I’m off to Boulder on Sunday to serve as a panelist for the 61st Annual Conference on World Affairs (April 6-10)! I know! Why the hell would they have asked me?!?
Public speaking makes me incredibly nervous, so usually when people are kind enough to invite me to sit on panels and suchlike, my first thought is how to graciously get out of it. But then I tend to find the people and the topics so damn interesting I just can’t resist (this also explains how I’ve been talked into a few New Year’s Eve parties, but that’s a story for another time).
How I ended up with an airline ticket to Colorado, however, is pretty much the same story writ large. The Conference on World Affairs sounds like summer camp for intellectuals–big idea discussions on “the arts, media, science, diplomacy, technology, environment, spirituality, politics, business, medicine, human rights, and so on.” Plus, once I found out that Molly Ivins used to go every year, there was no way I was going to miss the chance. They said they were interested in me because of the whole “writing and music and internet” thing going down around me. Does anyone smell copyright debate and conversations about new media in the air?
Yesterday, however, I read the bios of my fellow panelists and seriously started to sweat. These are some major league heavy hitters. Will I sound foolish?
Okay, deep breath–enough with the whining. Here’s hoping I can string my words together in an interesting fashion and add something to the conversation. The entire event is massive: some 200 panels, plenaries, and performances. I’ll try and report in while I’m there. If you see anything in the line-up you’d like some vicarious eyes on, let me know. And if you know of any good coffee shops I can hide out in if I embarrass myself, let me know about those, too.
Try Espresso Roma on the Hill, just west of campus. Best cup of coffee in Boulder. Second best is the Folsom St. Coffee Company, north of the football stadium. I’ll try to make it to at least a few of your panels!
Molly says: Great! Thanks for the recs. And be sure to introduce yourself if you make it to the conference.
For the short attention span session, this link is interesting:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/03/twitter-wouldnt-sell-for-1-billion-says-source/
I was expecting Twitter to agree to be purchased by Google but if it doesn’t happen, this is either a huge endorsement for brief communication or its moment of peak folly.
Or to phrase it differently, this will be an indicator that I need to spend more time reading the New York Review of Books or else reading my twitter feed. I have no clue which is the right path at this moment of time…
Molly adds: Yeah, I just caught Biz Stone on The Colbert Report spilling pretty much the same lines. And then of course there’s Flutter. Ha!
I’m going to be going to your presentation on the “upside of the downturn,” assuming my instructor allows me to miss class. I look forward to it.