Speaker Ideas (from Elizabeth to Heidi)

• The Hans Rosling/gapminder data (his gapminder software for analyzing demographic info was purchased by google, and now his son is working at google in that department) is fascinating.  Hans has spoken several times at TED (including I think at the most recent one in Oxford) and I had been thinking of suggesting him (or at least his TED presentations) as a global week presenter/presentation.  His son Ola may be at Google locally – Ola was one of the gov. 2.0 speakers on the list you sent.

• I’m a big fan of Tim O-Reilly, who put on the gov. 2.0 conference and spoke at it.  I have not heard him speak myself (I will try to find something on YouTube) but my hunch is that he would be really good.  I believe he lives up in the Sebastopol area so is relatively local. 
   
• Mitch Kapor – another one I will check out on You Tube or iTunes.  He is also local.

• Any one from the Obama White House or Obama campaign would be fantastic (a number of Obama people spoke at this conference).

• I think anyone from Twitter (particularly who was involved with the Iran election issues and similar political speech/citizen journalism issues) would be really interesting. 

• I think either of the guys who started Apps for Democracy or the guy who is the CEO of Meetup would be really interesting to high school age girls, because I think these are the platforms for civic engagement that high school aged kids are going to be using most heavily, so I think the Casti girls would find this very relatable and interesting. 

• It looks like there were a couple of speakers on Open Source related issues – I think the Open Source trend is going to have an impact beyond just software and technology, but I suspect this is just too techie/legal/dry to be of a huge amount of interest to the high school age group (or, probably, much of anyone outside of the tech/legal arena!). 

Not specifically among the speakers at the gov. 2.0 conference, but a couple of other thoughts on the gov. 2.0 issues –

• There was a really interesting TED presentation I listened to today by Jonathan Zittrain where he talked about what happened when the Pakistani government tried to block a You Tube video.

• There was also in interesting story a few months ago about Wikipedia and the NYT withholding info about journalist David Rhode’s kidnapping by the Taliban – the story was released after he safely escaped. 

• I thought Gordon Brown’s TED presentation about using social media effectively was fascinating.

I will try to see if the UN is doing anything noteworthy using internet/social media – it seems since they are a global organization that relies on communicating policy, arranging food/aid distribution, etc. they might be doing something interesting … then again, maybe not, sometimes they move kind of slowly!