Anne van Kesteren

reboot11

It has been four years since my first reboot, reboot 7.0. With the years the space, dot, and zero have been dropped giving this year’s reboot11. The conference is still inspiringly different from other conferences I go to, though just like everywhere else uptime is shaky :-) I also missed some reflection this year. Usually when a talk was over that was it; next session. Not much Q&A, no IRC backchannel to joke about the speakers, and twitter does not really work as communication channel when six hundred people are tweeting live all the time. Also, spammers discovered the #reboot11 tag after a while and made it even less useful. Maybe twitter could work if each session in the conference has a clear advertized tag that people can use. That would make it somewhat feasible to track thoughts and conversations especially when you can have up to ten tracks going on at the same time.

The talk by Richard Falkvinge on the Swedish Piratpartiet was probably one of the talks I enjoyed most. (Apart from him being pretty loud.) The historical overview with e.g. resistance against libraries because lending out books for free would kill authors compared with the situation as it is today on the Web; the library of this century. Balancing copyright and privacy; i.e. if you allow copyright and want to enforce it you need to invade privacy of people sending files to each other. Getting huge numbers in elections with USD 50k against USD 6000k. Almost no old media attention, but still over zeven percent of the vote. Good stuff. If Piratenpartij actually was a political party with some credibility I would vote for them. I cannot really think of any other Dutch party with a stance on these issues that I agree with. (Or with a vocal stance at all, for that matter.)

David Weinberger has liveblogged some of the more interesting talks and talked himself about the Web and how it “already” is a Semantic Web. A messy Semantic Web at that, but still. (The subject of his talk was cyberutopianism by the way, but I thought this bit was worth highlighting.)

Closing the conference there was an outside party downtown Copenhagen with music coming out of a transformed buggy consisting of a buggy (doh), wooden box, subwoofer and two speakers, Ipod mini, amplifier, and two large batteries. Apparently you can put one together for about EUR 500. The next day I cycled with novemberborn and tobiashm to Helsingør from Copenhagen. About 45km. I cycled back alone (they took the train) and got lost in Copenhagen until I found the route for bus 42 which I followed to a station from where I knew the directions.

Not really sure what to do today (likely some more cycling). Going back in the evening.