Aliens are back at #mixit17!

Let’s face it: "alien" talks are a big part of MiXiT spirit. For those who are not familiar with the term: alien talks are topics we rarely or never encounter in your typical conference, most of the time out of the IT field.

With a strong preference for the most improbable topics, the one that gets you thinking and/or leaving the room with stars in the eyes (yes, because React vs Angular is nice and all, but we are also human beings with a little heart that beats for other topics).

We remember some epic talks from past editions like the talk from Horacio Lassey-Assiakoley, who came from Togo to talk about the tech communities in Africa, Marie Manceau who gave us the yearning to give everything up to go and discover the beauty of Antarctica, or Florence Porcel who talked about space exploration.

This year again, we took a great pleasure to find exceptional speakers!

We are happy to announce:
- Rida Laraki, French researcher on ballot systems. I don’t know if you spotted that, but MiXiT will take place two days before a quite awaited date in France: the presidential election. So we’ll have a talk about… political scandals! No, I’m kidding: Rida will talk about a ballot system he is working on, called the majority judgement, a system that could potentially revolutionize the elections in general, by offering an alternative to the traditional one citizen = one voice for one name.
- A surprise topic of this presidential election is the universal income. Even before a candidate thought about it, the MiXiT team had already planned a small talk about it. In our weird IT world, where the code you write at night sometimes please you more than the code you are paid to do at work, the duality work/income and universal income looked like two really interesting topics. Romain and Jeff will explain everything to us.
- Nety et Mila, two developers that Agnès and Cyril met in Indonesia in 2011. At that time, they were finishing their degrees, starting a company and volunteering in a non-profit organization that helps young and poor people to learn how to code. Since that time, they kept going in tech-activism! They’ll come to talk about what it is like to be a girl and a developer on the Java island, that they have crossed on a motorbike and went to the deep end of the equatorial forest to teach code to local kids.
- Lyon, like a lot of cities around the world, has its own local currency. Did you know that? The Gonette, because that’s its name, will have a member of its organization on stage.
- In the Netherlands, a project has fascinated us: building an autonomous village, which respects the environment, capable of producing its own energy, its own food and even to recycle its waste. Marjolein Shiamatey will introduce us to the ideas behind the Regen Villages, “the Tesla of eco-village”, and this will be about renewable energies, machine learning, hydro and aeroponic agricultures, etc.
- Alain Renaud is a philosopher, who wrote his thesis in 1968 under the direction of Gilles Deleuze, on a nearly premonitory topic: how the digital age was going to change our lives. Nearly 50 years later, he will be on stage to explore the topic again.
- A theme we have at heart: the protection of online privacy. Fighting against the big Web villains that sell our personal data, a small (french!) company started… a search engine! A search engine that respects the privacy of its users: a mad project that the CEO of Qwant, Eric Léandri, will explain to us.
- Samuel Couffignal is the conductor of the orchestra “Meltin’Cordes”, a project aiming to reunify professionals and amateurs around music. What we loved about Samuel is his fundamentally humanist approach. For him, the orchestra is first and foremost a group of people. His opening to other fields allowed the attendees of Agile Lyon 2016 to enjoy a demonstration, with his quartet, of the relation between his position of conductor and the agile management, an agile conductor if you will. This year, he will come to MiXiT with 12 musicians, and speak about group management.

We hope these topics will open some interesting perspectives for you. On our part, we can’t wait to be there!