A Pirate Captain visiting the Pacific Northwest
About three weeks from now, Rickard Falkvinge (founder of the Pirate Party) will be kicking off the Vancouver Open Web Conference. He'll be presenting a keynote on how, in just three years, a party with an odd name organized around a narrow electronic frontier platform has become the fourth largest political party in Sweden. It's an amazing story that makes a good parable about how the world is changing and is a fitting start for a conference that we've (meaning mostly Jeff Griffiths, Malcolm van Delst, Mike Cantelon and Tim Whiteway) worked hard to make a careful balance of accessible, eclectic, relevant and useful.
In addition to Rickard, we're lucky to have a wide range of open web luminaries, local heroes and awesome hackers presenting, such as:
- Angela Byron of the Drupal community
- Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, Bespin hackers at Mozilla Corp.
- Boris Mann, from Bootup Labs
- Chris Messina
- David Ascher, CEO of Mozilla Messaging (formerly of ActiveState)
- Evan Prodromou, founder of Identi.ca
- Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor Project
As for topics, our speakers will cover a diverse range that includes Android development, engaging citizens via the Net, Drupal, iPhone development, Javascript, meditation, mobile web, Mozilla, MySQL, PHP, privacy, Sita Sings the Blues, testing, Tor, web video for social change and a whole lot more.
If you are near Vancouver and are interested in the electronic frontier, free software/open source or the open net, then you should definitely register and attend - it's only $185 CAD for both days.
