Taking Bohemianism to be a mindset more than a (forced or chosen) lifestyle, as described in the previous BlogWalk posting, I’ll now have a look at the things I took out of the meeting.
Speed, Space and Scale were the three words that sum BlogWalk up for me.

Space
Space is about physical, temporal and psychological space.
In the physical sense it is interesting to see the ways in which traditional offices are left behind as working places. To be not only replaced by parks, coffee bars, and homes, but also by new office concepts. Such as the Queen Street Commons on Prince Edward Island, or the WorkSpace in Vancouver, and the idea Thomas kicked around of having a coffee bar with a few meeting spaces and office materials. People working in these spaces are not looking for permanent places, but for spots with the right infrastructure.
In the same way they create their own infrastructure such as FON in stead of office LANs, and Plazes, IM and YASNs in stead of water coolers.
A second aspect to physical space is the felt need to travel. Social networks span the globe, not as a replacement but as a widening of more local networks. Travel becomes a must, because more social contacts generate more face to face meetings. Going abroad for meet-ups, be them Reboot(s), BlogWalks, BlogTalks, BarCamps or the odd day off or other, is less luxury than necessity, and a natural side-effect of the ever widening virtual networks. This brings new priorities to budgets and leads to new evaluations of decisions.
In the temporal sense space is about creating the time to focus in the midst of the constant and immense stream of (presence) information that is so easy to get absorbed by. (This relates to speed as well: space is created by slowing down at the right moments)
Psychological space to me is about balancing inside out and outside in perspectives, your social networks, periods of divergence and convergence, and being able to not worry about things that require attention but may have slipped your mind. Creating new information strategies befitting the new world of information abundance fall in this category, as well as things like Getting Things Done, and 43 Things.
In all these three areas we see new routines and tools popping up.

Speed
Speed refers to both slow and fast. I enjoyed the book Tyranny of the Moment by Eriksen a lot, and Digital Bohemiens seem to be experimenting their way to routines in dealing with the effects of speed.
The fact that life is speeding up is to me the unavoidable side-effect of the increase in the number of connections between people, as made possible by the internet. Roman roads, railroads, global shipping, telegraph, they all had the same effect: speeding up life, by the additional dynamics and transactions these new connections caused. The internet does this on an unprecedented level, as it potentially connects each human with each other human at the speed of light.
For a Digital Bohemien this slow and fast phases are highly pronounced. All the communication and social interaction is at high speed. The e-mail, the IM, the YASNs, the Twitterin, blogging and continuous sharing of micro-formatted information. If you aren’t careful your whole day is consumed by this constant stream of unlimited interaction. So again the challenge is to balance this with enough slow time to create results and be productive outside of your communicative tasks. Slow time to focus, to reflect, to prioritize, to write, to create. Mind you, focussing is not a solitary task by definition.
Scale
Scale actually impacts both Space and Speed. The term came up in the afternoon discussion. Because scaling ultimately never is only a question of increasing quantity. At a certain level the quantity creates a qualitative shift. Information when scaled to the level of abundance as it is now, requires not just more of the same information processes we are used to, but new information strategies that take this scale into acount. A qualitative shift.
For the Digital Bohemiens this is true for their infrastructure (building new ones with different design principles like modularity, openness, interexchangeability.), travel (from incidental travel to a travelling existence with a city as local anchor point), social networks (global span, 24/7), and the balance between dynamics and more slow time (where dynamics isn’t the incident but the norm, and focussed prioritized time requires switching of). All these signify qualitative shifts that have quantitative origins, where Digital Bohemiens are experimenting and groping towards new rhythms and routines. This is the way the change of self leads to societal change.

Right from the very first BlogWalk in 2004, I have always been amazed about the effort in time, travel and money people are willing to make to attend a BlogWalk session. It was no different for me at BlogWalk Eleven, in Amsterdam last Friday.
With people coming in this time from such diverse directions as Ireland, Paris, Brussels, London, Copenhagen, Estonia and Bucharest, as well as from all over the Netherlands, mostly just for the one day, I cannot but feel humbled.


Johnnie Moore and Thomas Madsen-Mygdal in conversation (photo: Elmine, CC BY NC SA)

Not that I think all these people are making that effort just for Sebastian, Lilia and me. They are making that effort because they trust themselves to be able to turn meeting 25 interesting people into a day full of worthwile conversations. That we three can be host to those conversations is already enough to feel humbled.


group conversation (photo: Elmine, license CC BY NC SA)

So my thanks go out to those that attended the dinner on Thursday, the day long session and/or the dinner on Friday night. Of course the first impressions can be found on-line already. Both Gabriela Avram, as well as Riina Vuorikari have published their impressions of BlogWalk. Bernie DeKoven created an interesting posting based on the Twitter-messages his colleague Gerrit Visser sent from the venue. And then there are the numerous pictures on Flickr. I could not take any pictures myself due to a problem with my camera (no, it wasn’t the batteries).


Bicyclemark (with cap) giving a guided tour. (photo: Elmine, license CC BY NC SA)

I also want to publicly thank again Peter Kaptein for providing us with the space in his building at Instant Interfaces, and Mark, better known as Bicyclemark, for the guided walk through the back streets of Amsterdam.
This morning I transcribed the text of all the post-its that were created from the discussion and conversations. They can be found in the BlogWalk wiki. I hope they can be triggers for further interaction.


Filling the windows with post-its (aka the WindowsWiki) (photo copyright Sebastian Fiedler)

In the coming two posts I will add some thoughts on the way the format of the session worked this time, and of course talk about my own take-aways from last Friday.


Mark Wubben, Alper Cugun, Carla Hoekstra and Riina Vuorikari walking in conversation (photo: Elmine, license CC BY NC SA)

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.)