Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Friday, April 07, 2006

Speakers, we've got speakers

A successful conference is all about the people.  People who attend, and people who speak.  (Although I learned from Esther Dyson to blur the line between those categories as much as possible.)

We’ve posted the initial speaker list for Supernova 2006.  There’s more coming, but I’m pretty excited by the group we’ve pulled together so far. 

There’s no perfect way to this—slots are limited, and Supernova covers a lot of ground.  I can’t invite everyone deserving.  Moreover, the speaker one attendee has heard ten times before may be a revelation to others.  So I’ve tried to include both my friends in the “digerati,” like Joi Ito, Dave Sifry, Dan Gillmor, and Jonathan Schwartz, as well as fantastic people like Rajesh Jain, Martin Varsavsky, Mike Zyda, Beth Noveck, John Garstka, and Dan Hunter, who you aren’t “usual suspects” on Silicon Valley tech conference rosters.  75% of this year’s speakers weren’t on the program last year.  We have entrepreneurs, academics, investors, corporate executives, journalists, bloggers, and representatives from six countries (Japan, England, the Netherlands, Spain, India, and the US).  And purely by accident, we’ll have both protagonists in the recent brouhaha over whether corporations should blog—Werner Vogels and Robert Scoble.  Not a bad start.

I’m also happy that more than a quarter of the speakers are women.  That’s still too low, I’ll admit, but it’s better than virtually every technology conference I know of.  And these aren’t tokens—people like Esther Dyson, Linda Sanford, Lili Cheng, Lise Buyer, and Mary Hodder need no defense.  They deserve to be there as much as anyone else on the list.  I try to make the Supernova speaker roster diverse (and not just in gender), because the world isn’t solely made up of people who look like me.  If we’re trying to understand technology’s impact on business and society as a whole, we can’t be myopic. 

Supernova is always a learning experience.  For me at least as much as for everyone else.  And we learn through exposure to new information, ideas, and perspectives.  I’m working to bring together a group of people who will help make that happen.