In just its second year, yesterday’s GoGreen has established itself as the premier sustainability conference in Portland. Impressive speaker lineup, quality content, gorgeous location, engaged participants, and smooth organization provided for a stimulating, if intense, experience. Last year, I attended GoGreen as a participant, this year as an exhibitor, representing my green business networking group Bridges.
The five speakers featured on the event posters, which you couldn’t miss around town in the run-up, were from government; by contrast, most speakers and panelists at the event represented companies. I missed greater representation from nonprofits and academia to round things out, though the conference’s primary target audience was clearly businesses.
As could be expected from an event with “green” in its title, content concentrated on environmental sustainability. While there were fewer breakouts than last year, as Rich Bruer noted the topics advanced from last year’s “Sustainability 101″ to the next level. Still, the academic in me missed bleeding-edge or controversial stuff. I did appreciate that sessions focused on real life examples and stories, offering the opportunity for participants to learn from real people about practical business applications of sustainability. At the same time, the line between sharing experiences and throwing corporate pitches sometimes became blurry.
The event’s focus on sustainable practices for business reinforced for me the distinction between companies with sustainability in their core (inside-out sustainability) and those that introduce sustainability into their traditional business models (outside-in sustainability; more on the distinction in a separate post). You could, therefore, attend a session called Eco-Visionaries with representatives of Costco and Nike.
As usually happens at conference-type events, the best stuff happens outside the sessions, and not just around the refreshments tables. I met a lot of great people doing a lot of great stuff; I reconnected with many others. Events like these are prime networking and relationship building opportunities – I just wished they lasted longer!
I credit GoGreen ‘08 with motivating me to launch the Beyond2020 sustainability unconference. As good as conferences like GoGreen are, the expertise of the hundreds of participants is left untapped. GoGreen now has a solid and well-deserved place among Portland’s sustainability events, as I hope will Beyond2020.
