About #140conf

The other week I went out to the #140conf Boston TweetUp. For those of you not in the know, a TweetUp is a networking event for people on Twitter. This event was all about the #140 Character Conference taking place September 14th in Boston. Being a pretty heavy twitter user, I had heard about #140conf before but I wasn’t exactly sure what it was about. Thankfully, the founder of #140conf Jeff Pulver was there to enlighten us.

He described it as a conference about the real time web, but also a platform for people doing interesting things to shine. Jeff tries to get celebrities and other big names to speak at the conferences to build an audience, then opens it up to lesser known people to speak. There are individual talks which last no more than 10 minutes and group talks that are no more than 20 minutes. The idea is to have lots of different people present a wide range of ideas.

My Pitch

Of course this sounded like a great opportunity for me to talk about the documentary project I am working on. I promptly wrote up a proposal to speak. Below is the proposal I submitted. Let me know what you think.

I would like talk about my family’s incredible story and how the real time web is helping us share our story.

This past December I sat down with my family in Central America to interview them about the past 12 years since we were reunited. We used ustream to broadcast the event to our friends and family. It was an interesting experience for some family members who had never heard or seen my father speak about what happened during the war.

From that first interview I started doing more interviews with other family members about different aspects of the story. My goal is not only to share our story with the world, but to make a documentary from it.

The internet has always played a big role in my life and in reconnecting with my birth family. In 1997 our home number was found by doing an internet search. Over the past 12 years we’ve used AIM, Skype, Facebook and many other programs to keep in touch.

I’m fascinated with the power of the web to connect people and share information. The #140conf seems like it is a celebration of this idea. It would be an honor to be able to share our story with a group of like minded people.

How You Can Help

Jeff was big on saying he wants people to tell him who should be speaking at the confrence. If you think I would make a good speaker at #140conf and you are on Twitter you can drop Jeff(@jeffpulver) a line. Please don’t spam him but you could say something as simple as:

I would like to hear @dewittn speak about #anasmiracle at #140conf

Every little bit helps!