Preparing for Pop!Tech

I’m off to Pop!Tech tonight, one of the best general interest/new ideas/big thoughts conferences I’ve ever been lucky enough to speak at. I’m not speaking this year, though Rebecca is, and I’ve been sitting in the library at Berkman with her, listening to bad Chinese pop that she’s matching to her powerpoint slides.

My presence at Pop!Tech is at the invitation of conference organizer Andrew Zolli who has – with the help of the United Nations and Sun Microsystems – done an amazing thing to ensure that the conference will significantly more diverse this year. 12 young African leaders – bloggers, activists, politicians – are being invited to Pop!Tech to attend three days of talks and discussions, and then have an intensive session on Sunday to talk about how the ideas presented in the conference could be applied to challenges in Africa. My friend John Gage from Sun will be helping moderate the discussion, and I’m looking forward to sitting in and blogging the proceedings.

Andrew asked me to nominate some brilliant Africans as Sun Participation Fellows, and I’m thrilled that six of the twelve participants are people I know virtually, or in real life. Three – Emeka Okafor, Ory Okolloh and Ndesanjo Macha – are prolific and talented bloggers. If you’re interested in what’s going on at the Pop!Tech conference, you’d be well advised to keep an eye on their blogs. (And if you speak Kiswahili, check out Ndesanjo’s Swahili language blog, which gets updated even more frequently than his English one…)

As for me, I’ll be blogging as many of the conference sessions that I’m able, constrained by battery power, finger speed, and the fact that I won’t be around for Saturday’s sessions. I’m likely to be posting some of those session reports on WorldChanging.com – I asked WC editor Jamais Cascio whether he’d like me to send him some content from Pop!Tech and he responded as follows:

“Would! love! to! have! relevant! Pop!Tech! posts!”

I’ll ta!ke th!at as a y!es th!en.

And if you’re at the conference, you read this blog and we haven’t met yet, please look for me on the floor of the opera house. I’m the guy who doesn’t take his eyes of his laptop screen who isn’t David Weinberger.