Digital Bohemiens Coming to BlogWalk Amsterdam

This is a first attempt at collecting a few thoughts around the theme of the upcoming BlogWalk meeting in Amsterdam.
With the list of participants being filled to capacity, I have a bit of time to try and prepare myself for the contents of this salon.

As said the theme is Digital Bohemiens, the people that have embraced the digital world as their habitat, as the place where their social interaction takes place and starts for the most part. They flock to place that provide wifi, coffee and power plugs, and have conferences for meeting places. They tend to travel a lot, though sometimes less than they wish, and track their and eachothers movements through tools like Plazes, Jaiku and Dopplr.

Three main groups of questions come to my mind thinking about this digital avant garde.

1) The type of questions that has to do with their working environment. What does their workplace look like? What kind of infrastructure do they need, use or build for themselves?

2) Questions that relate to how collect process and share information. How do they interact? How do they filter? What groups are they part of? Which tools do they use to support their information strategies? In what kind of structures do they embed themselves (networks / organisations) How do they create value for themselves?

3) Questions that have to do with learning, and personal and collective development. How do they learn? What goals do they set for themselves, and how do they attempt to achieve them? (orgnisational structures, business models) How do they align their own development with that of others in their network?

And of course: how is that different for other people?

For myself I can answer these questions pretty well I think. I work for an organization that uses no office but is Netherlands 'most mobile company'. So when I give presentations, and I introduce myself and our company Proven Partners I usually show a slide that looks like this:

I find it triggers a lot of emotion in audiences generally. To them the photo's look like fun, enjoying yourself, and usually there are those who think it doesn't look serious enough. To me it looks like hard work, getting results, and steep learning curves.

What does it look like to you?

(btw I also tag this reboot9 as it is closely related to what Elmine and I want to talk about at Reboot: How to be the owner of your own learning path. These digital bohemiens, whoever they are, is just another group of people having their own particular answer to that question.)