This morning, BoomTown will be onstage at California First Lady Maria Shriver’s well-known Women’s Conference in Long Beach, Calif., to moderate a panel titled “Changing the World Through the Web.”

The panelists include Hollywood actor/producer, Katalyst co-founder and Twitter demigod Ashton Kutcher; Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg; Premal Shah of Kiva.org; and Blue State Digital’s Joe Rospars, who was also new media director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

In other words, as a group, they are all either prettier, smarter or better for the planet than anything I have ginned up so far.

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Eve Ensler, playwright, activist and creator of V-Day, appeared at the the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in late May to talk about the links between what goes into making mobile phones and human rights violations.

There, she shed much needed light on the dire situation in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where some of the worst atrocities are now being committed on the population in a terrible civil war.

She predicted it would get worse without massive international intervention.

Tragically, she was right.

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Onstage in an interview at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Eve Ensler shed much-needed light on the dire situation in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ensler’s aim is to end the use of rape as a weapon of war there, in part as a consequence of the region’s coltan trade. Coltan, or columbite tantalite, is a mineral essential to the manufacture of a wide array of consumer electronics, such as mobile phones and laptops.

It is well worth hearing about exactly how some of our everyday gadgets come to us at a terrible price.

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Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

Well, we’re still going–making the same long-term bet that the digital revolution will keep rolling as we did at D1. Here’s our lineup for D7.

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