Updated more generic speaker invite letter

Dear mr Rees,

I read about your article on Qaurtz about why tech companies need philosophers and was extremely impressed. (write something personal)

I have something to ask - every four years there is a large socially engaged hacker conference in The Netherlands, attended by 3000 people, many of them bringing their families. It is an outdoors event, with most people staying in caravans or tents. There is also a speaker hotel.

I've been presenting at these conferences (every 4 years) since 2009, and in 2021 there will be another one. Some description can be found on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack-Tic This edition the conference is called MCH2022 / https://www.mch2022.org. Attendance is highly international, with particularly strong Belgian, Dutch and German representation. Various European countries host their own "embassies" there, Finland tends to bring its own portable sauna for example. Flanders has its own field typically. It has been described as a sort of burning man for tech.

Since its beginning, which I more or less accidentally attended, this has been a very engaged forum, exploring the boundaries and interfaces between freedom, privacy, safety, but also topics like the digital gap, where we were worried the Internet would end up only being used by the elite. We got that one wrong :-)

As an example of the unique status of this conference, the Dutch national forensics institute, national police and even our intelligence services tend to attend - as actual participants (although the intelligence people of course try to not stand out).

Attendees would call themselves hackers, but most of them work at infrastructure companies, or author the code that powers the internet etc. It is very much a conference full of people that touch the core of the internet.

For the 2022 event, which we hope to organise in July 2022 (fingers crossed), I was asked to be on "team content". We strive to find speakers that can tell interesting things to an audience rich with informed people who would like to know more.

So, my question is: can we convince you to do a presentation on one of our stages? Feel free to pick a topic, but the obvious choice is of course the intersection of technology and humanity.

Doing a presentation for this audience can bring several benefits to you. For one, in the longer term, it is helpful for recruitment. It showcases what you do at the ToftH and the audience is interesting as potential collaborators / future students.

Secondly, there is an extremely high concentration of knowledgeable and relevant parties present. Next to the techncial people, there are people interested in privacy and the implications of rolling out new technologies.

Also perhaps useful, it is an almost entirely lobby free zone. Chances are you'll run into actual Google, Facebook, Apple employees that can speak their mind. And given the informal outdoors setting, many "tribal issues" between companies or governments and companies have been successfully and sometimes memorably resolved.

I'd also like to stress that this is a very family friendly conference, which may make attending easier. 2017 speakers included:

• Bill Binney is a former Technical Director of the NSA who became a whisteblower over the failures of the agency to foresee and stop 9/11

• Marleen Stikker is president and co-founder of Waag Society, De Digitale Stad (The Digital City) in 1994, the first virtual community introducing free public access to the Internet. She is founder of aag, a social enterprise that consists of Waag Society, a research Institute for creative technologies and social innovation and Waag Products, that launched companies like Fairphone, the first fair smartphone in the world. She is also is advisor to the policy strategy group of the EU.

• Stephanie Wehner is a Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor at QuTech, Delft University of Technology, where she leads the Quantum Internet efforts.

The schedule consists of tracks, with bigger and smaller stages. A relevant presentation from ToftH would (I estimate) deserve the big stage and top billing, especially if the subject is exciting.

In any case, your presence would be most appreciated.

Best regards, Robin Edgar