From February 11-13, Ashoka and The Lemelson Foundation, with support from Microsoft, brought together pioneers and thought leaders in the field of technology and invention for systemic social change.

My organization recently held a big international conference in Nairobi with around 1,000 participants from all over the world. When our staff got back, almost every single one of them had a virus on their computers that would pop up pornographic ads every few minutes. Lovely.

Apparently there was one central computer where everybody brought their USB sticks if they wanted to print something and that is how the virus spread. I know, it’s ironic for an organization that deals with infectious diseases.

After I had stopped making fun of my colleagues, I asked them why they hadn’t locked their USB sticks so that they were “read only”. All I got in response was confused stares.

Chain Reaction is coming back to London, and the world, this November.  Last year, innovators and changemakers gathered for a two-day event in London to learn, share, and collaborate to make a better world.  The conversations, presentations and workshops were shared online in real-time thanks to a myriad technology set (including Twitter, blogs, video, etc.).  It's time again to meet in London and invite the whole world in to the conversations.

Learn more and connect with Chain Reaction!

The Feast is hosting a Twitter-based chat later today for all you changemakers and entrepreneurs! They’ll be tweeting questions such as “what are your favorite examples of social entrepreneurship” and looking for remarkable people like you to help answer them!

Join in: Wednesday, September 9th from 3PM - 4PM EST

The guest host this week will be Echoing Green (@echoinggreen)!  Since 1987, Echoing Green has provided seed funding and support to more than 470 social entrepreneurs with bold ideas for social change in order to launch groundbreaking organizations around the world.

HASTAC ("haystack": the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) is pleased to announce that registration is now open for its second annual conference.

TechnoTravels/TeleMobility: HASTAC in Motion

HASTAC II - SECOND ANNUAL HASTAC CONFERENCE
MAY 22-24, 2008 (just before N2Y3!)

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE and UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

I'll be there late Friday night - Monday late afternoon, and would love to meet folks, talk shop, imbibe.

On AIM: ianwrootslab; on gtalk: iwilker. 

-- Ian

Chris Pirillo and Ponzi Indharasophang are currently organizing the 6th annual Gnomedex tech conference, a successful and unusual part of the tech conference scene. Chris is the founder and tech evangelist of the online publishing group Lockergnome. Ponzi is the CEO of Lockergnome, a producer of various multimedia and a member of the Blogher community.

I caught the two of them at SXSW and asked them to tell me what they've learned about conference organizing in a Web 2.0 world.