The forum's history did not begin with a conference. In 2009, the Ukrainian Banner Network (UBN), which Alexey Mas created together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich, was marking its tenth anniversary. The network itself appeared in January 1999: according to Mas, it was written in Perl in three weeks, and the costs amounted to about $100. For the anniversary, the group Mad Heads was invited. Then the organizers decided to expand the venue and turn the celebration into a conference, and set the date for April 1. According to Mas, 1,280 people attended the first forum.
The organizing committee works for free, and membership in it is open. Its members include Yevhen Shevchenko, known for the project Internet Marketing in Ukraine, Denys Dovhopoly and Alexander Olshansky. Mas put together the forum program and led the Internet Business track—that is, he handled what today would be called the content and substantive part of the event, not just the organization of the venue.
By April 2014, the forum had already taken place for the sixth time. The main theme was crowdfunding—that is, raising money for projects through public contributions from small donors. Roman Skrypin and Anton Nossik spoke; Nossik was a regular iForum speaker and talked about the project. For the Ukrainian scene of 2014, this was a notable topic: internet projects were looking for money outside banks and investors, and fundraising through the network was just beginning to turn into a separate industry.
Three Waves of Change
In the interview, Mas identified three areas that, in his opinion, would change the internet in the coming years. The first was information security—that is, the protection of user and company data, which was becoming increasingly important as online services grew. The second was e-commerce. Its growth, according to Mas, was held back by payment regulation: online stores found it difficult to accept payment and transfer money the way it is done in developed markets. The third area was mobile internet, whose development was stymied by the issuance of 3G and 4G licenses. In 2014, these licenses were still awaited in Ukraine, and the smartphone and mobile services market depended on their timing.
A separate question in the interview concerned Linux in the public sector. Mas answered pragmatically: when choosing an operating system for government agencies, the interface matters more than savings. A free system that is difficult for officials and employees to master costs more than licenses, and this difference is often underestimated. Mas himself worked as an iOS developer—that is, in the world of Apple's closed platforms—and he regarded open systems without ideology.
“Society will get used to living in a transparent world,” he believes.
This idea logically continued his own path. Mas was born in 1974 and entered the radio physics faculty of Kyiv State University without exams, as a winner of physics olympiads. He then worked at a research institute, at Ukrainsky Kapital bank and at the National Bank of Ukraine, where he handled Visa card processing. In 2000, he became director of Ukrainsky Portal (UAPortal). It was precisely his experience with banking and government systems, by his own account, that taught him to value reliability and a clear interface above cheap solutions.
What Came Next
The forum did not stop after the first year. It grew from a celebration into an annual conference, and in 2013 Mas gave a talk on Google Glass, the augmented-reality glasses that were then being discussed around the world. In 2015, iForum took place for the seventh time, on April 16, and became one of the most prominent professional venues of the Ukrainian internet. In 2016, Alexey Mas became an advisor to Kyivstar on digital technologies.
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