Iowa City’s Mission Creek Festival has established itself as the home of musical, literary, film, comedy, and culinary arts. And on Friday and Saturday, the festival will cater to technology connoisseurs as well.

The first Mission Creek Tech + Innovation Conference will kick off at the University of Iowa Pappajohn Business Building and will serve as a "networking and knowledge-gathering hub for Midwest-based technologists and entrepreneurs," according to the Mission Creek website.

Mission Creek Director and Co-Founder Andre Perry said the Tech Conference has been years in the making and helps create a "hybrid model" for the festival.

"It’s all different forms of creativity and thought," he said. "We think there’s something interesting about them all happening at once; the idea that you could be at a tech conference at 10 in the morning and a concert at night."

Tech Conference speakers come from organizations such as Pear Deck, which builds technology to promote interactivity in classrooms, the Downtown Project in Las Vegas, promoting vibrancy and community in downtown Vegas, and Artsy, a website that gathers and organizes art from around the world.

The conference will wrap up with a keynote address at the Englert Theater, 221 E. Washington St., by Matthew Israel, the director of the Art Genome Project at Artsy.

Perry said the feedback from this year’s Tech Conference will determine if Mission Creek will continue the program in the future.

— by Emma McClatchey