Reboot - day 1 (Resume)

Well, day one of Reboot is over, and it has been a hell of a day!

I almost dare to say that it was a bit too much information for my brain to store in just one day! So many ideas, tons of conversations going on, meeting all that new and interesting people, but at the same time, such a short time to do everything.

So just follow to the next page for the resume on reboot’s first day.

The day started impressively with an Opening presenting Reboot by Thomas and Nikolaj (the main organizers of this conference). After their initial presentations it was time for Doc Searls to give us a memorable speech, from which I would like to quote some of the key ideas of his speech: 61212f3a4d3bc1adf5d224b594484ae2 Following Doc Searls, Robert Scoble came up to the stage and continued the opening keynote, he had some scribbled ideas, which he presented on screen, and I could find out the night before he doesn’t actually plans his presentations to the details, just goes with the flow! I guess that’s why is such a nice speaker. Robert put up the IRC chat window, so everybody could read the messages appearing in the #reboot channel along with is talk, once again from all the talk here’s some of the points I pointed down: d539d3ff4ba777638329b78f948d39d4 As a personal conclusion: Robert might have been too much in Redmond lately!. After the first break of the morning came the hard part of having to choose between presentations, so I headed up to the OpenSauceLive presentation. Presentation was conducted by Johnnie and James, and was more like a interactive game than a presentation. We had a small game that involved meeting the unexpected as well as identifying the fear of chaos, most of us have. After the game participants were asked to make some suggestions about some examples to them of good/bad marketing approaches, I decided to gave them to good examples of open source marketing which I believe are working very well: Spread Firefox and Clip-n-Seal. They’re presentation sincerely didn’t impress me, but might have been because they had such few time to talk about such a rich matter, just may be! Feeling a bit frustrated about the last presentation, I headed up for Dina’s Mehta presentation about “Social Tools for Research and Collaboration“, and to me, was one the better presentation of the day. Her presentation just runned smoothly and I got to take down some very nice concepts and ideas, so according to Dina:

• “We need tools that makes us forget that boundaries exists”
• “Teams are collaborating globally”
• Tsunami help blog was one of the most important examples of collaboration using internet based tools
• Technologies exist to link people that needs help to people that can provided necessary help
• Chaos can be an excellent master, since the system self-organized itself and from chaos came organization
• With blog connections you have an immense network of people ready to help you
• Blogs are indeed a disruptive technology
• Let your users do the talking, Observe them instead!
• Forget physical boundaries

Some of the final questions posed to Dina involved classification matters, how can one control so much information as for example the flow of information generated by the Tsunami Blog. Finally on her final statement, she just presented us with this comment to which I couldn’t agree more: bdcbcb81cbe67525b0d53cbb50d2047b Following Dina it was time for me to move on! This time to listen to Ben Cerveny talking about Dynamic System Models. This presentation was some how sparse, and in the end I had the feeling that we talked about a lot, and touched so many points that I haven’t figured out much from his conversation. Might have been because of the time (13:30 - 14:15), since my stomach is used to being filled by this hour. After lunch, I had another great presentation, this time from the “Benevolent Dictator” Jimbo Wales, creator of the Wikipedia Project, although he doesn’t like to be called that way. Jimbo gave an excellent talk: “The Intelligence of Wikipedia“. He covered with some nice details the Past, Present and (near) Future of Wikipedia and some other related projects like: 667faa925b559ebf433a5541da140961 He also presented two different views from Wikipedia, together with the major implications of each view: 390cf6139ce21ae4d5ae2a09cdc847c4 The remaining speech covered some of the features of Wikipedia right now, responding and importance of anonymous users, how to insure quality control over such a large community, some of the advantage of free knowledge to the Wikipedia project, and explained in detail the Neutral Point of View Policy - NPVP: 61819c0b3f887666d8b5f0bdcc809b08 We also explained the Wikipedia governance and in particular, and proceeded to the community challanges, just before the end of the talk. Following Jimbo, from Wikipedia I just kept seated, for the next speaker was someone I admire for some time now, Thomas Harttung, founder of Aarstiderne , for those of you, who don’t have a clue about what that is, you should take a look at their webpage. It’s not only organic food distribution with a nice shopping cart site, Aasterdierne is much more than that, it’s a different approach to all the agricultural business, as Thomas stated that the reason is called Agriculture and not Agribusiness, in a way that agriculture shouldn’t be profit oriented but instead quality oriented. We could all gain with this! I got this important fact from Thomas speech, and I find it really interesting since we tend to do just the opposite: 92004e648751a9af3d5171c766704c09 It was fun to hear him contesting the main current opinion on ecology: “that we’re on the road to disaster”, and stating that the system is in fact stronger and more disciplined than we are, and gave some rather nice and disturbing examples of ecosystem moderation techniques. In the end was an excellent talk on the similarities between technological and natural worlds, how were all part of a much bigger system! He even mentioned a matrix style approach, in a sense that we’re all connected to an incredible high speed communication bus, even if we don’t realize it at the beginning.

Well for now.. I have to stop here, but have some more interesting notes to share, as soon as I get a bit more time!

Goodnight!

1 comment June 11th, 2005