Keynote alongside the legendary Jimmy Wales

Click on the highlights of the Techfestival in Copenhagen on 7-9 September and you will see me positioned next to Jimmy Wales, the legendary founder of Wikipedia. This is such a big highlight of my career. It is such an honor to be situated alongside a person of this caliber - I continue to be in awe of how he managed to resist commercializing Wikipedia and continuing to keep it up as one of the top most loved sites around the world.

The Techfestival itself was an amazing event with a spectrum of fantastic people and even more amazingly, many with backgrounds in the humanities -literature, philosophy, the arts in general. Their backgrounds explain why this event brought sustained good conversations, thoughtful reflections and creative ideas to the fore which was not tech centric but society centric, about what it means to be meaningful, democratic, social, happy, and connected with one another - basically putting the human over tech in this conversation. I appreciated that very much but it does sadden me that while clearly there is an essential need to bring diverse mindsets together, we face a current day scenario where governments including the Dutch government does not see the relevance of humanities in shaping tech with their latest budget cuts especially in the humanities.

I also spoke for the Fuckup Nights which is such a great idea to begin with. It's all about sharing failure stories instead of success as failure has a much more interesting pathway that can bond us together, and humble us in this journey of social change.