Want to get someone to change the way they live?  To change their habits, lifestyles, mores, opinions?  Lectures don't work - almost anyone will zone out.  Data help - but numbers can be soporific, too.

It may be obvious to anyone who has ever attended a PowerPoint presentation, but if you want to captivate an audience, you've got to use images.  Here at Pop!Tech, the first presentation is on exactly that: art, statistics, and understanding the human impact.

Chris Jordan is a photographer and artist whose raison d'etre is to help Americans understand the scale of our mass consumption.  He uses data and art together, and it makes for a compelling talk.

When it comes to consumerism and waste, it’s often difficult to comprehend scale. Through photography, Chris Jordan puts American and global issues into perspective in an effort to help us grasp their magnitude. For example, his photographs show what two million plastic bottles (used in the U.S. every five minutes) look like. He has used nine million alphabet blocks to represent the number of uninsured American children. Chris’s photographs have garnered attention from The New York Times, CNN, and ABC World News, and have been featured in magazines and articles from Hong Kong to Sao Paulo. His current exhibit, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, addresses the impact American consumerism and greed have on our culture and our planet.

While he's telling Pop!Tech attendees about American mass consumption through art, Chris' message resonates somewhat differently for me.  All the while, I'm thinking about how those of us in the base of the pyramid community can do this.  How can we use data and art to convey a compelling story about the scale of business opportunities at the BOP?  Sure, The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid got things started in terms of visual representations of BOP data.  But it's not compelling enough on its own.

Has anyone seen a good example of someone using BOP data and scale and art to convey a story about the opportunities here?  Comments are open...

Pop!Tech session two is about to start, and I'm pumped. As you'll see from the schedule, the speakers in session two (Jessica Flannery, Paul Polak, and Adrian Bowyer) are probably the most apropos for our "base of the pyramid" audience here at NextBillion.net. Not only that, but Pop!Tech curator Andrew Zolli just mentioned the "bottom of the pyramid" concept and The Next 4 Billion in particular. I'm thrilled!

Jessica Flannery is the first to present - and starts her presentation with a video excerpt from Oprah about the Kiva.org model. Of course, Kiva.org is nothing new to the NextBillion.net community - former staff writer Alex Bloom actually "broke" the story of Kiva back in 2005, and Sara Standish conducted a multi-part interview with Kiva execs about 6 months later. So what's new?

First - an interesting fact: the day Oprah ran a story with Matt and Jessica Flannery, their site crashed - too much traffic. Furthermore, there was a time when there were more people willing to loan money than there were loan recipients. Kiva's back up, and they've done a lot of outreach to new MFI partners to build their portfolio.

It's clear that Kiva is growing up - hey, Matt and Jessica were on Oprah - and Jessica's presentation gives us some data points on that growth. First of all, they are working with MFIs to make their partners better. They have their choice of MFI partners, whereas when they launched, they had to beg MFIs to join up. They're getting big-time donations to support their NGO center from foundations, corporations, and lenders. And they're refining the model.

(This post continues past the break; click "Read More" to continue, including wrap-ups from Paul Polak's and Adrian Bowyer's presentations)

Last night, I wrote a post about Camden, Maine - where I am attending Pop!Tech 2007.  At the very end, I mentioned that I was heading out to meet up with Nathan Eagle, a MIT entrepreneur-engineer who runs the Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles project.

Well, I did run into Nathan, but he was deep in conversation with NextBillion ally Andrew Mack at the time.  In an effort to not re-invent the wheel, I told Nathan that NextBillion would interview him another time, and that - for the time being - I would just link back to Andrew's post.  So here it is:

Give Me a Cell Phone, or Give Me Death!  Does Tomorrow Belong to the C-Citizen?

Thanks to Andrew for the good work.  As for me, I interviewed Kiva's Jessica Flannery this afternoon, and will write that up in addition to my other blogging during the next few days.  If there are certain people or speakers you would like me to seek out, drop a comment and I'll do my best.