I need to write up something about Reboot 9, but meantime here's a different something … about Interesting2007, Russell Davies' visionary "conference" (his Interesting2007 posts are here). In fact, for reasons Grant and Lee suggest (below), the two conferences hang very well together.
The programme/speakers are here - or get the running order at Roo Reynolds' blog. There are masses of pictures on Flickr and a Flickr Interesting2007 group. (The attributions of the photos below are visible if you hover your mouse over each.) Rod's sketches are here.
I had this spooky feeling as I sat in the Conway Hall that my parents would have been there at some point in their lives — and indeed they had. I hope that was in the pre-WWII years when I know they hotly debated socialism and visions for a better century. That's how I imagine it, anyway.
Everybody's favourite hit of the Interesting2007 day seems to be Rhodri Marsden playing along to Wichita Lineman on a saw. Roo Reynolds has this great video of it:
The Independent's technology correspondent, Rhodri also plays keyboard with Scritti Politti. See Wikipedia for more.
Just so much to enjoy! I particularly liked …
Jack on comics (the picture shows Jack discussing one of my all time favourite images, a spread from Desolation Jones by Ellis/Williams — see Jack's and Matt's blog for more details). Hypertime! I must get reading (Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis) and find that Hockney film, 'A Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China'.
Anne Ward on how everything's interesting. (Throughout Interesting2007, I kept thinking of Andrew Keen and how this day, and Anne in particular, was a perfect riposte.) See I like and Nothing To See Here.
Tom Lewis-Reynier's surreal history of knots. (I want a copy of that maypole shot with every child's face hidden.) Chris on cooking in the El Bulli way. (May have transformed the way I think of cooking!) Tom on tubes as not at all a bad metaphor for the internet. Fiona on the planning and preparation of the Science Museum's Science of Spying exhibition (the slide to the right here is from her talk). Matt on The Vernacular of The Spectacular (great overview of formative influences, lynchpin ideas, striking words and images … and play).
Special mention to Dave Funkypancake's weird and wonderful collection of photos with killing commentary. This is Roo Reynolds' favourite slide from Dave's presentation, and also mine:
It was a pleasure to meet Grant McCracken at last and his post-Interesting2007 caught my eye:
My second guess was we were looking at the reinvention of the conference. Many cultural artifacts that have been dislodged by our new world. Our world has been decentered, flattened, destabilized, distributed, and made participative, anarchical, elite indifferent, cloudily networked, self organizing, and concatenating. So it's natural that we're having to rethink entertainment, information, elites, experts and especially speakers. Who now wants to sit in a room and hear someone hold forth? Certainly, there are a couple of people who we would like to hear speak in this way. But how often do they turn up to the conferences we go too? Mostly what we get is two things: 1) badly concealed self advertisement, and 2) a view of the world that means to be comprehensive but proves to be alarmingly (and unwittingly) partial.
Conferences used to create value by giving us the benefits of a sorting exercise. The organizers would choose experts and the experts would choose topics and treatments. We the audience would undergo edification mixed with a couple of moments of epiphany (with the opportunity to build networks over drinks). The trouble is we are now fantastically good at sorting for ourselves. What we want from a conference is not a surrogate intelligence of a big name speaker. What we want is a tide that delivers new and interesting things that present themselves in fresh and unexpectedly formed ways. …
Put us on the Kauffman continuum, the one that arrays the world between fixity at one end and chaos at the other, and it turns out that we most of us have paddled our way away from fixity towards chaos, and now tread water here in rougher, whiter waters with no discernible effort or difficulty. Experts be damned. We can read the world quite nicely on our own, thank you very much. It doesn't have to be very fully formed for us to "get it." …
… those of us who actually make and manage meanings in the world know the truth of our present condition, and this is that if you have the right powers of metaphor capture and pattern recognition the world is still a relatively intelligible place. The thing to remember is that the coherences are multiple, the interpretive frames many and conflicting, and the world changeable and fluid. And when all of this is true, then not only is the sky not falling, but Red Lions Square and Conway Hall when filled with speakers by Russell, is a very interesting place to be.
Compare Lee's post about what Reboot 9 means to him:
I think we suffer from having a well-established conference organising industry for whom conferences are conceived in spreadsheets, not in the heart, whereas Reboot, LIFT and even the O'Reilly events in the USA are led by people who care passionately about the subject of the event. I think Reboot and similar European conferences also benefit from being non-commercial in the conventional sense. Events like Interesting 2007, which I will sadly miss, and Hack Day at Alexandra Palace, and indeed even the semi-shambolic NotCon events of a few years ago are all a better model to build on, and I hope business conference organisers will take a few leaves from their book.
Last "word" to Matt:
