I spent last week in Copenhagen attending two conferences. The IFA 8th Global Ageing conference which focused on the global ageing trend and its impact on policies and cultural realities in the many different regions of the world. With decreased mortality, increase life expectancy, and a declining fertility rate the developed regions of the world are having to confront the impact of a reverse demographic pyramid. But not to be shut out the developing world is also expected to face the same predicament or opportunity in the near future. The active hosts included WHO (World Health Organization and the International Federation on Ageing.

Talks spanned from "Growing Old in a Foreign Country" where I listened to Professor Naina Patel of PRIAE (Policy Research Institute on Ageing & Ethnicity) speak about the very specific challenges faced by the elderly growing older in a foreign country. Often times foreigners face greater challenges due to a lower economic status. A favorite lecture was "Active ageing in age-friendly cities" where the organizer was WHO and Dr. Louise Plouffe described a program WHO will be rolling out in 2007 to encourage cities to create and sustain age-friendly environments.

The second conference Reboot 8.0 was a technological renaissance of sorts. I only managed to make it there for end of day Thursday and all day Friday, but it proved to be an interesting post-bubble look at current waves in the tech industry. One of my favorite scribblers Hugh Macleod was on hand to talk about the ability of any and every blogger to do commerce in the global cultural environment we now live in. He was particularly excited by the marketing effects of blogging, and it is hard to deny he has had success.

Other talks addressed digital ethics and the right of individuals where public digital dissemination is concerned. As Rebecca Blood pointed out, what right will a 3 year-old have in the future as a twenty year-old when her father Nicholas Nova addressed the emergence of objects in light of the networked world that we live in and the new ecology of things. In an interesting twist on reality, they asked whether objects might be able to produce insights of their own in our current hyper-world.

Themes that came out of both conferences were the following:

Reboot - Web 2.0 aka social software, the ability to work and be anywhere as a techpreneur, transparency, collaboration, the content generation, constant easy connectivity, how to turn a buck via your software more than hardware, digital ethics (?).

IFA's 8th Global Ageing Conference: Safety and security of the elderly, elderly friendly, global ageing as an ongoing process, the differences and similarities between ageing in the developed vs developing world, the economic impact and an appraisal of programs and policies for an ageing society.

All in all both conferences spoke about society and culture in the current and emerging context that we occupy in this global village.