With the resignation of Paddy Cosgrave following statements about Gaza that led to the dissolution of the technology giants at this year’s edition of the Web Summit, the new executive president, Katherine Mayer, takes the stage, promising to keep the debates without prohibited topics. , talking about an excellent team and the support of the government and the Lisbon city council.
This year around 70 thousand participants are expected. 2,600 startups from 85 countries are registered (300 more than last year’s edition) and almost a third are founded by women. There are also more than 900 investors, 300 collaborating entities and two thousand registered media outlets, from 160 countries.
The organization is also aware that 32 countries from the five continents will send official delegations to the Web Summit in search of foreign investment and the Portuguese Hotel Association hopes that the event will translate into an occupancy rate of 85% of the hotels in the Greater Lisbon with a higher average price.
Katherine Maher embarks on a transatlantic experience as the new CEO of Web Summit. The 40-year-old researcher lives in San Francisco, but of the 365 days a year, she says she travels at least 200, ran Wikipedia, worked with organizations like the UN, Unicef and the World Bank and graduated in Islamic Studies at the New York University, but it was in Cairo, during a university specialization, where his life changed when the invasion of Iraq occurred.
Katherine Maher left the Wikipedia foundation to become the new executive director of Web Summit. A researcher on topics such as transparency, she believes that we live in a very strange time for information: “A global crisis of fake news and misinformation, which means that our free knowledge movement has become somewhat isolated. At the same time, we are witnessing to a collapse of public trust, around the world, in many of our most important civic institutions. One of the reasons for this collapse of public trust in matters like public science, or a free and independent press, or even such Perhaps the very idea of democracy is that people, wherever they are in the world, are increasingly skeptical about the ability of these institutions to respond to future challenges and new needs.”
Focused on the modern problems of globalization such as the concept of truth, perception, the distortion between personal values and beliefs and the absence of hypotheses of scientific knowledge – and how this affects urgent changes in the course of the planet -, in a talk on the digital channel TED Talks, from the United States, which invites contemporary thinkers to talk about their object of study, with more than one hundred thousand views, explains why one of the aspects that we could all recognize is that part of the reason why which We have so many glorious chronicles of the human experience and of all forms of culture because we recognize that there are many different truths.
For the researcher, taking this into account, the truth exists for all of us and probably for the person sitting next to us, “but it may not be the same truth.” And he concludes that this happens because the truth of the matter, for many of us, means combining facts about the world with our beliefs about the world. Therefore, we all have different truths. They are based on things like where we come from, how we were raised, and how other people perceive us. And he explains: “For example, we can talk to a neighbor and share a common idea, but what happens when we add a third, fourth or fifth person? What happens when we try to expand that idea to a scale of 7.8 thousand?” . Millions of people? The reality is that we are a vast and varied world. “When we try to use our personal truths to make collective decisions about important issues, we start to run into problems.”
For Katherine Maher, collective decision-making, what we want to do in open and democratic societies, requires that we come together around common understandings about the root of the problem and some hypotheses about how we are going to get out of it, but if we are using our personal truths for this, we end up having conversations about our values and our identity and find ourselves focusing on what divides us, instead of focusing on what we agree on. For the researcher, this allows us to have conversations about the truth, in a way that focuses on what we believe, instead of focusing on what can be known, on knowledge, considering that this is an extremely divisive and harmful definition.
In an event that this year has as its motto “Atlantic, where the future will be born”, Maher guarantees that he thinks a lot about the lack of urgent measures on climate change, when it has long been known what the negative impacts of man are. produced carbon in the atmosphere. But, for this researcher, the implications of this data challenge our identities, industries and communities in many ways that create resistance and even misinformation and “the public debates that resulted from this truth about climate change prevented us from taking specific and concrete measures, which “It could mitigate the damage to humanity from rising sea levels, increased deadly heat and cold waves, and violent storms. “With these urgent threats before us, we need better ways to reach a common understanding.”
There is no shortage of expectations for this year’s edition, following the resignation of Paddy Cosgrave, the Irish businessman, founder and historical guru of the Web Summit, after making a mail on social networks defending Palestine, which caused the stampede of technological giants who refused, this time, to come to Lisbon.
Faced with the stampede, the Minister of Economy, António Costa e Silva, guaranteed on October 24 the Government’s commitment to holding the event. In a statement, he said that there are conditions for these four days to develop normally and comply with the agreement signed with the organizers.
This year, Marcelo de Rebelo de Sousa also does not confirm dates, meetings, or handshakes, but the President of the Republic may be present in moments of surprise. Who knows, maybe today the head of state will be surprised by the start of the Web Summit by Night events, spread across the Hub Criativo do Beato, Praça do Comércio and Pavilhão Carlos Lopes.
Source: TSF
