End-of-year madness, ThingsCon, 21c banks & lots of writing. That's my November. How's yours?
The end of the year is nigh, and with it, end-of-year deadlines. So it's heads down & all hands on deck for the next few months with client work and ThingsCon prep.
On Twitter, someone asked where to get pointers to upcoming and ongoing projects I'm involved in. Which was in some ways a painful/necessary/good reminder that of course a Twitter feed does in no way really convey a sense of what's going on at any point in time. Too much noise, too little signal. Or at least, not necessarily the most concise of signals - like a lense focused on a different level of depth. And so I'll take it as a reminder to be a little better about communicating what's going on as far as it's shareable. (Thanks, Dan! It's good to have these pointers.)
ThingsCon satellites & ThingsCon proper
With a stint in Amsterdam, ThingsCon had a first localized satellite. That's exciting and there's lots for us to learn in this - not just in the concrete talks and sessions (which were fantastic), but also on the meta level: What do we as an organization want out of local events? What are our goals as individuals or organizations? After all, ThingsCon is an event series run by three separate parties (knowable aka Simon, Max Krüger, and The Waving Cat aka me). Our learnings so far: It's not easy to establish a productive or even measurable link between an event and the organizers. This is, by the way, largely consistent with the overall conference scene as far as I can tell. An individual organizer can be communicated; a group is where it gets tough.
That said, ThingsConAMS was a full success, and we all had a great time thanks to the incredible efforts by Monique and Iskander plus crew. There are plenty of photos (mine, and not-mine-but-better) and I posted my slides, too.
So now it's back to putting together ThingsCon proper next May: Location, speakers, sponsors. Logistics galore. And the ongoing question: Where's the next local event? We've been getting lots of love from some parties in Japan, so maybe we'll be headed to Tokyo or Osaka sooner rather than later.
Connected
The new issue of Connected is out, focus: Wearables. A few months later than hoped, but it's there and I've seen a copy in real life. Which is exciting, and I don't care if that sounds a bit silly. It's great to see ideas manifest in a physical form, even if they're print-on-demand. Yay print!
Writing. Lots of writing.
For some reason, this month and next (and maybe throughout the spring) I've been hired to do lots of writing. Which I enjoy very much, particularly since it happens so rarely. A book contribution here, a series of blog posts there. Two client talks, too, just this month. So I get to dig into the insurance and IoT space; into big picture, mega trend territory; and hopefully, even into a - highly official, government-stamp official - smart city report, but that's not quite under wraps yet, so I try not to get overly excited just yet. Only of course I am, because it's always great to write stuff that might actually have an impact.
There's another reason I'd love for this to come to fruition, too: I love it when things come full circle. Like this smart city thing, which connects back directly to a conference I co-organized in 2010 or so, Cognitive Cities Conference. The talks, circling right back to the early days of Social Media, or Web 2.0 as we called it, and in fact part of the briefing references the way back to the day of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Remember that? "Markets are conversations." 1999! Incredible, so long ago. I remember just having started a job at a small publisher in their digital unit. Said unit was comprised of 4 people - three staffers including me, and an embedded developer from an outside agency. (Whatever happened to that model? It worked great, and I'm not being sarcastic! We produced CD-ROMs and a web service with a paywall and all.) Anyway, it's great to connect the dots and see why all the things I've done (often out of a vague gut feeling) make sense now, even more than expected at the time.
Lots of hardware, too
My thing, career-wise if you want to call it that, has always been to look at what technology does to us. "Us" being used in the widest sense of the word: As a society, as individuals, as organizations. In the early days of my work life, that was lots of social media & journalism; then it more and more turned into more general strategy work including transformational processes for organizations, digitization, political campaigning, whathaveyou. For the last year or two, connected services - IoT! - has taken a more and more prominent role. The obvious thing for me to justify spending so much time digging into the field was to write a few blog posts and start an event. Hence, ThingsCon. This of course organically made me a good candidate for talks and juries and also it connected me to all the movers and shakers in the field. Because on some level, who doesn't like it if someone can put them on a stage. Which I now can do, and which is awesome, and I tend to forget that sometimes.
So now almost by chance I find myself one of the go-to persons people abroad ask if they want to learn about IoT/hardware/maker things going on in Berlin/Germany/Europe. Which is obviously great! It also means I should really get my stuff together and be a better ambassador, so I'm working on that by a) pushing ThingsCon to the next level and b) trying to be a better host of dinners and meetups and what have you and c) generally being a bit better organized with blog posts and list and contacts to share.
Hardware startups from Berlin/Germany/Europe, ping me to include you in a list!
21c banks
A quick side note about banks. I've been having lots of interactions with banks recently. And my mind is blown. Seriously blown. As someone who has freelanced for years and run my own business (by myself or with partners) for a long time, too, I'm used to quite a bit of systemic discrimination against anyone who isn't a full-time employee of a company other than their own. I hasten to add, in my case as someone working somewhat successfully in the tech scene, this discrimination is real but not in any way existential! I won't go into the details of pension plans or social security, which can be sorted out with, essentially, money.
No, what blew my mind is that a banker told me, kind of as a side note while we signed the paperwork, that he had looked at my history: Company with partners, then freelance for a couple of years, than a new company, plus a parallel company for a conference; and just couldn't believe what he saw. No job security! That the numbers all added up nicely seemed secondary, it was the structure - the "non-monolithic" setup with several, sometimes overlapping streams of income, that threw the risk assessment algorithms, and only after sitting down and having the setup explained triggered what I kinda think of as a manual override." I can't do that, Dave," says HAL. Only in this case, banker Dave still does have root and can manually override.
And while that experience was mildly annoying to me, I imagine for less fortunate freelancers of all stripes this could in fact be quite existential in cases. It certainly means that banks are in for a good ol' round of fun in century 21, where full-time, long-term employment will be the exception rather than the rule. I'm fortunate/privileged enough that most likely I'll always find a way, the systemic bias towards my demographic and industry are just too strong; but banks that discriminate because you incorporated? What the actual F***.
I guess there's work for all of us to be done here, true pioneering work. Next time you talk to your banker, don't tell them about your full-time employment. Try and see how they react when you tell them you live off of your two parallel companies, both based in different locations. Maybe a coworking space, or a post box, or your aunt's garage. It'll be fun.
For now, after this unusually long & personal letter, I wish you a great rest of the week. You're more than half-way done, and in this season the nights are nice and long and it's nice to be productive without missing out on the sunlight. Enjoy!
Peter
On Twitter, someone asked where to get pointers to upcoming and ongoing projects I'm involved in. Which was in some ways a painful/necessary/good reminder that of course a Twitter feed does in no way really convey a sense of what's going on at any point in time. Too much noise, too little signal. Or at least, not necessarily the most concise of signals - like a lense focused on a different level of depth. And so I'll take it as a reminder to be a little better about communicating what's going on as far as it's shareable. (Thanks, Dan! It's good to have these pointers.)
ThingsCon satellites & ThingsCon proper
With a stint in Amsterdam, ThingsCon had a first localized satellite. That's exciting and there's lots for us to learn in this - not just in the concrete talks and sessions (which were fantastic), but also on the meta level: What do we as an organization want out of local events? What are our goals as individuals or organizations? After all, ThingsCon is an event series run by three separate parties (knowable aka Simon, Max Krüger, and The Waving Cat aka me). Our learnings so far: It's not easy to establish a productive or even measurable link between an event and the organizers. This is, by the way, largely consistent with the overall conference scene as far as I can tell. An individual organizer can be communicated; a group is where it gets tough.
That said, ThingsConAMS was a full success, and we all had a great time thanks to the incredible efforts by Monique and Iskander plus crew. There are plenty of photos (mine, and not-mine-but-better) and I posted my slides, too.
So now it's back to putting together ThingsCon proper next May: Location, speakers, sponsors. Logistics galore. And the ongoing question: Where's the next local event? We've been getting lots of love from some parties in Japan, so maybe we'll be headed to Tokyo or Osaka sooner rather than later.
Connected
The new issue of Connected is out, focus: Wearables. A few months later than hoped, but it's there and I've seen a copy in real life. Which is exciting, and I don't care if that sounds a bit silly. It's great to see ideas manifest in a physical form, even if they're print-on-demand. Yay print!
Writing. Lots of writing.
For some reason, this month and next (and maybe throughout the spring) I've been hired to do lots of writing. Which I enjoy very much, particularly since it happens so rarely. A book contribution here, a series of blog posts there. Two client talks, too, just this month. So I get to dig into the insurance and IoT space; into big picture, mega trend territory; and hopefully, even into a - highly official, government-stamp official - smart city report, but that's not quite under wraps yet, so I try not to get overly excited just yet. Only of course I am, because it's always great to write stuff that might actually have an impact.
There's another reason I'd love for this to come to fruition, too: I love it when things come full circle. Like this smart city thing, which connects back directly to a conference I co-organized in 2010 or so, Cognitive Cities Conference. The talks, circling right back to the early days of Social Media, or Web 2.0 as we called it, and in fact part of the briefing references the way back to the day of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Remember that? "Markets are conversations." 1999! Incredible, so long ago. I remember just having started a job at a small publisher in their digital unit. Said unit was comprised of 4 people - three staffers including me, and an embedded developer from an outside agency. (Whatever happened to that model? It worked great, and I'm not being sarcastic! We produced CD-ROMs and a web service with a paywall and all.) Anyway, it's great to connect the dots and see why all the things I've done (often out of a vague gut feeling) make sense now, even more than expected at the time.
Lots of hardware, too
My thing, career-wise if you want to call it that, has always been to look at what technology does to us. "Us" being used in the widest sense of the word: As a society, as individuals, as organizations. In the early days of my work life, that was lots of social media & journalism; then it more and more turned into more general strategy work including transformational processes for organizations, digitization, political campaigning, whathaveyou. For the last year or two, connected services - IoT! - has taken a more and more prominent role. The obvious thing for me to justify spending so much time digging into the field was to write a few blog posts and start an event. Hence, ThingsCon. This of course organically made me a good candidate for talks and juries and also it connected me to all the movers and shakers in the field. Because on some level, who doesn't like it if someone can put them on a stage. Which I now can do, and which is awesome, and I tend to forget that sometimes.
So now almost by chance I find myself one of the go-to persons people abroad ask if they want to learn about IoT/hardware/maker things going on in Berlin/Germany/Europe. Which is obviously great! It also means I should really get my stuff together and be a better ambassador, so I'm working on that by a) pushing ThingsCon to the next level and b) trying to be a better host of dinners and meetups and what have you and c) generally being a bit better organized with blog posts and list and contacts to share.
Hardware startups from Berlin/Germany/Europe, ping me to include you in a list!
21c banks
A quick side note about banks. I've been having lots of interactions with banks recently. And my mind is blown. Seriously blown. As someone who has freelanced for years and run my own business (by myself or with partners) for a long time, too, I'm used to quite a bit of systemic discrimination against anyone who isn't a full-time employee of a company other than their own. I hasten to add, in my case as someone working somewhat successfully in the tech scene, this discrimination is real but not in any way existential! I won't go into the details of pension plans or social security, which can be sorted out with, essentially, money.
No, what blew my mind is that a banker told me, kind of as a side note while we signed the paperwork, that he had looked at my history: Company with partners, then freelance for a couple of years, than a new company, plus a parallel company for a conference; and just couldn't believe what he saw. No job security! That the numbers all added up nicely seemed secondary, it was the structure - the "non-monolithic" setup with several, sometimes overlapping streams of income, that threw the risk assessment algorithms, and only after sitting down and having the setup explained triggered what I kinda think of as a manual override." I can't do that, Dave," says HAL. Only in this case, banker Dave still does have root and can manually override.
And while that experience was mildly annoying to me, I imagine for less fortunate freelancers of all stripes this could in fact be quite existential in cases. It certainly means that banks are in for a good ol' round of fun in century 21, where full-time, long-term employment will be the exception rather than the rule. I'm fortunate/privileged enough that most likely I'll always find a way, the systemic bias towards my demographic and industry are just too strong; but banks that discriminate because you incorporated? What the actual F***.
I guess there's work for all of us to be done here, true pioneering work. Next time you talk to your banker, don't tell them about your full-time employment. Try and see how they react when you tell them you live off of your two parallel companies, both based in different locations. Maybe a coworking space, or a post box, or your aunt's garage. It'll be fun.
For now, after this unusually long & personal letter, I wish you a great rest of the week. You're more than half-way done, and in this season the nights are nice and long and it's nice to be productive without missing out on the sunlight. Enjoy!
Peter
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