Reboot 8: I

As with Reboot 7, Reboot 8 gave me so much to think about. Last year I wrote that Reboot 7 was 'far and away the best conference experience I have known and has so far resisted my attempts to write it up: too much to say, with each line of thought multiplying into several new ones as idea leads on to idea'. There's a brief, '100% personal and biased' history of Reboot here and the program for this year's meeting is here.

What endures from Reboot 8? Again, almost too much! Still, I want to make some points of reference here that I can come back to …

I bumped in to Bruno Giussani in Cab Inn and he has a good series of posts made at the time: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I missed JP's talk (but enjoyed meeting up; his thoughts about Reboot are here) — Bruno summarises it (2nd post):

Three steps of cultural development: the invention of the written language gave culture persistence; the invention of the printing press created a means of cultural reproduction; the Internet allows us to transmit and share. Three things that will/should go to the graveyard in the coming years: locked devices; marketing; and copyright and intellectual property. Three things that will thrive: relationships (are more powerful than transactions); trust; access to information (never been so easy).

And from his third post, about Ben Hammersley's evening "speech":

1. Steal from the best (like Brunelleschi reverse-engineering ancient Roman architecture in order to build Florence's extraordinary cathedral dome (photo) - or like today's web designers hitting the "view source" button on Web pages).
2. Never say no (like Michelangelo accepting the challenge to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel despite his preference for sculpture and little experience in fresco painting).
3. Indulge ("slack, leave early, do other stuff: one of the things in being a Renaissance man is actually not doing your job; in order to create great art, to create great legacy you have to indulge your senses and passions" - example: Filippo Lippi, a XV century painter).
4. Complexity is good ("let your different interests feed upon each other").

"What's holding you back?", Hammersley asks the audience. "We live in the most exciting possible time, can access every corner of the planet and every bit of information, have very powerful tools.  The secret is: consume more data, suck stuff in like sponges, have passion. The secret rule number 5 is: no matter what opportunities come to you, what interest, what encounter, what curiosity, say yes: grasp it, do it, yield to it, and create new things!". 

What I most remember (no significance in the order):

• Talking to Ben, whilst I was supposedly finishing my own talk, about the Guardian, 'Comment is Free', 'Big Blogger', etc.

• Chris' talk and demo of Nokia's mobile web server (Nokia's Open Source  page on this here; there's a good piece about it in LinuxDevices). Chris' talk can be downloaded here (ppt). Mobile internet-connectivity is set to become so important and I enjoyed what Chris said about mobiles, connectivity and the social, and the role of the mobile server in presence-awareness.

• Imity's extraordinary demo. Their blog's here.

• Hearing what an impression OpenStreetMap's demo made. The talk's available as an mp3 file and there's a pdf of the slides, too. (Lars Plougmann has posted a mindmap.)

• Nicolas Nova & Julian Bleecker: Networked objects and the new ecology of things.  I read Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things a while back and it was good hear this talk (Julian Blecker writes about it here and the slides [pdf] can be had from either here or here; Nicolas Nova's post about the talk is here.) I like Claus Dahl's comment:

Maybe it would be less taxing on the human biology if we didn't have so many tools we had to know how to use but just better surroundings. This involves turning information into a living thing embodied in the spime around us and simply stop thinking of all this data as something we have to know. We can just live in it. I think this idea fits very nicely into the ideas about which of our senses actually afford which abilities. Culturally produced information is just too constrained to live in our focal view all the time, whereas we're effortlessly consuming naturally produced information in much greater quantities through the use of the rest of our senses.

Also, Fabio Sergio: 'In the dawning age of the Internet of Things networked handheld devices will not be used to just search for information on the Internet. They will be used to search for information stored in things.'

• Meeting Marko Ahtisaari. I follow his blog and his thinking has shaped my views about mobile devices in education.

• Jyri: 'the importance of peripheral vision and how enabling that could change our everyday lives and the web and mobile industries' (link). Be heedful — Mobile 2.0 will not be about mutlimedia but about 'enabling social peripheral vision — across space and time' … knot-working -- quick, ad hoc networking. There are some fuller notes on Jyri's talk here (Kars Alfrink — his other Reboot 8 posts can be found here). And yesterday (14 July), Jaiku went live (beta)!

• Doc Searls' inimitable presentation — with its stimulating distinction of live web (Technorati-read)/static web (Google) and the role of the live web in driving the intention economy. My favourite slide from Doc's talk is this one, which reminds me of Paul Valéry, quoted by Caterina Fake: 'that which is finished is not made'.
  

  And for good measure: markets are transactions and conversations, but they're also relationships — the latter's the way we're going in Web 2.0.

• Matt's talk on the senses and software: 'What I want to talk about today is the navigational metaphor, and what the senses are, and how we can use the senses – the human senses – as a model to design better ways to interact with things'. As ever, I came away with numerous new ideas and leads to follow, reading to do, etc. (I've just started on James J Gibson's The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.)

• Tom's talk on narrative and blogging.

• Euan's closing talk with its celebration of ways other than the top-down of organising and running things, of the value of the seemingly chaotic vs the drive to keep order …

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