Over 900 participants from 13 countries, speeches given by almost 70 Polish and foreign experts. Lectures, seminars and workshops held at the offices of 12 partners, international debate, as well as a coding zone for children, fairs participated by several dozen companies, technology zone with participation of Polish and foreign universities and common networking. On top of that, live coverage that reached almost 80,000 Internauts and ranked first on Twitter – that is the brief summary of Sector 3.0 Festival, the biggest in Poland event on new technology use in social activities, that was held in Warsaw on May 22 and 23.
Each year, Sector 3.0 Festival is visited by hundreds of enthusiasts of new technologies, representing social organizations, business, public administration, the academic world, and media. Like in former years, the main part of the event was held at the Copernicus Science Center on the first day, and the partners of the Festival prepared workshops for participants that were taking place in the partners’ offices on the second day.
“It seems that we will cause the next Great Flood ourselves and that artificial intelligence can help us solve the problem of climate change impact,” said traveler Marek Kamiński in his opening address, speaking about his forthcoming journey around the world with Nao robot. Tom Gilb, one of the pioneers of Agile method, spoke about triggering creativity thanks to state-of-the-art technologies. An address by Andrea Leitch of National Geographic on the role of story in contents creating for the Internet was the last one in the main part of the Festival. Andrea Leitch emphasized that thanks to the multimedia development nowadays many people who don’t have access to travel can visit the whole world.
In the seminar part, the meetings for participants were conducted by Michał Jaworski of Microsoft (“First of all Data!”), Łukasz Pietrzyk of Google, Dr. Jan Zając together with a group of panelists including Ewa Krupa of Orange Foundation, Michał Pol of Onet.pl, Janusz Piechociński, former Member of Sejm representing Polish Peasant Party (“Twitter: 280 characters for a good cause”), Steven Patterson of MIT Media Lab (“How they do it at MIT? The recipe for hackathon”), and Johnny Miller of africanDONE (“The idea of a drone: africanDONE”).
The Festival guests had also the opportunity to take part in the fairs where several dozen exhibitors presented their offers, including Google, SWPS, Microsoft, University of Naples, German Aerospace Center, Experyment Science Center, or Orange. The fairs were supplemented by the innovation zone constructed specially for that purpose, where Polish and foreign universities such as AGH University of Science and Technology, Czestochowa University of Technology, or National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan, presented their technological achievements.
The crowning point of the discussions and workshops was the debate on how technologies can support innovative ideas, projects and teams, conducted by Dr. Michał Boni, Member of the European Parliament, and participated by Prof. Samir Chatterjee (University of Southern California), Michał Jaworski (Microsoft), Dr. Anneken Reise (German Aerospace Center), and Marcos Oliveiry (Meviro).
“The Festival develops. We attract more and more participants. Equally important is constantly increasing group of domestic and foreign partners of our event. This year it is worth mentioning the companies, universities and organizations from the USA (MIT Media Lab, National Geographic, University of Southern California), Taiwan (National Taipei University of Technology), South Korea (Seoul National University), Republic of South Africa (africanDRONE), and Brazil (Meviro),” Dawid Szarański, Sector 3.0 Program Director says.
The Festival made also an opportunity for the Polish-American Freedom Foundation to present its award of PLN 40,000. It went to Citizens Network Watchdog Poland for active and practical use of new technologies in building civil society.
On the second day, the participants took part in 12 specialist workshops prepared by the Festival partners, which were held at various venues, including Warsaw offices of Google, Orange, Microsoft, IBM, as well as at the Ministry of Digital Affairs, Agora, Coalition for Polish Innovation, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, or SGH Warsaw School of Economics.
The Festival is a part of the PAFF “Sector 3.0” Program addressed to social organizations activists and employees, especially those from small local communities. The objective of the program is to improve their knowledge and skills in the area of effective use of ICT in their everyday work in order to broaden the scope and effectiveness of their actions. In 2018, the program got a honorable mention awarded by the European Commission under the European Digital Skills Award competition.
The Festival organizer and “Sector 3.0” Program Manager is the Information Society Development Foundation.
