Tom Coates writes of FooCamp:
It's absolutely clear to me that the whole reason for the event is the people and therefore the opportunities for creative collision and friction. As such, it has a tremendously collegiate non-competitive feel to it, with everyone believing that the best way to make great things and change the world is to share ideas and learn from each other.
This is exactly what I felt and feel about Reboot.
It sounds excessive
to say so, but nothing that happened during my five years at University
quite compares with the excitement and stimulation of Reboot — because
of the
collegiate opportunities for intense, 'creative collision and friction'.
I would
add, also, how essential to the experience was the
inter-disciplinary
nature of the event — another feature of Reboot where my
university experience compares badly: I was reading widely for
myself back then, but my courses of study were fundamentally
self-contained and introspective, one or two inspiring influences apart.
Tom Coates goes on:
As Danah has said, it's incredibly depressing and conflicting that this kind of event just doesn't scale well enough to let in all the people who should be there. I'm more than aware that there are hundreds of people in the world who would have had more to contribute to this event than I, and I was surprised to be invited and was humbled by the stature of many of the other participants. I think Danah kind of hints at something interesting when she talks about the parallel BarCamp, and about the nature of competition and alternatives. Perhaps a competitive market in collaborative events could be a way to achieve fairness - or maybe that makes the divides wider. Maybe it's impractical to think about collapsing hierarchies, and we should instead be proliferating them wildly - cut in all kinds of different directions, removing a sense of one embedded power structure and replacing it with hundreds of parallel, orthogonal ones. I don't know - scarcity of time, attention and resource have always been problems and we all have a responsibility to try and work out ways to alleviate them. In the meantime, all I can say is that FooCamp was a hell of an experience, and one that I'd delighted to have been able to attend.
Cost is also an issue, Tom! I was amazed, and immensely grateful, that my school sent me and Ian to Copenhagen. It shows vision and institutional commitment of a kind I've simply never encountered before in secondary education. But it couldn't stretch to San Francisco!
He's right: we have to find ways of opening up these experiences to as many people and budgets as possible. I am convinced that the future lies in this kind of collaborative, inter-disciplinary approach to work, play and learning. Educators have got to be brought into this.
