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New Economy

Ignite Boise Inspires Idaho’s Twitterati

By Sharon Fisher, 3-19-09

Back in the 1980s, when I worked in Silicon Valley, I hung out with a lot of brilliant people, people who went on to become millionaires, whose companies became household names. And one of the things I found out is that brilliant people tend to be brilliant in a lot of things at once. The guy who wrote the software that lets PCs link to the Internet was also an inventive cook (I particularly fondly remember his hot and sour matzoh ball soup). The woman who wrote a seminal series of books explaining the new technology, it turned out, could explain everything. The woman who helped design Microsoft Office is now a circus aerialist. And so on.

An evening that can best be described as “geek performance art” demonstrated just how many people there are like that in Idaho.

A guy I quote a lot, Richard Florida, described in 2002 what he called the ”creative class.” “If you are a scientist or engineer, an architect or designer, a writer, artist, or musician, or if you use your creativity as a key factor in your work in business, education, health care, law or some other profession, you are a member.” About 30 percent of people these days fall into that category, he said.

Members of the creative class traffic in ideas, and they don’t operate in functional silos, meaning they can’t necessarily be described as programmers, writers, web designers, marketers, or state employees. They fit multiple categories, or transcend them.

This is where Ignite comes in.

Ignite is sort of a syndicated performance-art-in-a-box group. It captures the “Hey, my mom’s got a barn!” inside a lot of people and helps provide a way to focus it and use it. It’s like a company team-building exercise for people who don’t work in the same company—at least, not yet.

“Ignite captures the best of geek culture in a series of five-minute speed presentations on topics ranging from The Best Way to Buy a Car to Hacking Chocolate,” explains the website. “Imagine that you’re on stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, doing a five-minute presentation using a slide deck that auto-forwards every 15 seconds, whether you’re ready or not. What would you do? What would you say?”

Ignite started in Seattle in 2006, and since then has been held in a number of cities worldwide. Shows are currently being held in Reno, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Bloomington, Orlando, Denver, Salt Lake City, and a variety of Australian cities.

Tonight was Boise‘s turn, bringing together presenters from “business, art, technology, government and academia.” Twitter (#igniteboise) and Facebook have been burning up for weeks talking about it, and 600 (free) tickets were snapped up in no time. While newspaper articles this week urged people to attend tonight, they were definitely, and literally, an afterthought, admitted half an hour after people who’d already obtained tickets online.

I suspect a lot of attendees didn’t know their intellectual property attorney was also an expert on the history of bicycles, nor that their state government administrator was an expert on the business lessons to be drawn from Star Wars.  I also expect most attendees will never again use “hey” as the subject line of an email message, ask a young woman when she’s planning to get married or have a baby, or think about Paul Revere in quite the same way again. (They’re not up yet, but videos of the presentations are supposed to be available.)

But the most important part of the evening wasn’t the scheduled events, but simply the effect of throwing approximately 750 brilliant people into a room together and letting them interact. A number of the presentations, including the concluding one, talked about entrepreneurship and making ideas reality, and the event was an orgy of networking and elevator presentations as people introduced themselves to their neighbors and tried to figure out how their specialties could work together.

What is the gestation period of an idea?  In a few months we’ll know.

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