Well, I just arrived Lisbon, after an incredible flight! When we went to Copenhagen for Reboot, the trip was nice, but boring, the company had only got us business class tickets so there was no major action there! Our return flight was on economic class, which ended up being much more business class than the so called business class! We seated next to Vinod, an Indian guy living in Hong Kong and traveling throughout Europe, trying to promote is exporting business (he actually only export china’s products, but a all range of them! So if anybody interested drop me a line, we have is contacts!).
Sure feels go to be back home, to be with PatrÃcia again, it’s pretty incredible how much we miss the people we love, even when it’s just for a few days!
About Reboot? Well, to me was actually pretty amazing event, much, much more interesting that I thought at the very beginning, during the next days, I’ll complete my first day resumé, and post the remaining notes I have, for now I must regain energy and recover all the lost sleep! 
June 12th, 2005
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.
NOTE: With the help of the same guys as yesterday, and a couple of new ones, we managed to have almost all of the
participants comments online right after the presentations, again only possible thanks to the guys of
CodingMonkeys and in particular their application:
Subethaedit. Impressive to say the least! All the effort from the writers have been well rewarded by fellow participants, some of them even managed to get a name for our team: “
SubEthaEditors“. I could stop comparing the thing has having a bunch of guys literally knitting words and phrases all together to end up with a nice and mostly coherent document.
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:
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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:
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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:
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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:
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He also presented two different views from
Wikipedia, together with the major implications of each view:
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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:
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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:
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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!
June 11th, 2005
Well, I just arrived to Reboot venue and it sure feels good to back online! Blogging just started! he! he! More in the next hours.
Just for the record, there are 410 participants registered for this reboot conference.
Flickr photos from everybody under the tag “reboot“, the ones i take can be found here
June 10th, 2005
I just arrived from the “Building of Basecamp” Workshop, and I should probably write something down about it, but time is short so I’ll just keep for the immediate thoughts, and based on a super document made during the workshop, I’ll talk more in detail later on.
I really liked the workshop in general, there wasn’t that much new to me unfortunately, but at least I got to do a checkpoint on some ideas I already had and of course hearing some stuff on the first person is always great, and on this matter Jason, David and Ryan did it really well. The workshop covered several topics of the process of designing, creating and deploying the Basecamp Project Manager web application, so it was like a day to get to know the thing from it’s very first steps all the way to becoming what it is today.
The topics the workshop covered were:
- Introduction
- The small picture
- How did we start
- From ideas to features
- From features to screens
- From screens to programming
- From programming to user testing
- On to promotion and launch
- But launch is just the beginning
- Moral support
- Our mistakes
but about them I talk later in detail, for now it’s all the time I have!
June 9th, 2005
I’ve just attended the “Building of Basecamp” workshop, by 37signals, and after writing about it, I had to write about SubEthaEdit, specially the results of having 5 guys with a mac with this little program.
Just the day before Melo had been talking to me, that it would be a nice idea to use SubEthaEdit to take notes together (this little application allows people to edit simultaneous, in a real-time environment, one same document, writing down you made which changes, read more about it on it’s site here).
When we got the conference we were just about to start when we realized that a guy, named Nathanael Obermayer already had the same idea, so we just joined his shared document! Super! Me, André and Melo started taking down notes all-together. By the time the coffee-break happened Magnus Rembold joined us, making us a team of five taking down notes about the workshop. It was a memorable experience, with an incredible result: a 1300 lines document with all the notes you can imagine about this workshop. One incredible thing was that when the guys put up a new slide, it would take more than a couple of seconds to have it all.
Just to get an idea about what I’m talking about, the final result are a bunch of lines that looks like this:
the colors show who wrote it, so as you can see this simple paragraph was written for 3 different persons, each completing eachother.
We just agreed no to share the document, since it’s so rich about what happened there, it wouldn’t be correct for the guys at 37signals. Never the less, it was an incredibly experience in collaborative working, and I looking forward to see it working during Reboot.
June 9th, 2005