Below, in short, you’ll find: Thanks! International geeks! Interview! Party photos! Food! Smart cities! Drumbeat!
#Thanks! Wow, what a week. Big thanks and props to the team behind re:publica 2010. Like the last few years, it’s been a blast and incredibly well organized.
#International geeks! Yet something has changed over the last years it seems – to the better in my point of view – and that is: more international geeks. It might just be my personal perception, but I think the number of talks in English back it up: More international geeks have shown up this year. Republica has managed to become the most important geek (“geek” as in “non-corporate”) conference in Germany, and the folks outside Germany started noticing. For me that’s always a good sign, as the web scene here is pretty fragmented and really needs focal points like this. (Small side note: Lots of talks had English titles but were in German which led to some confusion.) So: If you want to get to know the German geeks, republica is the place to go.
#Interview! Speaking of change in the conference scene – and again, this is just a personal feeling – it seems to me that the less marketing and PR and agency focused conferences (republica, SXSW, barcamps and what not) keep getting more and more important. Of course, they’re each aimed at different audiences and different kinds of exchanges take place at these very different event categories (geek vs corporate event, conference vs trade fair etc). To over-simplify: On one, knowledge and personal respect are exchanged; on the other, financial deals are made. Yet, to me it seems like the lower-profile events that are aimed at those that do cool stuff will be giving the much more expensive, agency-centered conferences a run for their money. Let’s see how that plays out. Markus Richter of Trackback kindly interviewed me briefly about the role of web conferences (in German), here. (There’s also a bunch of great CC-licensed music to be found there.)
#Party photos! Also this week, my friends Igor, Caroline and I organized a party with the support of Tumblr, Tribaspace and Ketchum Pleon. Check out the photos!
#Food! Having two foodies visiting, the whole week we were out looking for great food and coffee. If you’re visiting, don’t miss out on: Bonanza Coffee Heroes and Espresso Ambulanz, Korean BBQ at Kimchi Princess and a tea time at Chen Che. Unlike will show you the way.
#Smart cities! Igor Schwarzmann and Johannes Kleske gave a talk on smart cities and how cities can be discovered in more playful manners by using technology. Their talk “Playful Urbanism” will be is up on video soon. (I’ll be posting it here, too.) You can watch their talk “Playful Urbanism” on video below and read up on the whole thing here. Igor had already talked about Smart Cities at Ignite Berlin, and they also write the blog cognitivecities.com. So along with a few others, we decided to have an event this fall around the same topic. Updates and more details soon.
Update: The video is posted below, and here’s the write-up with all the links.
#Drumbeat! Mozilla Drumbeat is all about keeping/making the web open. Drumbeat will be coming to Berlin with a full-day event on 8 May. You should be there. (I certainly will.)
While I’ll catch up on a bunch of links, I might be updating this post to include some videos or more links. But first it’s time to catch some rays.
Update: The good folks over at pl0g asked participants to tag the conference (in German):
