DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I went to the plaNetwork conference in the Presidio today. It was pretty interesting, as you’d expect if you could get a couple hundred left-leaning technology geeks in a room to talk about how to remake politics, culture, and social responsibility through creative Internet applications.

If I could sum it up into one word, the one word would be: blogging. No, wait, it’s RSS. No, wait, it’s targeted email. Well, maybe it’s not possible to boil 20 hours of conference into one word. Or even a single blog entry.

The organizers contracted with GreenHome to “green” the conference. This meant using compostable cups and forks, and providing many recycling bins throughout the conference center. These few small changes made it easy to do the right thing after lunch — although there was still some confusion about whether paper plates (bleached, ech) should go into the compost or the paper recycling. Anyway, I appreciated the effort. It would be lame to spend the morning discussing how to make the future ecologically sane and socially just if at lunchtime we’d generate 200 lbs of landfill garbage to be trucked to Alameda.