August had been quiet-productive; September was a little crazy. So much going on, all back to back, side by side, on top of each other. To name just a few, at a strategy retreat we officially took ThingsCon into a new phase (v2!), had another Ignite, brought the Good Home to London Design Festival. More below!
ThingsCon
September was a big month for ThingsCon. We asked our local organizers and most activel community members to join us for a weekend retreat outside Berlin. One of the biggest moments for me personally was when the group officially adopted a mission statement that will serve as the basis for all ThingsCon activities going forward:
ThingsCon fosters the creation of a human-centric & responsible IoT. To this end we provide practitioners with an open environment for reflection & collaborative action.
ThingsCon has been upgraded to v2: a new phase of development for the whole network. Jump on over to the ThingsCon blog to learn more about our retreat and brand-new roadmap.
The Good Home
The Good Home’s presence during London Design Festival (LDF) took place first at the Digital Catapult Centre, then at the V&A Digital Design Weekend as part of Mozilla’s Open IoT showcase.
Among others, Michelle and I hosted a discussion based on our ebook Understanding the Connected Home; but there was tons more including modular furniture, privacy machines, connected screenless toys, an emotional radio, Brexit Bedroom posters and lots more. Head on over to TheGoodHome.org where you’ll find a full list of the projects.
Ignite Berlin
Ignite @ ViewSource took place – a first experiment for Ignite Berlin of joining forces with a larger conference. We had a blast! Videos will be up soon on the Ignite Berlin website.
Dearsouvenir
For Dearsouvenir, it’s the quiet before the storm as we’re getting ready for issue #3. Until then, check out the first two issues in English or German online, for free, both for tablet (iOS and Android) as well as on our recently relaunched website.
German-Japanese Young Leaders Forum
The German-Japanese Young Leaders Forum, a well-established program to promote dialog and cooperation between Germany and Japan, kindly invited me to give a talk about the challenges and opportunities of IoT. It was both an honor and a tremendous joy to talk to this group, and they were quick in pinpointing exactly where currently we see shortcomings in accountability and social impact and identifying how and where IoT should be applied to fix this. It also gave me the rare opportunity to join a reception at the residence of His Excellency, the Japanese Ambassador to Germany. A fantastic day indeed.
A lightweight advisory gig with Bosch HR is about to wrap up, a new and pretty exciting advisory engagement with Google around IoT policy has kicked off. Quite excited about the opportuniy in this one.
In one of the more (most?) random side projects so far—one that pretty much outside my work context, in the evenings and weekend—Michelle and I teamed up with our fashion designer friend Cecilia to make some pretty great travel pants. We hit our Kickstarter goal within 10 days and it’s coming along nicely: Zephyr Berlin on Kickstarter
Writing
I’ve starting a column on #IoT for Netzpiloten (in German), which should be up online shortly.
Also, after some much-needed prodding I restarted my good old simple, quite open-ended, very low frequency newsletter, this time through Revue, a tool that helps provide some structure by making it easy to include external sources. I won’t promise it keeps going more regularly, but if you want to give it a try you can sign up here.
What’s on the horizon?
In loosely chronological order: Jury duty for not-yet-disclosed-great-org. Dearsouvenir issue #3. Mozfest. Shanghai & Shenzhen road trip for ThingsCon.
Talks and workshops at Retune (Berlin), Mozfest (London), ThingsCon Salons Shanghai and Shenzhen, ThingsCon Amsterdam.
