I had the tremendous honor earlier this month of speaking at Web Summit in Lisbon about my work using massive computing power to reimagine how we understand the world around us and what it means to be human. Yet, many technology conferences tend to bring together mostly the same community of the “usual suspects” of tech luminaries from a small number of fields, while the attendees tend to be exclusively die-hard technologists, often with a sizeable fraction of them hailing from Silicon Valley. Web Summit represents something truly unique in the tech conference world: a gathering rather than a conference, a single destination that momentarily transcends geographic and technological boundaries to create a magical realm in which one can just as easily run into a policy maker as a business leader, a hardened programmer as a non-technologist trying to change the world. Web Summit made this even easier with a unique element that I haven’t experienced at other conferences – a smartphone app that included a live chat feature allowing attendees to direct message each other and contact speakers, making spontaneous conversations even easier to have amongst the cacophony of 60,000 people. In the end, conferences like Web Summit that bridge the technical and non-technical worlds, bring 170 countries together and combine the people who build technological tools with the world changers who use them and the policymakers that govern them remind us of the power of bringing the world together.

Source: Forbes December 01, 2017 02:03 UTC