Thomas opening Reboot, with my name as sponsor on the banner
Last night at my birthday party one of the guests was Sam. He had just finished his Masters in 2009, when I invited him to Reboot in Copenhagen. A conference I first visited in 2005, which became a turning point in my professional life. In 2009 I was a main sponsor, and one of the perks was bringing people to the conference for free. Sam was one of them. At my birthday party he told me how that had been a pivotal point for him, an eye opening experience so shortly after his masters. He went on to create similarly inspiring events in the Netherlands with others, and remarked how spoilt he was with being able to do that. Awesome how paying the spirit of Reboot forward has influenced people till this day.
At the end of my post last week about weblogs and the GDPR I mentioned that Frank Meeuwsen had recorded a Pecha Kucha talk of mine at the Reboot conference in 2006. This, in turn, prompted a rumination by Frank about Reboot and its role in his life, further spurred on by Ton’s similar look back.
Three years ago, on the 10th anniversary of my first Reboot, I also looked back, and, rereading that post now, I realize that, as Frank and Ton realized, Reboot played an even more significant role in my life than I imagined.
You can’t go home again, and as the shadow of Reboot recedes into the past and the calls to resuscitate it fade, it is a good time to consider the larger legacy of the conference: the connections forged in its furnace, but also the social web that both allowed it to happen, powered it, and from which novel new manifestations thereof spun.
That Ton and Frank and I could consult our own blog posts from a decade or more ago as a resource for this reflection is a testament, if nothing else, to the diarizing utility of the medium.
In this spirit, I am happy to see a tentative rekindling of the social web underway. It’s not in full flower by any means, but people are dusting off old tool-chains and, with the value of distance from earlier, reconsidering how it all connects together.
For the first time in a decade, I feel like the social web might have promise against the onslaught of the re-CompuServing of the web.
Weblogging | Reboot | Ton Zylstra | Frank Meeuwsen