IDEAS Boston’s mission is to promote innovation and contribute to the economic vitality and competitiveness of the region. Through a unique conference, dissemination of new ideas after the event, and connecting cutting-edge thinkers across sectors, IDEAS Boston serves as an important resource to individual innovators throughout the community, and from a civic perspective helps to build the region’s brand as a hub of innovation attractive to businesses, college students, and workers. The core of IDEAS Boston is an annual conference where leading innovators present their latest (or sometimes their next) big ideas in a fast-paced format that combines succinct and lively presentations, artistic breaks, and time for networking and discussion. This cross-fertilization across sectors provides the ingredients for additional innovation and creative breakthroughs. IDEAS Boston was created by The Boston Globe in 2004. After successful events in 2004 and 2005, IDEAS Boston was reorganized as a non-profit organization in 2006. Beginning with the 2007 conference, IDEAS Boston has operated with MassINC (The Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth) as its fiscal agent. IDEAS Boston has a track record for attracting top quality speakers and a diverse audience. Whether the outcomes from IDEAS Boston conferences are new ideas individuals use in taking their own work in different directions, or enabling diverse thought leaders to forge new networks, this conference is providing the fertile ground so important for fostering innovation.

In 2002, two guys sat around their office saying, “We should start a film festival.” The idea was to create a festival that would showcase the best independent films from around the world–a festival that would bring directors, actors, producers, sponsors, and attendees together in an interactive environment. There were other film festivals in Boston, but there wasn’t a mainstream independent film festival inclusive of everything that made up the film-festival experience. The Independent Film Festival of Boston (IFFBoston) shows films that people might not get a chance to see anywhere else, films that are both innovative and crowd-pleasing. It offers the chance to meet the filmmakers at post-screening parties, and to ask them questions both after the films and at festival panels. The festival is a selection of movies made outside the Hollywood studio system. IFFBoston is a mix of features, documentaries, and shorts with ticket prices lower than what it costs to see most first-run movies. The success of IFFBoston can be attributed to the hard-working, passionate, and completely volunteer staff that puts in time year-round. It’s also thanks to our 100+ extra volunteers, our sponsors, our venues, and our community. And the success of IFFBoston is largely due to an audience that had long wanted and waited for just this kind of festival and continues to support it. IFFBoston aims to put Boston back on the map for independent film. To learn more about the 8th Annual Independent Film Festival Boston : April 21 - 28, 2010 visit the IFFB website at http://www.iffboston.org

Intelligent Television produces innovative films, television, and online video; conducts research in the future of media; and provides strategic planning and consulting services, all in close association with leading cultural and educational institutions and renowned directors and cinematographers, and all to make educational and cultural material more widely accessible worldwide. Intelligent Television works with many of world’s leading directors, producers, and cinematographers in its productions, joining them together with leading historians, scientists, journalists, policymakers, librarians, curators, and other scholars and activists committed to education worldwide. Funding for Intelligent Television productions comes from philanthropic foundations, government agencies, corporate underwriters, corporate advertisers, and investors. With this support, Intelligent Television has also begun building a nonfiction studio and production network for cultural and educational institutions keen to engage with the moving image. Intelligent Television is producing programs on the history of the American South; the nature of memory; the history of American comedy; the American labor movement; war and foreign policy; communications policy; open access to science and medicine; and other projects in association with leading cultural and educational institutions.

Istanbul Center is the largest Turkish-American organization in the southeast US. We serve metro Atlanta and the southeast, as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization established in 2002. We seek to build bridges between individuals of different cultural backgrounds, particularly Turkish and American. We promote the use of dialogue to proactively contribute to solving educational, cultural, environmental, social, and humanitarian issues. We do this by creating opportunities for children and adults to engage in dialogue about other cultures and their own. With outreach throughout the southeast, our major areas of concentration are education, culture, and humanitarian works. Our name comes from the nature of the city of Istanbul. Istanbul is a city where more than 15 million people with various backgrounds, languages, religions and cultures live together in peace. Istanbul’s unique connectivity of Europe and Asia has allowed the city to be embellished with a richness of history and culture rarely found elsewhere in the world.