From October 9 through 12, Pisa, Tuscany’s incubator of tech start-ups and digital innovation, once again hosts the annual Internet Festival.
This year’s festival will host exhibitors, lectures, workshops and even concerts, all connected to ‘Matter,’ the conversation-starting theme for #IF2014. Pisa is preparing for a crowd: in 2013, the festival drew more than 280,000 visitors and featured hundreds of speakers from around the world.
Many of the events planned for this year’s festival will focus on web-based opportunities for young professionals, design, ‘green’ start-ups and hackers’ connection to larger conversations about ethics and privacy. Booths, laboratories and other venues as well as events will be organized into eight categories. Among these are Take the Money, which will centre on entrepreneurship and scholarship; Make it Good, which will focus on bringing an artisanal approach to web-based activities; and Cooperation Wanted, which will shed light on how volunteer associations can maximize their potential using digital platforms.
Among this year’s confirmed speakers are Nathan Jurgenson, a social media theorist and prominent researcher at Snapchat, and Derrick De Kerckhove, author of Connected Intelligence, a breakthrough book in early research on new media and cognition.
The Internet Festival is part of a long history of tech-based tradition in Pisa. The University of Pisa was a game-changer for information technology in Italy, opening the country’s first degree programme in information technology in 1969 and pioneering a digital humanities program in recent years.
In addition to the on-the-ground events, the Internet Festival will be active online too of course: follow the fun and get program details on Facebook (www.facebook.com/internetfestival) and Twitter (@internetfest).
