John’s Blog

I’m here at the World Economic Forum meeting in Dalian — the first of these annual meetings of 2,000 or so global leaders in China. Dalian is a very very nice city — the nicest Chinese city that I’ve been to (I’ve only been to three — Dalian, Beijing & Shanghai). I’ll post more about it, and some of the activities here, soon.

But this morning has been amazing — the queen of Jordan spoke, then there was a smaller session on China’s use of soft power (referring to a brilliant concept by a Harvard professor named Joseph Nye) — Tom Friedman of the New York Times was on the panel, along with the CEO of China’s largest bank (maybe the world’s largest by market cap — I’m not sure), and a pretty high ranking Communist Party official. It was a candid, sometimes aggressive panel, and was terrific. Then I sat in a very small session with the guy who coined the term “nanotechnology” and a couple of other guys who are succeeding with it today. And I just had lunch with some Chinese friends who are working very hard to develop an open culture here. I’m blown away by their mission, their dedication, and what they do every day.

As for Mozilla, about half the people here who I talk with know about Mozilla and/or Firefox — and the people that recognize us absolutely love us. It’s great. I do feel like a tech nerd, though, next to all these economists, politicians, and world leaders. It’s cool, actually.

More later — at the moment I’m about to go into a session where all of us on the panel will be nerds. 🙂 Tariq Krim of Netvibes, Dave Sifry, formerly of Technorati, John Gage of Sun, and some others — it’ll be like being at home…

Lots to think about — makes me both realize that the contribution of Mozilla in the world is large (and growing) and can be larger — and that the way we’re doing it — in a broad, people-focused, open, non-organizational way — is what many many leaders around the world aspire to.

And as usual, I feel very lucky to be here on behalf of Mozilla. More soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 4:17 pm and is filed under China, Mozilla, Personal stuff. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.