The GoTo Conference in Aarhus, Denmark

At the beginning of this week I attended and spoke at the Goto Conference in Aarhus, Denmark. A friend and colleague Rebecca Parsons organized a track on IT and Society at what was a very technical conference featuring agile programming, web as a platform, and open source development.

The conference is produced by Trifork, a Danish software development company that decided 15 years ago that a great way to keep itself current on technical and professional skills was to host a conference. They have succeeded in creating an invigorating and useful conference.

The two other talks in the IT and Society track talked about technology for the developing world or T4D. Technology has a different meaning in Africa, where much of the continent does not have power on a regular basis, but cell phone coverage is high. Although there is not power, there is cell phone coverage. The estimate is that by 2015, 95% of the world will have cell phone coverage. This is consistent with Hillary Clinton's claim that the cell phone will become the world's technology platform. In Uganda, where Rebecca spent three months as an innovation fellow, the cell phones are the simple Nokia 1100, with SMS only. With this cell phone as a platform, UNICEF is introducing some incredible tools including medical feedback using the SMS system.

My talk was on women and technology leadership. You can see my slides under the track information. There were about 50 people, with about a 1/3 men, and 2/3 women. What was impressive was the level of commitment from the attendees who really wanted to understand how to have more women at the University in Denmark, as well as at the local companies.

I loved Denmark. Copenhagen was great, and Aargus was friendly and welcomed. However, it rained most of the time I was there.