Chris Messina has been confirmed as a speaker for the two-day Turing Fest due to take place at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre on 28th-29th August.

A veteran of Silicon Valley, Messina has designed products, platforms and experiences for big name companies such as Google and Uber, founded a number of startups, and given away many of his creations, including the hashtag.

A technology evangelist, he is a strong advocate for open source, open standards, microformats and Oauth, and is known for being a driving force behind several movements.

In 2014, he helped organise the grassroots movement, Spread Firefox, that helped the company achieve its first 100 million downloads. In 2005, he co-organised the first BarCamp and popularised the unconference event model to more than 350 cities around the world.

Then, in 2006, he opened the first co-working spaces in San Francisco, giving rise to a global movement. His creation of the hashtag in 2007 forever changed the landscape of social media and helped to galvanise social movements around the world.

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In 2008, he went on to win a Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award for Best Community Amplifier for his involvement in some of these movements.

Alongside Messina, a further three speakers have also been announced:

• Nandini Jammi, a product messaging strategist who is one of the founders and organisers of Sleeping Giants, a social media campaign-turned-movement dedicated to making hate speech unprofitable.
• Kevin Goldsmith, chief technology officer at Onfido, an acclaimed identity verification startup. He was previously Vice President of Engineering at Spotify and Director of Engineering at Adobe.
• Matt Schatz, SVP Global Sales at WP Engine, a leading managed hosting platform WP Engine, where he is responsible for defining and executing the company’s global sales strategy. Previously he has worked at Bazaarvoice, CityVoice and Rackspace.

The event will see more than 60 speakers take to the stage to address an audience of more than 3,000 attendees. To find out more about Turing Fest 2019, visit: www.turingfest.com