Rebooted
Reboot7 was every bit as great as i could’ve hoped it would be and even more. Meeting and listening to all these people doing great things and advancing the field i’m most interested in, the way humans interact with technology and with each other through technology, on so many fronts was incredibly inspirational and energizing. There was a lot of common ground among participants (i got like 6 comments about my creative commies t-shirt in one evening, without ever getting one before anywhere) which made it really easy to meet new interesting people and have great discussions.
If you look back at my first post from reboot on friday you’ll notice that it’s named Reboot7 first day, first half. This turned out to be a bit optimistic, there was just too much going on to leave enough time for posting around here. Three sessions in parallel all the time, all day long, few and short breaks in between, massive back-channeling on irc (mostly of the bitch-and-moan variety, but in a mostly good, very entertaining way), keeping up with current proceedings on the wiki, taking notes in subethaedit and of course hanging out with many great people.
Deciding on a session was sometimes really hard, except during the keynotes three sessions in parallel were scheduled all the time. I think i made some poor decisions on friday (Jason Fried’s talk wasn’t that revelatory, at least if you’d been following 37signals for some time and i heard Ulla-Maaria Mutanen’s talk on craftblogging and the long tail in fashion was amazing) but even during fantastic talks i sometimes had this nagging suspicion that i was missing out on other great stuff, like Michael Heilemann’s talk which collided with Jason Calacanis’ or Lee Bryant’s which collided with Doug Bowman’s. I hope the organizers come through on their promise to put audio recordings of all sessions online.
In the meantime there are some notes available. I have a lot more lying around on my hdd, i’ll add those asap. Collaborative notetaking with subethaedit worked incredibly well, there were always three or four people taking notes simultaneously and fixing mistakes together in one shared document. Nice to be able to take a break from taking notes, knowing someone else is keeping up with the proceedings. It was also a fun way to follow what was going on in the sessions in other halls.
Finally i’d like to say thanks to the organizers of reboot7, they really did an outstanding job. The registration process was a bit chaotic from my point of view so i feared they weren’t prepared for so many participants, but the actual conference went great and without any hiccups except for a minor wifi outage during the Doug Engelbart demo. The halls easily accommodated everyone, there was free wifi, a sufficient number of power outlets for laptops, free coffee, water and fruits at all times and abundant food during breakfast and lunch for everyone. A job really well done.
christoph,
glad you enjoyed reboot and happy that you came (saw the t-shirt)! wifi outage during engelbart’s demo was fully intentional as to secure that the video and voice came through as clear as possible across the atlantic.
see you at reboot8!
/n
Comment by Nikolaj Nyholm on Jul. 3rd, 2005, at 22:30 #