ETech: Closing Keynote Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'm sitting in the closing keynote from this year's ETech. We've got "Freedom and Control: Lessons from China for the World" with Rebecca MacKinnon, "How the Magic Circle Transforms the Commons: Games, Communities, and Civic Participation with Kati London, The End of Free Space with Jane McGonigal and finally Viral Forecasting with Nathan Wolfe.


Rebecca MacKinnon
First up is Rebecca MacKinnon talking about China, the Internet, and what it means for the future...

River crab wears three watches

She's talking how, while heavily censored, the Chinese web contains a great deal of political commentary which is arising virally where people are using stories, pictures and language to get around the censorship. The problem is that there is a opaque layer building up between the government and the citizens.


Kati London
The next speaker is Kati London talking about civic participation, and how we might be able to use games to engage people.


Our penultimate speaker is Jane McGonigal with the results of Free Space, the 3 day massively-multiplayer thought experiment which has been going on at ETech, kicked off earlier in the week at Ignite ETech on Monday.


Nathan Wolfe
The final speaker of the conference is Nathan Wolfe talking about what we can do with all the infrastructure we're building right now...

How is it possible that a virus as devastating as AIDS sat in the human population since the 20's, spread around the world, and wasn't really detected until the 1980's. However the real question is, how do we avoid something like this happening again? How do we avoid something worse? We need to look at how viruses are entering the human population well before they become more than only weakly adapted to living in humans.

...we're done. Time to head to the bar.