Pop!Tech is a technology and society conference held annually in Camden, Maine, co-founded in 1996 by Tom DeMarco, former Apple Computer president John Sculley, and Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe. DeMarco served as president of the conference.
The conference brought together thinkers and practitioners from technology, science, design, and the humanities every October in DeMarco's hometown. Pop!Tech reflects a side of DeMarco not visible in his software management writing — an interest in the broader social implications of technology and a network that extended well beyond the software engineering community.
The founding of Pop!Tech in the same period as the peopleware-breakthrough-era and the transition to the organizational-dynamics-era suggests DeMarco's intellectual interests were already expanding beyond the software project management focus of peopleware and toward the broader organizational and societal questions that would animate slack and, ultimately, the IEEE recantation essay.