About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

The first time I checked out BIL conference wiki site, “BIL” stood for: Benevolent, Inspiration and Latitude. In fact, the three words change every time you refresh the page. As a result, I initially didn’t get the idea of what the conference was really about except that:

• BIL was created to “attract” TED people to BIL and save BIL attendees the TED conference fee of $6,000 (roughly the same amount as a year’s tuition to UC Berkeley according to Monterey County Weekly) for the opportunity of sharing your ideas;
• BIL is a self-organized, open-source unconference conference.

We three arrived at the Monterey Youth Center around 930 a.m. on Mar. 1, 2008 as we were afraid we would not be able to get in the conference (BIL wiki announced that the max attendance of 150 was reached at 10 a.m. on Friday Feb. 29, 2008). As the instruction suggested, we also brought our own chairs and even a monitor since we were not sure if there would be a projector for Boris’ presentation. It turned out that we underestimated the power of open-source collaboration.

At around 10 a.m., as a first time BILder, I witnessed a well, self-organized process of setting up a conference environment, including items from projectors, studio, screens to name tag - everything you see in a commercial conference. Schedule was the most challenging part of a self-organized conference, because presenters pick their own time slots and audience need to check out what is going on a white board. Elliott posted and updated the schedule here and here and maintained the schedule on the BIL Wiki, another example of open-souce volunteerism. But unfortunately, the schedule on Sunday kept getting delayed for some reason.

I am 99% sure that I am the only person from China in BIL. When I told people I am from Shanghai, they either mentioned their trips to China or responded with “oh nice! “, excepted that one gentleman said “你好”to me and another lady counted the numbers one to seven in Mandarin to me!

Unlike from my last experience in Shanghai Bar camp where most people spoke Web 2.0 or “start-up idea” languages, BIL was a real show of “diversity and variety”- more than I could digest in a weekend. I was impressed by the BILders in many ways:

1. Freedom and courage to speak: I was not encouraged to speak freely when growing up in schools. I don’t know the education system/tradition in Russia, but my colleague Boris, a Russian, asked a question I would have likely asked myself: why would these people come together to present all these kinds of ideas?
2. Openness: KV Fitzpatrick shared her personal story as “Growing Up Gifted” to present the art of raising brilliant minds. According to her, telling kids that “they are gifted” is not wise, one reason is that kids who think they are gifted (or highly/profoundly gifted) would try less to solve difficult problems which might require long term continuous diligent work. Thus they will end up being less successful. Because the parents in the conference applauded hard, I think the theory must be true in some way.
3. Innovation: Look at the keywords: stem cell, heretics, robotaxi, open-source security…Some are cutting-edge promising technologies，some sounds like (highly possible fantasies. I really enjoyed a “robot car future” idea by Brad Templeton, a solution to reduce death toll and energy consumption without giving up vehicles.

Using a blog post to cover BIL conference is like writing a 500-word book reviews about 40 books. One last good thing about BIL in Monterey is that we even took out 2 hours to hike in Point Lobos State Park, seeing the exceptional beauty Pacific Ocean in a sunny warm Spring day.