"Share Your Shit" turned out to be the slogan of Reboot 10, the amazingly inspiring conference organized by Thomas Madsen-Mygdal and crew. Over 500 enthusiasts from various countries and backgrounds attended in Copenhagen, Denmark, last week, leaving behind exhilaratingly positive feedback on every social-media platform one can think of. The two-day gathering took place in Copenhagen's Kedelhallen, a venue I'd call highly suitable for the event. The Reboot 10 schedule consisted of six simultaneous tracks, featuring many top-notch speakers who had been invited from all over the world.
First coined by Danish popular science author Tor Nørretranders to use in his opening speech, referring to the biological notion that one organism's shit is another organism's food, the mantra-like phrase "Share Your Shit" was reiterated throughout the conference by several other speakers, showing no restraint whatsoever to adapt their presentation on the fly. "Share Your Shit" hence beautifully introduced and concluded the idea behind Reboot 10.
The actual, official theme for this year's edition of the two-day conference, however, was 'free'. As an example how a tangible object can actually be free-form and still highly functional, designer Sten Jauer demonstrated how the brightly colored knitted laptop socks handed out as Reboot 10 conference schwag, could easily be turned into a scarf or into a beanie. The fabric sleeve, made from 100% organic cotton, turns out to be a real-world product, designed by Sten's industrial design start-up dinglab.
To get into the mood for free, Nadja Pass introduced the audience to the idea of freedom with her pleasingly succinct lecture "Freedom Is" (click the link for a transcription). After Nadja's and Tor's short introductory speeches Howard Rheingold held his keynote speech. Most important outcome from Howard's speech for me was that he'll be releasing a multi-faceted social-media classrom platform later this year. It is based on Drupal and it will be available as a free download.
This picture, one of the many photos shot at Reboot 10 by my Danish host Karin Hoegh, shows how new-media producer Björn Falkevik proudly demonstrates his live-video streaming set-up. He used a Nokia 8GB N95 together with the web service Bambuser to broadcast a personal, live report from Reboot. At the start of the event, conference organizer Thomas Madsen-Mygdal pledged that full-video recordings of all sessions would be made available on the Reboot site sooner than previous years.
It's impossible to summarize each and every Reboot speech I attended, although like several others I did experiment a bit with live-tweeting using my newly acquired ultra-portable HTC Shift UMPC. Unfortunately the frequent disconnects due to the weak WiFi access points distracted very much from covering the presentations. I also still need to get up to speed with this technique of listening and reporting simultaneously. My respect for those skilled in live blogging has grown considerably. Some of the presenters spoke really fast in comparison to my comprehension speed of the English language. I'm sure a more thorough preparation would help, in addition to a flawless internet connection throughout the building. I'd like to mention how convenient it was to find that there was an abundance of power extension strips available at Reboot 10.
What's striking about Reboot is that every year the conference, its date schedule, location, speaker programme, ticketing, web site and many other aspects get determined only at the very last minute. Rumor has it, for example, that Howard Rheingold's contribution wasn't confirmed until very shortly before the start of the conference. Even more remarkable was that none of the people I spoke with seemed to be bothered by this uncertainty at all, to the contrary: "it works out every year, just go with the flow", was the consensus. Some people I spoke with did express their concern if perhaps this year's edition would be the last one, as it's so difficult to keep such high level up year after year.
I very much hope that the Reboot site will consistently be updated with links to speech transcripts, slideshow presentations, videos and other archive material. It would make sense if they'd be easily accessible on a single page, for example the conference schedule page.
In the mean time, you may want to check out the Reboot 10 News Radar that I made. It fetches search feeds from all kinds of sites where people have posted their impressions of the #Reboot10 event: Twitter, Jaiku, Flickr, SlideShare.net, Truveo, Google Blog Search etc. I haven't been able to locate a podcasting search engine that can generate RSS feeds based on custom keywords, otherwise I'd have added a feed of podcasts tagged with #Reboot10. If you happen to know of any such service, please let me know.
In all, I had a marvelous time thanks to an excellent organization, extremely hospitable crew, outstanding lectures, above-average quality food, plenty of healthy snacks and just great, great people to connect with.
Stowe's invitation to become a /Messenger, aptly communicated through a Twitter direct message, probably was the most surprising outcome of the whole event for me. Obviously it lead me to write this maiden /message.
Damn, I really should have gone! Hope Thomas repeats the reboot feat again next year.
Posted by: Sebastian Franck | June 30, 2008 at 07:25 AM
Hi Marjolein--it's great to see you on this blog reporting from Reboot!
Posted by: Brian | June 30, 2008 at 12:19 PM
Marjolein, it was so nice to meet you. I am very impressed by all of your efforts. Thank you so much!
I knew as soon as those words dropped from Tor's mouth, that they would be the unofficial slogan for the reboot. I am so glad everyone shared their shit. It was a great time. I posted my review as well in the hyperlink of my name.
Posted by: Jodi Church-Wagner aka tinythoughts | June 30, 2008 at 12:33 PM