What's the new economy like when it leaves an urban setting?

We attended the final day of last weekend's Catskills Conf gathering at the Ashokan Center in Olivebridge to find out. And while noting that as many in the audience were knitting parts of a crowdsourced blanket as were tuned into their smartphones, we also found out quite a bit listening to the event's final three speakers, as well as its audience.

Kingston residents Micah Blumenthal and Joe Conra talked about their plans to grow the O+ Festival concept to other locations around the nation, reminding everyone that "in the end we're all activists." Pamela Pavliscak of SoundingBox, a web company that measures website's and user's "emotional experiences," talked about finding ways to improve online experiences and activate creative thinking from mash-ups of random research, cool visual experiences, online friendships, and consistent, persistent, obsessive online activity.

During a break I spoke with a couple who live and work in New York City but have a second home in Sullivan County. He's a designer, working now on a real estate-related app; she teaches computer thinking for elementary age students. They like where they are but think Kingston might be the better place to end up if moving away from the city permanently. They also used the term "artisanal" a lot, and worried about the baggage gentrification carries with it.

Event organizers Aaron Quint and Kale Kaposhilin quipped about how those in the new economy prided themselves on figuring things out, then introduced the conference's final speaker, Matt Stinchcomb of Good Work Institute, who had just driven in from delivering a lecture at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics in Great Barrington, MA, on whose board he serves. He talked about his background working in Etsy.com's earliest days eleven years ago, when he and his roommate decided that "e-Bay was just too ugly," as well as how he's recently been using a grant from the mother company to replicate and expand on its ideals of not only building on CSR (corporate social responsibility) concepts, but teaching business in new, more sustainable ways.

"The 'less bad' ideal is not good enough," he said, talking about how economic growth was not necessarily an effective end in itself anymore. "We can work in ways that are net positive, and that are regenerative instead of degenerative."

Stinchcomb described a new set of business tenets his institute was teaching; they included the honoring of place, building of community through work with others, embodiment of integrity both structural and ethical, "nourishing the whole human," growing appropriately, and maintaining openness and curiosity to change/adaptation.

As for how the Institute was affecting the changes spoken about, its founder and director (who keeps a home in Mamakating) talked about his focus on the Hudson Valley and five month all-expenses-paid fellowships inclusive of regional old-timers and newcomers, and a host of different business types.

Later, we met one of a bunch of Hunter College computer students who'd come up by a rented bus. "Everyone here started their own little thing. That's all I want to do," said one. "I know now that little things get big. That it's okay to make a mistake. And that I have lots of cohorts now."

His teacher Mike Zamorsky, whose wife had led the knitting experiment, spoke about how enthused he was about what was happening in the Hudson Valley these days.

"It's like getting a bunch of kids and getting them started right," he said. "New York City is so bottom line and politically driven; I see this awesome opportunity up here."

I asked how the new economy would work in rural settings.

"I have a lot of friends at big companies and they're finding it's getting harder to get a senior team together in the city. The senior developers want more of a life. This is their perfect cell," he said.

Was anyone pushing for giant new entities like those in the Pacific Northwest or California yet? Was there a possibility for a new IBM-like presence in the region?

"The right tech people will see what I see," Zamorsky replied. "The area's ripe for the next generation of all this to come up."

Which may be what this new economy is all about, in the end.