A sneak peek post of The Gathering.

FYI: This is a precursor to the actual blog post that will be up by end-week.

I threw a curveball to Erik Hersman, known on the interwebs as The White African of Ushahidi (Who just won a Kenyan Open Source Award – Congratulations to them) and Afrigadget fame. Upon getting his tweet that he just got his new set of TED DVD’s.

I’ve been familiar with the TED Movement for a couple years, and had watched a load of the talks online. And since I don’t happen to be very blessed with the bandwidth on this side (Oh, for the days in The States where I would stream videos… ='(

TED, beside having one of the coolest Felllowships ever (I ought to mention that we have two East Africans selected this time around, Mobile Technology Evangelist Jessica Colaco and Jonathan Gossier, an American based in Uganda. The founder of AppAfrica Labs) has worldwide conference with some of the most fascinating speakers from around the globe with some of the best ideas around.

TED stands for Technology Entertainment and Design and they get people from these disciplines to speak and engage the crowd in 18 minute talks.

At yesterday’s gathering we viewed 4 of the Talks, favourites of the different TED Fellows present. We  laughed, chuckled, nodded heads and networked.

It was hectic to put together, especially since most of it was out of pocket, but it really was worth it. More on the rollercoaster of bootstrapping together a meetup like this. I know I didn’t invite people, I forgot to tell others…it started a little late, but it happened and people seemed to like what we put together. Big (big) thanks to Skunkworks and The ICT Club for the venue. The notice was very short.

The TED Fellows who showed up included Ory Okolloh, Erik Hersman , Sheila Ochugboju and Joshua Wanyama

That’s all for the ‘snippet’ sneak peek version. ‘Real’ blog post on events + TED Videos shown will follow. Including a tweet-out to all who showed up (lots of Twitter folk came through, on short notice)

More to follow.