where we see increasing access to tools and processes and know-how previously confined to a precious few corporate and government planners and elite groups. And this is no concidence.