It Must Be Spring: Reboot 8 Announced

Last weekend Mark Wubben, after talking about Reboot over beers the day before, alerted me to the fact that the Reboot website seemed to be brought to life again, as did Peter Rukavina via e-mail. Today, just after I registered, Thomas Madsen Mygdal sent out a mail announcing Reboot.

Reboot is a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us... 2 days. 400 people. A journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas.
Applied towards us as individuals, citizens, teachers, culture workers, entrepreneurs, creators and change makers.

Elmine and I will certainly be there. Registration is done, currently scouting out places to stay, hotel is booked at Cab Inn Scandinavia (just as last year).

Participate!
Reboot is not a templated conference, nor an unconference. It is a bit of both, volunteer only, with key-notes, sessions, demo's and talks. You get to determine the program largely yourself. Head on over to the Reboot Participate page, and name those you'd like to see presenting, or provide details what you would like to talk about, and propose your own contributions to the program.

Reboot is the premier conference to help leverage European diversity towards inspiring workforms, great applications and forward leaps in learning.

It is spring. Time to reboot.

Tech Question: SMF and RSS

A quick question on the off-chance that someone of you might have the answer, or a pointer towards one.

I run a Simple Machines Forum in the so-called Patchwork Portal I described earlier. Most messageboards are only accessable for registered members only. RSS however seems to only generate a feed containing public content.

Does anybody know a way to make SMF RSS feeds take into account members-only content? (They would be RSS feeds requiring authorization I guess, but my first question is whether SMF can actually create feeds like that)

Any pointers welcome as the SMF community seems to not contain anything.

Off to G.O.R.

I''m off to G.O.R. - General Online Research conference the coming days. Or rather I am commuting to GOR these days, as Bielefeld, Germany is actually closer than most Dutch cities in the west to me.

I am as organised as ever. Found out this morning I hadn't paid yet (Now done, thanks to PayPal), and must still prepare my sheets for Wednesday morning when I am presenting. Ah well, it'll work out I guess.

Relationships Above Information Exchange

Whenever I talk about knowledge work and the role of social software in doing knowledge work in complex environments I always say that the key to social software is it's emphasis on relationships above information. Whatever you do with social tools, always it will be clear who is the source of information and what your relationship is to that person. It is also the relationships, the social context that allows you to judge information and put it to work for yourself. It's the social context, through its multi-subjectivity and feedback loops that allow me to detect patterns and filter information.

When you tell me something it is therefore different to me than when I read the same information in the newspaper. You are that difference. The fact that you care enough about something to tell it to me, gives a different perspective on that information, adds context to it and thus increases the relevance of that information to me. The relational context of the information is more important than the information actually shared. Social software supports that.

In my presentations I always give an example to underline this point, that I never actually shared here in the same way. Last Tuesday over dinner with Lilia and Robert, Lilia asked me to blog it. So here it is.

Anjo Anjewierden created this picture a while back, that depicts the relationships visible from analyzing a number of blogs, not on links but on content. It depicts rather nicely the mental picture I have of part of my network of relations that emerged from my blogging in the past three years. In my presentations I always show this picture and say that I am no longer worried to loose my blogpostings and comments of the past 3 years, as long as I am able to keep this mental picture of who is in my social network. Yes I would be sad to loose all that texts, thoughts and conversation, but as long as the relationships survive it never is really lost. It has become part of our shared context, experiences and consciousness. It usually makes those in the audience still hooked on information as neutral and objective entities gasp.

To me this is the strongest personal proof that blogging indeed breeds community:
I can loose my blog, as long as I can keep in touch with my relationships it's ok.

Ubiquitous Wifi, or Connecting the Information Landscape and the Geographical Landscape

Connectivity basic need now
For me as travelling consultant, but also as a private citizen, having ubiquitous access to my on-line material is crucial. It is my premier gateway to my social networks as well as my work. When during the move last month we were thrown back to using a 52k dial-in phoneline for a week I felt both blind, deaf and mute. I'd say more than 80% of my working as well as social life uses internet-channels at some point.

So when I got wifi at home, I also put up an open access point for others to enjoy. So when I am in hotels and conference venues I am irritated by the ridiculous pricing schemes they have for using wifi services. So e-mail gets send to my phone. So I want free wifi, or flat fee wifi, worldwide. Early October last year I came across Martin Varsavsky's call for people to help him get FON going, and of course I was already aware of what others are doing, and am privvy to some intriguing projects of some of my IFCCC colleagues over at F11.

FON
Basically FON is a network of private wifi routers with modified software (only for some LinkSys routers at the moment), that you connect to your own broadband connection at home. Other members of the network, or paying guests, are given (pw protected) access to your wifi router as long as you're not using your bandwith yourself. If you open up your router to FON, you get access to all FON routers everywhere. FON seems to have gotten support from Google, Skype and Sequioa, and also collaboration with the good guys from Plazes.com has been announced.

Information Landscape and Geographical Landscape
The latter is interesting to me. Because it connects the information landscape and the geographical landscape much more intimately. And I need that, and you need it too. I still have friends that give me strange looks when I describe my usage of internet tools. For them the internet is a one-way oriented information source, not a two-way place of exchange. For them cyberspace is different from their regular surroundings, and for me both form the world I live in. I simply can't afford to treat them as seperate any longer, as I could in 1990 when I first got on-line on a daily basis.

Traversing the Geoscape via the Infoscape: 21st century's seven league boots

Infoscape is Faster but Catalyst for Geoscape
In geographical space I meet people face to face, have drinks, which is great. But my mobility there is limited and time-constrained, slow, and resource-intensive. On the net, I don't meet people face to face but through digitally mediated channels. But there my mobility is global and instantaneous, and the speed of interaction and change matches much more closely the speed I need to be able to do all the stuff I find relevant. Through the net I arrange the face to face meetings, through the net I decide where to spend my limited time and resources for geographical mobility. Which in the end actually increases my geographical mobility (I would not have started BlogWalk or visited geeky conferences abroad otherwise for instance, or for instance got to entertain Qumana's Jon Husband from Canada at our home).

That also means that when I am on the road (the hard surfaced ones in the geographical landscape) I don't want to be cut off from my information landscape in the net. I want to immediately share pictures, get and share info and opinions about the restaurant I am standing in front of wondering whether to have lunch there, be aware of the presence of others geographically nearby for possible chance encounters. In other words to be able to leave as well as pick up many traces that lead to emergent patterns relevant to the geographical spot I happen to be in.

Can we do more?
Opening up a wifi accespoint at my geographic location is a small step I can do to help bring the information landscape and geographical landscape closer together. Whether it's FON or not is irrelevant. Letting others crash is another. Dutifully catalogueing every location you access the net from yet another.

Do you agree that combining the information landscape and geographical landscape is a necessity for you as it is for me? If so, what steps would you take, or have you taken to help combine the two more closely and permanently? Could we do more? What small steps are available to us as opportunities?