Welcome to Brave Conversations

/ INTRODUCTION

Brave Conversations Bangalore 2020 took place on 12 February, 2020 at IIIT Bangalore

Brave Conversations Bangalore 2020 was our first formal alliance with a Web Science Lab at their home. With the support of IIIT and the Deputy British High Commission we attracted a diverse group of people from both the University but also the broader Bangalore community. It was our first opportunity to bring Brave Conversations to both students from IIIT and the University of Southampton, and for them to present their research to non-academic audiences.

Brave Conversations Bangalore was held after Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a second general election in a landslide. The Indian Government had banned the triple talaq (instant divorce for Muslims), and passed the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, the first time religion was overtly used as a criterion for citizenship under Indian law. India had experienced the longest internet shutdown in August 2019, an attempt at a Moon Landing with Vikram in September 2019. The day before the event elections in Delhi saw the Aam Adami Party win a resounding majority, seen by some as a rejection of Mohdi’s BJP and it’s policies.

Photos & Reflections

Story of Mini Grocery Bag & Artificial Intelligence Resurrecting the Departed Loved One

Article by Ganga Sharma

Background

In 2008 a group of people from industry, government, academia, and the community sectors came together to create the first Brave Conversations (then called the Meta conference) to create a forum for people to discuss and debate the emerging issues related to humans and their use of digital technologies.

At about the same time a group of luminaries from the Web world were creating Web Science in order to focus interdisciplinary research on precisely the same thing.

In 2017 these two groups came together to create Brave Conversations.

Objectives

The goal of Brave Conversations is to challenge and also empower everyone who participates. There is no pre-requisite of knowledge or expertise, and we seek to encourage as diverse a group of participants as possible from all walks of life, ages and stages.

We will explore the decisions that we make on a minute by minute basis and impact us all on a personal, community, societal and planetary level, in order to make explicit how our engagement with social technologies is changing everything.

We are all responsible for the world we are creating. It is time we were empowered to make it better rather than blindly feeling over-whelmed. In order to do this we need to learn from each other, play with ideas, and ask the questions that are both confronting and will take us to uncomfortable, yet important places.

How it works

The Evolving Web

The Web dominates how most of us interact with each other and with the societies in which we live. It has provided new digital platforms which have given rise to the largest companies of the modern era; it has enabled massive societal change on a global scale, and it is facilitating powerful new socio-technical systems which are changing the very notion of human research, science and potentially human evolution.

We can feel that things are changing all around us, but

How often do we engage in a robust and challenging dialogue and debate about what sort of future we want to create for ourselves and for future generations?
How often do we feel that our opinions are respected, that we have the space to imagine real possibilities, and that we can take some proactive control of the world that is emerging?
How often do we feel that our opinions are respected, that we have the space to imagine real possibilities, and that we can take some proactive control of the world that is emerging?