Twenty years ago today E and I visited Reboot 7 in Copenhagen. What I wrote a decade ago at the 10th anniversary of that conference still holds true for me.
Over time Reboot 7 became mythical. A myth that can’t return. But one we were part of, participated in and shaped.
Still got the t-shirt.
The yellow t-shirt with red text from the 2005 Reboot 7 conference, on my blue reading chair in my home office 20 years on.
Seventeen years ago today I blogged about a barcamp style event in Amsterdam I co-hosted, called GovCamp_NL. I struck up a conversation there about open government data after having had a similar conversation the week before in Austria. It marked the beginning of my work in this field. We just welcomed the thirteenth team member in the company that over time grew out of that first conversation. Our work at my company is driven by the same thing as the event, something I’ve come to call constructive activism.
These days, the principles and values that drove those events, and have set the tone for the past two decades of everything I’ve done professionally and socially, seem more important than ever. They are elemental in the current geopolitical landscape around everything digital and data. We can look back on our past selves with 20 years hindsight and smile about our one time optimism, because so much exploitation, abuse and surveillance grew out of the platforms and applications that originate in the early 00’s. But not because that optimism was wrong. Naive yes, in thinking that the tech would all take care of itself, by design and by default, and we just needed to nudge it a bit. That optimism in the potential for (networked) agency, for transparency, for inclusion, for diversity, and for global connectedness is still very much warranted, as a celebration of human creativity, of the sense of wonder that wielding complexity for mutual benefit provides, just not singularly attached to the tech involved.
Anything digital is political. The optimism is highly political too.
The time to shape the open web and digital ethics is now, is every day. Time for a reboot.
Certainly one of the most happy and transformational moments of my life. Thank you for being there for all of us back then and since then.