2or3things

LIFT ‘07, exciting conference for the intellect (part 1)

Back from LIFT, that conference organised by Laurent Haug and his team in Geneva. We really had a great time over there. Lots of challenging thoughts, numerous talks with questions and topics open for debate, passionate speakers, great people to meet, and a good spirit, focused, intelligent, attentive. The kind of conference one gets back home with new territories to discover. Discovery and curiosity, two themes that drive what we do here. We strongly recommend the conference to anyone willing to expand and challenge their horizons around technology and its impact on our societies.

Below are some highlights we grabbed from the discussions and presentations we particularly liked in the program.

• Florence Devouard, chairing from the center of France the Wikimedia Foundation, operator of Wikipedia. Great to see the world taken over by women. Everyone knows now what Wikipedia is, what is less known is that it requires some resources and funding to run. Wikimedia is a charity, non-profit organisation that has to raise funds on an on-going basis. Florence mentioned that the last fund-raising campaign secured a rough million USD, which would help them for the next three months. Even though the funding process keeps rolling at a steady pace, it looks like some people have understood that Wikipedia was to stop in three months. Bruno Giussani, an active writer, editor and advisor to LIFT, rules out these speculations by summarizing his conversation with Florence Devouard here.

• Next came in Habbo, presented by Sampo Karjalainen. Habbo is a full environment for teenagers to play and socialize. Everybody can play, claims Sulake, the Finnish company producing Habbo. Habbo’s world is a funny isometric one, where characters are like playmobil puppets. Each user creates characters the way they like and starts to interact with others through games or social events. Users may buy credits to furnish and decorate their room. To some extent, users create a virtual market where some items get rare hence valuable for other players to acquire. But the essence is the game. Habbo wants to propose a playful, non-violent, safe environment where interaction is totally intuitive thanks to the user interface. Habbo doesn’t take for granted that a teenager no longer wants to play. Rather, everything seems to be done for freeing one’s creativity and self-expression. The Habbo users are equally spread gender wise and everywhere from 12 to 18. I like the idea of something on line that is not hectic, fast and furious. (picture by Chaz_Dixon on Flickr)

• Lee Bryant, from the company Headshift, made an excellent, concise, straight to-the-point presentation about collective intelligence inside the enterprise. Too much brain power wasted in organizations, same work being over and over: for those who have had the chance (or else) to work for a large, global company, needless to say that it was a daily experience… Tools & solutions 2.0, new processes, change management, all of these can be applied to communities sharing goals, interests and vision. Medium to large companies have such a large enough community for implementing some of the social tools that are commonly used nowadays by the web community. Re-engineering (a very end of century buzz word) the information flow where information finds users and not the contrary. Use of RSS feeds everywhere, attention data, filtering, targeting, clipping, library management, etc. A lot of things that resonate with what we want to do with Blastfeed as far as technology and solutions are concerned.

• Stowe Boyd, founder of BlueWhale Labs, walked us through a presentation whose title is somewhat paradoxical, “social = me first” and gave us his perspective on how to build social applications, rather what they are or should be. Social network, social media, social applications, social web, social everywhere. The more individualistic our society becomes the eager people try to find connections, behave like connecting dots and enroll in social networks. But are we then talking of networks of strict individuals intersecting at some points (i.e. common interest) or communities governed by (to put it simply) a set of needs, beliefs, preferences that drive the identity and the level of adhesion required by participants (e.g. refer to Acéphale, the secret community founded by Georges Bataille)? Social applications, according to Boyd, revolve around the self, i.e. my passions or interests, which lead to my people, which in turn create my markets. What drives people towards such applications? The craze for discovery of things, places, people and… oneself. Check out Stowe’s workshop presentation here.

More to follow.

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