Tag: reboot

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My site as a graphThis is a multi-part story about the themes I picked up at the Reboot 8 conference in Copenhagen, June 1st and 2nd.
Relationships above Information/Technology
Putting relationships above information shifts your perspective on what information filtering is dramatically. Something I noted here a number of times but which is not something that everybody easily or automatically grasps and accepts. On a number of occasions the notion came up that if you want to keep knowledge alive in your organisation, or want to ‘store’ it or protect from getting lost, you need to share it, and need to build more and stronger relationships around it. The announced death of marketing as broadcasting fits here too, as does the rebirth of marketing in its original shape of bringing your goods to market and weaving relationships around it.
Visualization
Another major ingredient for filtering and dealing with information abundance. Visualization so that we may see the patterns. Pattern watching is much more important than the individual pieces of information when you are trying to make sense of the world around you, and want to see trends. Combining visualization and relationships is when information filtering really starts to get into its own.
Contactivity
Technology helping you to be a social animal while on the move. Staying connected to your existing relationships and being able to spot the opportunities for new ones. Who is near you, in your proximity, who is in your general location, and how can I share with them and my relationships at home and elsewhere. Plazes and Imity are examples of aspects of this. Contactivity is social connectivity. It needs technological connectivity but is a totally different beast.
ContactivityThis posting and the last four sum up the major themes I took away from Reboot, and which are likely to come up in the postings in the coming months.
All parts in this story:
I Renaissance
II Diversity
III Good Enough
IV Privacy and Ownership
V Relationships, Visualization, Contactivity

Photo’s: both by me.

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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.
Good Enough
Jacob Boetter brought this to daylight for me over dinner on Saturday. All of these new web apps are built to be good enough. Not perfect.
I always accepted the fact that the net is inherently messy, just like human behaviour is messy. People thrive on messy, because it challenges them, causes coincidental connections, associations and serendipity. In my mind though new web apps were primarily decentral, catering to the edges, where old apps were primarily centralised catering to command and control.
Good enough however is not just about that. It is also about accepting that you cannot predict the future, and mostly don’t need high precision info to be able to navigate the world. This means you don’t need to script all possibilities into your technology, and don’t need military precision for a lot of your info. I don’t need to know where exactly you are, as long as I can find out if you are near to me, so we can meet up, for instance. A lot of the web apps we saw at Reboot take the messiness of human behaviour as given, don’t try to put it in a straightjacket, but use it as a feature rather than a bug.
All parts in this story:
I Renaissance
II Diversity
III Good Enough
IV Privacy and Ownership
V Relationships, Visualization, Contactivity

Photo’s: Target by David M license CC BY NC.

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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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Michael Heilemann of Binary Bonsai has created a Google Calendar for the schedule of Reboot next month. He promises to keep it up to date and also invites others to help him do that. You can add it as a public calendar if you use GoogleCalendar itself, or import the iCal file into Outlook (updating seems to then be needed by hand, but if not I’m happy to hear about that in the comments) or keep track in your feedreader with the XML file. The program is still sketchy now, as it is still being fleshed out by the participants. (found at the Reboot wiki)
rebootcalendar.jpg

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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.