first off, thanks to thomas for creating another fantastic conference this year. reboot is really special for me, and you pretty much kick every other conference’s ass, which is quite an achievement considering the sheer number of conferences that have popped up in the last few years.
in the spirit of sharing your shit, i’d like to throw up some thoughts i had on how we could make reboot even better next year.
better how? well, reboot is about sharing your thoughts in a public forum, thereby helping others to get a fresh perspective on their own work, right? so i think better means more sharing, at more levels.
tools
bring back the past! my first reboot 4 years ago completely blew my mind. this had a lot to do with the kinds of tools people were using at the conference. this year, a lot of those tools either just weren’t there, or i couldn’t discover them.
wiki
the reboot wiki used to kick ass. who took my wiki away? this year, i didn’t really feel any sense of ownership with the website. the social network was nice enough, but kind of off the mark. the low entry barriers of the wiki had fostered a feeling of common ownership of the website, and so people used it a lot more for ad-hoc communication. also, the wiki was simply a better hammer - i remember pages opening pre-conference, where people listed books they were offering to swap. this year, i didn’t feel like i could bend the website to do whatever i wanted.
irc
was there an irc channel this year? i couldn’t find it. back in the day, there was a huge stream of commentary available for each talk, realtime. links and supplementary information would pop up around what was being said, and if i could hear something properly, i could just ask in the channel for an instant answer. irc was the shit! you could sit outside and just ask into ‘reboot-space’: what’s room 2 like right now?
i realize that this was pre-twitter. but twitter was only valuable to me over summize.com, and i couldnt get this to aggregate into anything near the sort of speed of irc. to my mind, twitter is still to (micro) bloggy for something like “is room 2 any good” - i certainly did not see it used this way.
there are other backchannel tools around, like onlinr.com, maybe. but frankly, is there anything wrong with irc? open question. the use of twitter i say seemed like a step backwards in terms of the sharing going on, anyway.
subethaedit
was this happening? if so, i didn’t see it. collborative note-taking was one of the most kick-ass things i saw 4 years ago, it simply blew me away. i didn’t have a mac at the time, so i could’t play, but seeing others do this: unbelievable. sharing ideas, supercharged. if there was no large scale use of subethaedit, was there something else? and if not - why not? open question.
service discovery
okay, so maybe all of this stuff was happening under my nose and i couldn’t find it. the only backchannel i found was summize.com. well, i’m sure i wasn’t the only person with a discovery problem. so i propse a new tool for conferences: a service registry. this idea is stolen from the recent revival of bonjour in the ruby community. people are using it to share git repositories, share their clipboards and do all kinds of perverse and fantastic stuff. there is also a bonjour based discovery service which, yes, can be used to discover all bonjour services in the network.
we need something like this, but it should be highly accessible. it should register bonjour services as well as summize.com, as well as irc channels, subethaditing, whatever. it should be easy to register services, it should even support automatic self-registration of services, like bonjour.
the website
i don’t see the need for a social network for reboot. certainly, i didn’t see this tool increasing the level of sharing. to increase sharing activity, i think the website should go back to being wiki focussed. it should also serve as the central point for service discovery.
another thing i would like to see is aggregation of flickr / 23 / ipernity, as well as blogposts and tweets. this is simply a matter of convenience. i didn’t look at flickr at all, neither did i look for blogposts. i simply forgot. i’m not a big friendfeed user, so i don’t know if this was being used as a partial aggregator. certainly, i want to aggregate around the conference, not around my friends at the conference.
also, i have no idea where aggregation of ‘feeds’ ends, and where aggregation of ‘services’ like irc channels begins. maybe all of this is the same stuff, it’s something to chew over.
thinking of the digital classroom
one of the most thought-provoking talks i ever saw was at the lift conference in geneva several years ago. pierre dillenbourge of the epfl talked about his vision of the digital classroom. his classroom is still a physically shared space, there is no remote learning or any of the crap associated with e-learning during the .com 1.0 era. but it is an augmented and collaborative space, that is full of new kinds of tools, made to share your shit! i think his ruminations are extremely applicable to reboot.
so lets bring in some of this thinking. lets find out what new sorts of tools dillenbourge would advocate for reboot. let’s invite him, or others who are looking at modern learning (or whatever you want to calle it ;), to participate in the tools design of reboot. it’s a fantastic test-bed!
rolling snowballs
i’d like to see more context around the full timeline of reboot up on the website. there’s already a bunch of stuff happening: we have the blog and proposals before the conference, then the schedule and who’s interested around the conference, and after the conference the videos go up.
there’s a lot more we could do before/around/after. mainly i’d be interested in after. i’ve always come home from reboot, laden with new ideas, but the digestion process was always something i did alone. my favourite way of digesting is to try stuff out in small, exploratory projects. wouldn’t it be great if a bunch of small group projects were kicked off at reboot, and developed after the conference?
here’s an example. the guys from soundcloud had some interesting ideas about how a track on compact disc might be less powerful than a track under a url + a lot fo context built around that url. context could be information on how the artist evolved the track in the pre-release phase, or user participation in that release phase. well, how might this apply to something else - books, for instance? the pragmatic programmers series lead the way in pre-release pdf books, but could we take it even further? a micro design project in a group of 3-4, with some people i could really jam with, that would be great. no need to finish, or code / build anything, either. then throw up all the materials on the website
it might even be possible to share the projects in the same way that github.com does it. on github, anybody can fork a public project without asking for permission. but this happens in public. this leads to huge trees of collaboration. i know that this is a programmers thing, but i suspect that there’s a general pattern here: share / fork / pull request. something to think about, maybe.
so in summing up, thanks to thomas for creating this fantastic conference! let’s all think about how to make it even more kick ass.
