Dokutech — Connecting the Dots
Clusters of young men and women were increasing their efforts towards the the League of Prizren, a historical site that would yet again make history. The most epic social and tech gathering of them all — Dokutech, would come to life in full steam on it’s second edition.
Picture this: While you take a seat and look in front of you, there’s a modern LED big-size screen with a super-futuristic video, emphasizing the aim on brining the future closer. To the left, there’s one of the most important buildings in the history of Kosovo dating from 1878, and further to the left there’s a beautiful mountain with a fortress on top built in 11th century. To the right theres a beautiful mosque, and further down there’s the museum of the whole venue. Take a look at the picture now. (That’s the view people had during the conference).
I’ve been attending numerous conferences, yet Dokutech is one of the few that managed to remain a hot topic days after.
From space to homo sapiens 2.0, from privacy violations to dictatorship and from synthetic life to self-driving cars, the venue was packed with a crowd of over 250 people (and over 900 attending it for workshops and talks at different periods) and and others were gathering around the railings just to listen what was happening here.
“It is a place that we’re aiming to make different in terms of networking, social gathering and meeting with anyone you want. We want the community to be connected with the speaker, that’s why we got the stage even closer to the audience and had the seating in round-shape. We want to fight the culture of hotel-conferences and build unique tech cultures.” says to me a great friend and producer of Dokutech, Kushtrim Xhakli.
And while looking through that, one can see that the organizing team is working hard to deliver value, first and foremost, while making sure that people have the possibility to meet as much as possible with new faces.
The names present included Esther Dyson, Yanki Margalit, Peter Sunde, Lane Becker, Kentaro Toyama, Laurent Hague and others, while Teresa Crawford, great friend and board member at IPKO Foundation, helped a lot with Digjtiale.com in event coverage while putting her blogging skills to practice.
It is worth mentioning that these kind of events put Kosovo on the tech scene further more and bring hope that the community is finally taking things, and as Brad Feld puts it : entrepreneurs must be the “leaders.” Everyone else — universities, governments, investors — are “feeders” that, though important, can’t kick-start a startup community on their own.
I mean just look on top of the many things; the co-organizers of the conference are Share Foundation from Serbia, IPKO Foundation from Kosovo and also world-known film-festival Dokufest, also from Kosovo. The audience included people from Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Sweden, Italy, US and many more, while again standing behind the statement that small Kosovo, can connect the dots and can connect people of the Balkans. Technology doesn’t need visas …
Images: Curtesy of Meddy Huduti / Doku:tech.
