from the horizon

I don’t know how people live-blog from conferences and workshops. When I haven’t been in the various sessions, I’m talking interesting people, and when I’m not doing that I’m exhausted. Hence this rest of the posts about the camp are several days late! I have also been trying to get some work sorted out, and have felt guilty whenever I’ve been anti-socially hiding behind a laptop. I’m not convinced that having laptops at Conferences/Workshops/Camps is a good idea.

Never-the-less laptops are a handy resource. A Wiki (website which can be editted by anyone, like Wikipedia) was set up for the camp, which allowed people to created the following report, of all the activities in our track.

I found that the second day wasn’t quite as good as the first. In the morning we had a session on Internet Security, which I thought was too technical for most of the audience, although eventually did give some practical advice (Install antivirus and antispyware, AVG is free to download).

The next session showed how to use Joomla! Open Source Content Management System software to set up a website and Google Analytics to monitor the site traffic. I thought that this material was covered far to quickly for anyone to actually take away any practical knowledge, and not enough emphasize was put on the purpose of the tools: Why would you have a website? What could you use it for? How could it add value? Why would you want to track the traffic?

In the afternoon I went to a session held by Michel Bauwens from the Foundation of P2P (peer to peer) Alternatives. Wiki, Blog, Links, Social Network, Blog Subscriptions to create an “information ecology”. To summarize, Michel argues that new technology allows people to work in a more collaborative fashion, without the need for large corporations or organzations (similar to my “2.0″/dequantization arguments). His “information ecology” is a trove of useful resources, but I think it will also be a case of information overload! We did have a very engaging talk (which is always better than going away to read websites), exploring some ideas about the free flow of information, and how society would change, if people stopped charging people to use any type of information, from software to music to designs for fridges. If people created information for free, similar to people working on Open Source software, without an economic incentive, but with a incentive of passion. I pointed out that you can’t eat information, but Michel suggested that these people could be supported by society, either through a basic wage, or similar to monks through tithing from people. I’m not sure how it would all work, but there’s plenty more to think about.

And finally the Camp got its photo taken: