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July 4, 2008
The last two days an old and historic school in London, England hosted 2gether08, a "festival of ideas, popular technologies and progress". Predictably during Wimbledon season, the weather was a glorious English summer as the photo of Steve Moore's final "thank you" talk shows:
The event had an immense amount of illustruous sponsors, with Channel4 being the leader and also covering the whole event and happenings around it.
The short tagline of the event was "solving bigger problems", the larger vision is much more wordy and available at the 2gether08 site.
The main mantra is the following:
The first 2gether Festival will bring together over 300 innovators from a wide range of fields to focus on how using digital technologies we can generate real social benefits. 2gether08 is not just about wise words and rousing presentations. A defining hallmark of the Festival will be how we frame problems and work towards solutions. This is happening now in advance of the Festival and will continue during and after the event. Imagine what we might be able to achieve…
This is all part of a larger movement right now called social entrepreneurship, especially in the world of media and IT. A lot of successful specialists in these markets feel that they are not having much impact in the world with what they do and want to concentrate on solving real human issues and save the environment instead. There are a lot of government and otherwise funded awards and competitions going on in this sector in the UK at the moment with the UK catalyst awards and Channel Four's 4IP - Innovation for the public fund being the leading lights and smaller funds like Show us a better way asking for more concrete hacks.
As a geek and developer evangelist I was a bit out of depth at the event. Yes, as lot of the talks and discussions revolved around using internet technology to change real social issues and environmental problems but not much was hands-on. The Social Innovation Camp, who were one of the co-sponsors did a better job at that, but the main idea of 2gether08 was to allow people to meet, collaborate and inspire another to do their share to spark social change by using technology.
That said, what I found was that there is a massive gap between all these great ideas and funds and IT and web experts available to deliver web solutions. I spent most of my time explaining mashup opportunities, already existing systems to host and remix videos online, create your own social networks or just host photos and make it easy for people to comment and tag them (yes, Flickr).
Case in point was that the organizers tried hard to make the participants network before the event via Crowdvine and Twitter, but it just did not catch on. I went home with around 50 business cards, about 20 of them from people that already connected with me on both of these systems.
As expected, the media coverage was great. Channel4 filmed the events, numerous film crews and reporters walked around and interviewed people and in general we'll find a lot of the things that happened and were said in the media soon.
The main social issue I subscribed to solving at the event and the nearer future is try to make the gap between the geeks and the people with great ideas a little smaller. Geekyoto earlier this year had a similar agenda as 2gether08 - on a more technical level. The 2gether08 people went to this event, too and started merging the groups of skilled and concerned geeks and more "wider picture" thinkers. There is much power in this merger, so let's make that happen.
Christian Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted at July 4, 2008 6:41 AM
Hi Christian - funny because at Sicamp I felt the same but the opposite way round - I could sense the frustration from the technical types who just wanted to get on and build something, but didn't really feel many people understood the social elements/benefits or the sector and how it works.
I'm sure with more events though the mutual understanding will come, though I'm also sure we need more skilled people in the 'middle'.
Posted by: Mike Amos-Simpson at July 4, 2008 8:46 AM
hi Chris,great to meet you at the event. thanks for your sharing your view about "time Set", and agile methodology. hope to c u again in the future.
Ryan - taiwan.
Posted by: ryan at July 4, 2008 5:12 PM
Christian, I found this post through an alert on "crowdvine." I'd love to hear a bit more about why you thought CrowdVine and Twitter didn't catch on. Based on activity and feedback I heard about both systems, they caught on a quite a bit. Is it just that they weren't able to replace business cards? Or that you had some other expectation?
Posted by: Tony Stubblebine at July 5, 2008 6:12 AM
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