Meet Me @ Re-publica.de

Tomorrow, finally, the #rp11 starts. And it's going to be crowded! For easier recognizability, I'll be wearing the shirt pictured to the left.

Should you feel like saying hi, please do, I'd love to chat in real life. 

Today, thanks to the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, I got a little sneak peak of Cyrus Farivar's talk at the conference. He just recently finished his book The Internet Of Elsewhere. In it, he discusses the the role of the Internet as a catalyst in transforming communications, politics, and economics in Estonia (where access to the Internet has become a human right not long ago!), South Korea, Senegal, and Iran.

If you think these countries sound a little distant, let me surprise you by saying that Korean food tastes absolutely fantastic! ... Just kidding. I was going to hint at the connectivity of things: We can really learn a lot from each other, especially when it comes to typical issues that arise around the accessibility and possibilites of the web: technical availability, equality of distribution, government control and so forth. Cyrus will explain his ideas in more detail at the Friedrichstadtpalast starting at 10 am on Thursday.

Should you be more interested in talks by women but are too lazy to scan the schedule yourself, try the Mädchenmannschaft's collection of female speakers. Part of the conference will be recorded and later made available online. But Simone's and my session on Thursday at 11 am won't be amongst those, I'm afraid. We'll do our best, though, to keep you updated and informed nevertheless, and will make our material available to you as soon as our workshop is finished and we'll find the time. 

I also do apologize for keeping you waiting on the next Blogger Portrait - it's been in the making and will surface to your screens as soon as the re-publica craziness will have died down a bit. I just couldn't fit it all into last week. See you tomorrow, I hope!