3 conferences, 3 client projects, 3 publications. Plus Tesla and online identities.
It's February 20 and I'm typing this from the Betahaus Café. I'm in between offices since we moved out of our good ol' space down the street, and home office isn't for me in the long-ish run. So while we're waiting for construction to finish in our sweet new space up at Aufbauhaus, Betahaus it is. It's like coming home, really, I've worked so much from this space and know the team so well that for a while they asked me to do the interviews about coworking for them. So I feel right at home.
If I were in the mood I might call this particular location symbolic - Betahaus is physically located right along the street on the way from the old to the new office. Then again, that'd be silly, wouldn't it?
Anyway, this is what the new space looked like a week or so ago:
You might notice a certain lack of floor and interior over all, but later today we'll have another look at the place, and maybe stuff is happening. We'll see. Current projection is 6 weeks to go.
It's been an intense few weeks. Lots of exciting stuff happening (in the work-related sense of the word), and of course all at once.
Three conferences
My buddy Sami Niemelä and I were invited to San Francisco to join IxDA's annual conference Interaction - to be announced as next year's co-chairs, with IxDA Helsinki hosting the whole thing. We're bringing Interaction 16 to Helsinki. He even brought a promotional video! (Also on the site.) If you're into looking at Flickr streams, here's an album with some of my photos.
NEXT conference, which I've been helping to program for the last few years, just announced moving to Hamburg. Another homecoming as it started in Hamburg and had moved to Berlin just a few years ago. Now NEXT joins forces with Reeperbahn Festival, a large local music festival. (Drop in your SxSW reference here.) This should be good. I'll happily stay on board, I've always very much enjoyed working with the NEXT team over at SinnerSchrader.
And then there's ThingsCon, slowly heating up, getting more intense. Rationally I know how much work running a conference is; still, I regularly manage to trick myself into committing to another one, time and time again. Usually I manage to do so by committing so early that it feels really far off (which frankly is also the way speakers are lured to events, including myself). I hope I never get onto myself, because once this trick stops working I'll stop running these things. Which would be a bummer, 'cause it's a lot of fun. And then something extra awesome happens, like we just signed up one of my all time favorite sci-fi and graphic novel authors, Warren Ellis, and I remember exactly why I keep doing this. So by now I can confidently say: If your friends are into Internet of Things, hardware, connected things, maker culture, they wouldn't regret coming to the event. Current speaker list here.
These three events are also the three that I'm involved in, in reverse order (both chronologically and by intensity).
Three client engagements
The smart city report for the German government that I had hinted at last time, and hoped for, was approved, so I get to take a very critical look at the current state of (very much vendor-driven) smart city visions around the world, and dig into research around the topic. Together with good friend and ethics professor Christoph Bieber, too, which is just delightful. This is the kind of gig that I love. More of this!
Other client work is ongoing and buried under NDAs. One day maybe.
Three publications
And then there are still three(-ish) publications running alongside the whole thing. Two I've mentioned before: Connected, our (admittedly quite sporadic) printed collection of essays around IoT. The short ebook I co-wrote with frequent partner in crime Max Krüger for indie conference organizers, which not only brought in about $12 or so in revenue; it's also freely available under the most liberal Creative Commons license and being translated, I'm told, by the Wikipedia community into several languages. If they go through with it, that'd be exciting. Number 3.5 in this list of "3-ish" is a project that's been in development for a few years and been shapeshifting ever since; it's going to be a digital magazine, and shapes up to be really nice, but still too many moving parts to announce concretely.
The new kid on the block is a monthly briefing around emerging tech - for super busy executives who don't have the time to follow all the debates but need to make informed decisions all the time. It's a collaboration with Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsinso and Patrick Tanguay, both great friends and top notch experts in their field. It's a pleasure working with them, and between the three of us we have a ton of input and output that we go through every month, plus we're all tapped into various networks and backchannels. So once a month we'll turn the most relevant debates into a brief, super condensed briefing: a few commented links or short bits of analysis, and a longer, more indepth look at something that struck us as relevant. It's one month of emerging tech distilled into a briefing to be skimmed on the phone on the way to the airport. Not for our peer group, but for a small group of C-level execs that need to stay up to speed but don't have the time. It's an experiment for us, albeit an enjoyable one. Check it out here.
So all these things I'm involved in might seem disjointed and a bit scattered; but in my never-ending quest of trying to frame, reframe and re-reframe what I do - in the abstract hope I might one day be able to explain it to people outside our direct peer group - it turned into this grid for me:
Personally I find it super important to also keep the balance between sharing freely online, which I do a lot, and some more corporate/executive stuff, which tends to pay the bills. The mix helps do both and the insights from both worlds inform each other nicely.
Open patents
Speaking of sharing freely. Tesla, the car maker, had been making noises around opening up their patents for free use for a while: They would patent technology and processes so protect them - not from other companies using them, but from other companies being able to sue over them. It's a very, very powerful notion. Until recently, the annoucements were slightly vaguely phrased, which had the hard core of free/open folks scratching their head a bit - after all, it did sound a bit too good to be true.
Now in an interview, Tesla founder and delightfully deranged billionaire Elon Musk clarified:
Musk: We actually don't require any formal discussions. So they can just go ahead and use them.
Reporter: Is there a licensing process?
Musk: No. You just use them. Which I think is better because then we don't need to get into any kind of discussions or whatever.
Which is EXACTLY how it should be. It's web thinking in its purest form, and undoubtedly the future. Frankly, I've never heard a more compelling argument for investing in a company than them showing they get how web principles can be applied to other industries, and that they embrace openness. Two thumbs up!
Twitter as the core ID online
Not news in any way, but by way of a quick reality check, I just recently was thinking about online identities, or rather identifiers. And even in 2015 it seems to be that Twitter still is the most (maybe only?) legit-slash-practical online identity. Facebook just never cut it for me, and the more open alternatives never really got there. If someone doesn't have a Twitter account, they're practically unlinkeable, and as such pretty much don't exist. Bizarre. Maybe I'm not trying hard enough, but then again, that's the perk of writing on your own platform.
That's it for today. It's February 20, and a sunny day in Berlin. Have a great day, and say hi. I always enjoy hearing from you.
P.