Tag: diversity

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This is a multi-part story about the themes I picked up at the Reboot 8 conference in Copenhagen, June 1st and 2nd.
Diversity
A theme I brought to Reboot myself with Lee Bryant and Martin Roell.
But it surfaced in a number of other ways for me as well. First and foremost that you have to act yourself if you really mean you need diversity around you. Use the European examples, look at who you invite for your event, look at the holes in your current network and fill them. And that if that is not working out, remember the key point Lee had in his talk about participation. If you are looking for participation and people are not responding, it is because of your system, the structure of your attempt to engage others, not because of the people. You make it work. If it doesn’t, redo it.
Interesting to note was that those present in the session really seemed to get energized by the topic. While at the same time also a number of people told me before the session that they’d already given up on Europe and had a Rumsfeldian look on Europe as the world’s retirement home. I was quite surprised by that. If I intend to keep on living in Europe I need to help find ways for creating new value. You can’t say your neighbourhood is going to waste and stay indoors bemoaning that, without acknowledging you’re part of that yourself and need to take co-responsibility.
All parts in this story:
I Renaissance
II Diversity
III Good Enough
IV Privacy and Ownership
V Relationships, Visualization, Contactivity

Photo’s: Strings by Brainless Angel license CC BY NC SA.

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About two months ago I wrote here about how to celebrate diversity. I mused whether such a discussion might find a place at Reboot. Well it did and it does. Together with Lee Bryant and Martin Roell, the three of us will be hosting an open conversation session on diversity. We will try to keep things practical, and also very much welcome all contributions in terms of suggestions, questions and remarks in the wikipage of the Reboot site. Reboot takes place next Thursday and Friday in Copenhagen.
Basic premise behind the idea to have this session is that the cultural, lingual and historical diversity within Europe is a unique characteristic that can be leveraged as the driving force in working towards an innovative culture. It allows us to find a future oriented course that is not formulated defensively in relation to e.g. the USA and China. The latter is I think predominant in current discussions about innovation and a knowledge driven economy. We are in a position to employ our unique differences for creating value, because we have spend the last 50 years building enough common ground and trust to start from.
Head on over to the Reboot wiki if you like and add your thoughts.
Update: Nicole Simon recorded a Preboot podcast interview with me.

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In the past two years, Lilia Efimova, Sebastian Fiedler and I have been organizing a number of day long workshops / salons under the name BlogWalk. With ten sessions on three continents, in eight countries, we brought together roughly 200 people for day long dialogues on different weblogging related subjects.
To me it seemed that the energy I felt at the first two, three sessions was less present in the later sessions. Not because the newness of it all for me was gone; meeting groups of interesting people face to face is always inspiring. I think for me at some point my collector’s attitude kicked in. My focus shifted a bit from doing great days of dialogue, to adding another city, another country, to the list of our travelling circus of BlogWalks.


Windows Wiki During BlogWalk London, Sept. 2004

Sebastian Fiedler expressed some of the same doubts I felt in the last six months or so, so when he visited us earlier this month for Lilia’s and Robert’s wedding, we took it as a great opportunity to have a little rethink of the BlogWalk concept.
Over at Seblogging you can read the notes Sebastian took, and the conclusions we arrived at. But before looking forward, I like to look back at the things that got in the way of my personal ‘original BlogWalk experience’.

  • Eagerness sometimes resulted in hastily organised sessions, leaving too little time for inviting the right people, and too little time to collectively prepare the day.
  • A number of sessions were only done by one of us three, making it much less a collaborative experience
  • Doing BlogWalks in conjunction with major conferences works good for getting a broader group at the day, but distracts as well: people flying in or out during the day, a few just looking to kill some spare time in a nice and useful way.
  • Loosing sight of people, and especially of the spin-offs and effects meetings had for us.
  • Staying at people’s homes around a BlogWalk adds a lot to the experience, but takes time to prepare, and thus we ended up in hotels more and more.

Snowball Fight at BlogWalk Chicago, Jan. 2005

So, looking forward Sebastian and I would like to re-energize our BlogWalk efforts:

  • BlogWalks are facilitated by us as a team
  • Themes will be chosen from the whole of social media, and not so much tool-centered as opportunity or problem focussed
  • Three BlogWalks a year creates the needed preparation and follow-up time
  • Choosing two fixed European cities lets us build on previously found local resources
  • One BlogWalk will ‘travel’, and we’ll look for local groups and institutions to help host it. For these meetings we will be looking for support for basic travel costs for our team
  • These three BlogWalks will be stand alone events. If opportunities arise to do something in conjunction with a conference it will be considered, but the three stand alone events have priority
  • We want to continue to voluntarily spend time and effort on organizing and facilitating BlogWalks
  • BlogWalks will continue to be by invitation only and free of charge
  • We want to track and document more of what BlogWalk meetings help spark.

Magic of the Screen During BlogWalk Innsbruck, Jun. 2005

All in all I think the ideas and thoughts we formulated help us create new energy and organize BlogWalks with a renewed sense of fun. It also means that to me this is no longer an experiment, it is something we do as part of our, mine at least, efforts to knit a wider European network of thinkers and doers from different fields. Something we need to help leverage our European diversity as fuel for innovative thinking.
A first practical result of leaving the experimental phase behind is that we will start moving the current BlogWalk wiki and BlogWalk website from their current subdomains to two new urls, blogwalk.net and blogwalk.eu.
I’d appreciate any thoughts or comments you might have concerning BlogWalk.

Photo credits: Windows wiki London by Riccardo, Snowball fight by AKMA, Magic Screen by Sebastian Fiedler, all under Creative Commons.

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While I drove Marc Smith, his son Eli, and Andrea Ben Lassoued back from the G.O.R. conference in Bielefeld to Enschede to meet up with Lilia Efimova, it was Marc that started the thoughts for this blogpost rolling.

At some point, after discussing opinions on the EU, and how living in a border town felt and feels, he concluded "then you are part of the international class".

True I guess. But what does that mean? Over the past 5 years the mycelium of my social network has indeed come to encircle the globe. It means my empathy now flows to a much wider range of people on almost all continents. Their local news becomes my local news too, and from it I build patterns and notions of what is going on in the world. That is a good thing: having a sense of world events build on my empathy for the emotions and experiences of distinct individuals. It brings it all home in a way the main stream media never can hope to achieve.

We do build a class I think, as Marc called it. We spend money, time and effort to meet eachother in different European capitals, we invite people we never met face to face before into our homes to stay. Going to a conference like Reboot or BlogTalk brings multiple days of very intense conversations, and exchange of ideas, while we recognize ourselves in the other. It is a heady mix and it’s addictive.

But is it as diverse as it is international?

I and others say it often: Europe’s true innovative potential lies in it’s diversity.
Not in emulating other parts of the world, best practices make you runner up at most, but in what defines us most: the patchwork of local cultures, languages and traditions that is this continent. That diversity worked against us in numerous wars and feuds across the centuries. Over the past 50 years we are increasingly finding ourselves under the roof of the EU, establishing common ground. It is a remarkable political experiment: a supranational construct that does not lay claim to any specific geographical area. Now that we start to see our common ground better and better, how to learn to build on our wonderful diversity?

What can I do, what can I take as an action list to start celebrating diversity. And what about you?
What on the agenda of an event like Reboot 8, would help us do that?

Your thoughts are appreciated.