Clay Shirky, regarded as one of the world’s leading thinkers on technology and its impact on economies and societies, will visit SA in August.

He will be the keynote speaker at the inaugural Tech4Africa conference, which will focus on the impact of the Web and emerging technologies in Africa.

The conference, to be held in Johannesburg, is being organised by Technovated and will also include senior-level speakers from Twitter, Mozilla, WordPress and Yahoo.

Shirky is a sought-after speaker on topics related to the Web, social media and the Internet. He has spoken at events such as TED Global and South by South West.

He divides his time between teaching, consulting and writing. He lectures in new media as an associate teacher at New York University’s graduate interactive telecommunications programme.

His consulting practice focuses on the rise of decentralised technologies such as peer-to-peer, Web services and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired, client-server infrastructure that characterises the Web.

He is also a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers, including Business 2.0, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired.

Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody, which explores the effects of open networks, collaboration and user created and disseminated content on organisations and industries. He is especially well known for using the phrase “the Internet runs on love” and for his advocacy of “crowdsourcing” and collaborative efforts online. — Staff reporter, TechCentral