PortauPrince

Confirmed Speakers

• Marcin Jakubowski
  2011 TED fellow, founder of Open Source Ecology. A Polish-American who is starting a new civilization -- from scratch -- in the Midwestern US. Marcin came to the U.S. from Poland as a child. He graduated with honors from Princeton and earned his PhD in fusion physics from the University of Wisconsin. Frustrated with the lack of relevance to pressing world issues in his education, he founded Open Source Ecology in 2003 in order to make closed-loop manufacturing a reality. He began development on the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) (see his 2011 TED Talk), an open source DIY tool set of 50 different industrial machines necessary to create a small civilization with modern comforts. His work has recently been recognized in his acceptance as a 2012 TED Senior Fellow, a 2012 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and his TED Talk was named the top 6th in the Huffington Post Best of TED 2011. His goal is to create the open source economy - an economy that optimizes both production and distribution - while providing environmental regeneration and social justice. To this end, Marcin is currently building a team of global collaborators and on-site builders for his land-based facility - to take this from concept to reality. He believes that the norm in society should be pursuing autonomy, mastery, and higher purpose - as in Daniel Pink's talk - and that achieving such a state can take us beyond artificial material scarcity. He believes that the open source economy is indeed a prerequisite to the type of autonomy that allows people to pursue mastery - consistent with higher purpose. His main interest is helping the world evolving to freedom by eliminating artificial material scarcity from driving geopolitical relations. He thinks that this can be achieved by open-sourcing modern technology and adapting it for maximum human service: by lowering the barriers to enterprise. His approach to this is building an economic foundation for the open source economy - by deploying the 50 open source tools of the GVCS by year-end 2012. Thereafter, his plan is to engage in a social experiment to determine whether a modern standard of living can be achieved with the GVCS tools. He claims that the scale of a couple hundred acres in a community of Dunbar's number is sufficient to create advanced civilization - namely, a civilization in which people have time for one another. More particularly, he claims that 2 hours of work should be sufficient in such a community to provide modern material prosperity - all the way down to smelting of metals and semiconductors from local resources. At the point of material post-scarcity - he claims that society will not be magically healed - but it will have a fair chance of evolving a higher level of harmony and cultural advancement where pursuit of higher purpose begins to weave back the societal fabric. Marcin's motivation was formed by observation that gross terror and suffering is persistent, and that making a better tomorrow is a choice that all responsible individuals must make, proactively and without fear. With stories of grandparents in concentration camps and in the Polish underground of WWII filling his childhood memories, Marcin gained the conviction and passion to make a better world - to live the life of evolution that he talks about. He is an ambitious entrepreneur whose passion is fueled by constant learning, meditation, and a desire to live from local, sustainable resources. He claims that living the technology-enabled option of local resource use should not be an eco-elite privilege, but a transformational force that is a prerequisite for improving personal and geopolitical relations. His vehicle for transformation is development of the Open Source Ecology paradigm - an open source economy where open technology is a way to reconnect to one another and to our natural life support systems.
• Catarina Mota
  2012 TED fellow, co-founder of Open Materials and active member of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) movement. Portuguese maker, open-source advocate and founder of openMaterials, a collaborative research project focused on open-source and DIY experimentation with smart materials. Catarina is a maker of things, a research scholar, and an open source advocate. She co-founded openMaterials.org, a collaborative project dedicated to do-it-yourself experimentation with smart materials, and altLab, Lisbon's hackerspace. She has taught numerous hands-on workshops on hi-tech materials and simple circuitry with the goal of encouraging people with little to no science background to take a proactive interest in science, technology and knowledge-sharing. Catarina is wrapping up her PhD dissertation on the social impact of open and collaborative practices for the development of technologies. She is a fellow of the National Science and Technology Foundation of Portugal, co-chair of the Open Hardware Summit, TEDGlobal 2012 fellow, and member of NYC Resistor. Catarina has an MPS in Interactive Telecommunications from the New York University (ITP-NYU) and a BS in Communication Sciences from the New University of Lisbon (FCSH-UNL).
• John Engle
  Co-founder and co-director of Haiti Partners and is based in Haiti. John also co-founded Beyond Borders and its Haiti-based partner organization, Limyè Lavi Foundation, in 1993. His focus during the last two decades has been on participatory leadership and discussion-based education in Haiti. He has been a consultant with organizations including World Bank, Amnesty International, and United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
• Darren Gil
  Architecture for Humanity / Bati Byen
• Hans Tippenhauer
  President of Foundation Espoir. Fondation Espoir is headquartered in Pétion-ville, Haïti. Its mission is to promote Effective Democracy and Sustainable Development through training, Social Communication and Organizational Development. Within the foundation, there are several organizations with different functions and focus. The foundation’s President, Hans Tippenhauer is the Co-founder and Executive Vice President of Bati Ayiti, a mining, land development and construction company and a strategic management consultant, developer and social entrepreneur. He is a Steering Committee member for the World Movement for Democracy, the Latin American and Caribbean Democracy Network (Redlad), and a founding Curator for World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers, Haiti.
• Gianni Dal Mas
  Responsible for the first batch of temporary Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic with legal papers under the new regulations in 2012, now working as a consultant of UN International Office for Migration and DR's Immigration Office.
• Margarita Quihuis
  Director of Peace Innovation Lab at Stanford University
• Marcelo Ferder
  Argentinean artist who will create a wall of remembrance with recycled materials at ESIH. This wall will be matched by a solidarity wall in Uganda (Kampala) built by internationally renowned artist and TED 2012 award winner Ruganzu Bruno.
• Ruganzu Bruno
  (video presentation). 2012 TED Award Winner. Founder of EcoArt Uganda. Ruganzu Bruno Tusingwire is a 29-year old eco-artist from Uganda as well as the founding curator of TEDxKampala. In addition to being the winner of the first City 2.0 Award, Tusingwire is a 2011 Young Achievers award winner and a lecturer in the Department of Art & Design at Kyambogo University. His big idea is to use waste materials to create a movable amusement park for children living in slums of Kampala. He is using the City 2.0 Award to grow his local TEDx community, grow an woman eco-artist loan program already supporting 15 women to develop their business ideas, and expand the amusement park from a single plane-shaped sculpture made of recycled plastic bottles into a permanent park.
• To be Determined
  VivaRio, social and cultural community engagement organization working in Bel Air.