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NETWORKED CREATIVITY: Andrew Zolli, executive director of PopTech, was a speaker at the CreativityWorld Forumin Oklahoma City in November. At right, artist Christen Lien performs at a “PopTech Salon,” inWashington, D.C. The salons are intended to extend and expand the annual PopTech conference.
are kept low, with tickets ranging from $135 to $225 for “the Main Event,” the conference day. “We call it ‘Davos meets Main Street,’” DiGirolamo said. But even in a venue that can accommodate thousands,
demand still outstrips supply.Tickets to this year’s Main Event sold out in less than an hour. So the Women’s Conference makes its satellite feed available to organizations around the country, allowing themto create their own self-organized, live viewing events. The organization provides supporting mate- rials —a kind of “conference-in-a-box,” DiGirolamo said. This year, for the first time, the conference included an inter- active broadcast link with an audience gathered at NewYork University. There’s also aWomen’s Conference website that has drawn a million users. Filled with content from the con- ference, and augmented with additional information and take- aways, it’s intended to be a daily destination, DiGirolamo said, “an event that happens every day.”
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Creative Focus While theWomen’s Conference offered attendees a smorgas- bord of possibilities for creating change, the seventh annual CreativityWorld Forum, held at the Cox Convention Center in Oklahoma City on Nov. 15–17, took a focused look at the relationship between creativity and business, education, tech- nology, and art. “Oklahoma may not leap to mind when one thinks of creativity,” said Susan McCalmont, the vice-chair of Creative Oklahoma, a nonprofit organization founded in 2006 to promote innovation in the state.“Any place can be cre- ative if you pay attention to it, and cultivate it. And creativity can be suppressed, in business and learning.” Oklahoma is the only North American member of the
Districts of Creativity (DC) Network, which has 14 mem- bers from regions on three continents. The DC Network organizes the CreativityWorld Forum, which pairs govern- ment leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, and academics from the network with outside experts to exchange ideas.With atten- dees from 38 countries, including South Africa, Korea, Sin- gapore, Russia, and Uruguay, the audience represented “probably the largest international contingent in Oklahoma —ever,” McCalmont said. At the conference, speakers including PopTech’s Zolli,
author Dan Pink, and creativity guru Sir Ken Robinson, mixed with international and homegrown experts to discuss
PHOTO COURTESY OF GRETCHEN HORDE–JACK MILLS PRODUCTION