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In May I flew all the way to Denmark to spend four intensive days at the 9th installment of the Reboot Conference. I traveled solo and knew no more then 5 people before I arrived. I can honestly say I left knowing 100. I never got a chance to post it and it’s still a worthy read.
Reboot’s premise is that it’s extremely healthy to shut everything down regularly and do a hard reboot. While most of the sessions are purposely conceptual, theoretical and philosophical they are all rooted in the reality of the immediate present and I returned home with an extremely confident vision of what the next 6-12 months will hold for web-oriented development. My mind was not blown but my RAM buffer was ;>
The closest U.S. conferences in terms of content experience would be SXSWi (which is much bigger and a much higher percentage of PR, marketing and financiers), BarCamp (which are much smaller but equally forward looking) and WebZine (which is smaller and more open-ended).
As Jeremy Kieth said in his Reboot review this year, you wouldn’t want Reboot to be your only conference of the year (because you miss out on the practical topics) but attending offers web technologists a more profound understanding of exactly what it is we are doing and will be doing.
Here are what I found made Reboot excel at achieving it’s premise.
The event is all in one small building. The is very little reason or temptation to leave.
There is a great but small lawn just outside with a cafe that serves beer and drinks, meaning conversations can flourish and you can’t help but meet others.
The panel schedule is organized, but extra rooms are available for anyone to speak on any topic, unconference-style.
The event organizers do it for the love and purpose it serves. Their own web businesses were not mentioned or promoted anywhere. Seriously their projects we’re even ‘media sponosors’ or on the program materials at all.
The actual event sponsors are passionate about the community. Their dollars are more spent in a goodwill brand-awareness manner then in a calculated ROI.
The website is the best participatory website conference site, period. Attendees can make profiles that allow for easy exploration by matching interest by picking keywords from a finite set. It was easy to comment on panels, events, each other or simply check ‘I was there” or “I am interested”. In the end the site framework could be considered a wiki-enabled social platform and worked excellently.
Every time I asked someone what they did or why they came, they said what their skills or interests were. The name of who they worked for wasn’t nearly as relevant. Conversations stayed squarely focused on the realm of all possible development, not a chest-thumping match or drole name dropping.
Dinner was served at the event the first night. A majority of the people traveled to be there, so most everyone preferred to stay at the event as long as possible.
If you are not European you get a rapid and profound immersion in a much more global understanding of usage, wants and challenges. If you are European you get to confer with your peers, each struggling for the right blend of keep distinct cultural traits in tact, while still offering features universally.
The invited speakers change each year, keeping everything fresh. You can actually sense the evolutionary change as many of the speakers referred to ideas posited at the previous year’s event.
Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, the primary organizer of all nine Reboot events, is a very rare blend of humanist, technologist and entrepreneur. His aspirations for society are high, his moral compass is strong and his business skills are honed from years of use. But the first thing he’ll do when you meet is ask you questions about you’re experiences.
Barked by Ted Rheingold
