Today Lane Becker is celebrating his 46th birthday. To mark the occasion he is organising a conference in Austin, Texas.
Bringing together a cool line-up of speakers, he asked us to do a live video conversation at the start. To explain a bit about the history of how Lane came to doing birthday conferences. A few months ago I described that some the ripples of our birthday unconferences are more birthday conferences, such as Peter’s last June, and that also includes Lane’s events.
We had a live conversation at the start of Lane’s birthday conference, and described the history of how we came to do our first unconference for Elmine’s birthday in 2008, and then the subsequent events. We also tried share some of the main things that stand out to us.
That doing an unconference at home, which started as a fluke, brings a special vibe to it all. Everyone behaves informally, you’re a guest in our home, but still get into deep conversations and do workshops and sessions. How we learned at Reboot that bringing kids makes everything more real, more human. People talk less bs on stage if their kids are around 🙂
That it is quite amazing to bring together people from all our various networks, and see how well they hit it off.
There’s always a moment during an unconference when you look around you and see the energy and how everyone’s engaged, when it hits me how awesome it is to be the hosts to that. And how awesome it is that so many of our friends make the effort to travel to us.
That the 2014 Make Stuff That Matters was probably the best one yet, as it turned us from just doing sessions, to also letting participants learn new skills. And having a 14 meter mobile FabLab parked in front was pretty impressive too 🙂
And we talked about how some participants feel a birthday unconference can be life changing, pivotal. We suspect it has a lot to do with that it’s rare to spend time together and have deep conversations, without pressing needs yet tied to things of importance to your own life.
Happy birthday Lane, we hope you and your friends have a great event!
Thank you both for opening! It was perfect.
This is a RSS only posting. Not secret but not actively public either! You, reading this through RSS, are considered a regular reader, and thus provided with some additional postings.Read more about RSS Club.A regular week in which I
Attended the kick-off of a scrum team to prototype some new ideas on using open data in providing micro-subsidies and addressing energy poverty, and did another session with the scrum team to further work out first tasks and activities
With our intern-now-turned-employee J jumped through assorted administrative hoops to get my company registered in various procurement platforms
Had a MT meeting with my company, to take stock of our first 9 months this year, and decide some next steps. It took place in a somewhat hidden Chinese restaurant in The Hague, that immediately reminded me of where E and I had lunch with Boris and Roland over a decade ago in Vancouver, which was hidden behind a tiny bakery.
Did some preparations for the IndieWebCamp Amsterdam I am organising in 2 weeks time.
Wrote up more about my participation in Techfestival in Copenhagen last week, and followed up with people I met there. More still to follow.
Spent two days with Y, the little one, so E had more time to finish up two video projects in time. (I had taken a day of her time by being in Denmark last week, skipping my usual Friday with Y)
With E made a live video appearance in Lane Becker’s birthday conference, which took place in Austin, Texas Saturday, which was fun to do.
37, by Seth Dickens, license CC BY SA
It sounds like a good and easy enough experiment, getting your own simple e-book out in the market. My eye fell first on Reinier Ladan’s Dutch language video on making zines (everything old is new again), via Frank’s newsletter. Today Robin Rendle’s post Volume A popped up in my feeds as an experiment to learn how to publish an e-book in a way that just gets something out there. Those two small nudges coalesce into the idea that it should be very doable to collect a few connected blogposts and turn them into a slightly more coherent whole, for publication as a separate artefact. A decade ago I already reworked my closing SHiFT keynote Maker Households into something of an e-book draft at the suggestion and with advice of Henriette, and my Networked Agency or information strategies material would lend itself to it as well. The second nudge was the realisation that the e-book Elmine and I created in 2011(!) on How To Unconference Your Birthday (get the PDF in the sidebar on the right) is already zine like, and has both digital and physical form. An update after a decade makes sense as we already concluded after visiting Peter’s unconference and doing a short video session at Lane’s, and could be part of such an experiment in publishing e-books.
Everything old is new again. I think I should pick up some of the things where I left off decade ago. But this time not as some big scheme, my grand theory of everything all at once, but just as a small thing. As then it might actually happen.