April 20th, 2010 Posted in Computing, General | 1 Comment »
Last Friday I attended the annual Innovative Ideas Forum at the National Library of Australia (NLA). This event brings together speakers from a range of backgrounds to deliver presentations around the theme of innovation to an audience mostly drawn from those who have a relationship with the NLA. I was there because I work for the National Archives and indeed I saw several archives colleagues there, heard many conversations around me in the audience from librarians, observed a few people from the Free and Open Source Software Community and I recognised a handful of academics. I think that the majority of those who attended were from the cultural sector one way or another, but it was a big auditorium and very full, so I may have missed a lot of people.
At the outset, Warwick Cathro, an NLA Assistant Director General (wearing an NLA promotional T Shirt!) exhorted the audience to live-blog with the tag iif2010 or to tweet with the hashtag #iif2010. The free wireless network available in the auditorium made this possible, but not necessarily easy. I brought along a very capable little EeePC netbook with which I took notes and watched the twitter stream. I’m not sure how anyone can listen properly to a speaker, interpret projected presentation slides, take notes and tweet at the same time. I managed three out of four with a lot of concentration but I collected barely 1489 words of notes across 6 speakers through the day. I may have had a better Twitter experience if the netbook didn’t keep needing to have its network connection reset. I even tried Tweetdeck during the morning session in an attempt to stay connected but I think the whole Twitter side of the event was lost on me.
The first speaker was Dr Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist working for Intel Corp in the USA. Just the idea that Intel employs an anthropologist had me sit up and take notice. Genevieve combined stellar public speaking skills with an incredibly interesting insight into her past and into the fascinating work that she does for Intel and others in looking into the reality of household and personal circumstances now and in the future. Her insights into changing global demographic trends touched on an ageing population, increasing urbanisation, more single occupant homes, greater influence from non western countries and the purchasing power of women - among many other things. Her 50 minutes passed all too quickly.
You possibly know Mark Pesce from such TV shows as The New Inventors. Mark delivered a meticulously prepared and thoughtful presentation loosely concerned with eBooks (whither the book?). He tempers passion with panache, exposed his conviction with a deft touch and drew us into a carefully constructed thesis on the current and future state of the book. I’m still re-reading his blog.
Brianna Laugher drew an interesting parallel between Wikipedia’s impact on the world and its impact on her. Her diplomatic language around Wikipedia’s current troubles and the possible virtue of forks made it hard to see where she stands in the current circumstances. Good points about the ways in which the Internet makes it easy for any idea to have a chance because up front costs are insignificant but the observation that failure (and plenty of it) comes for free. Central theme seemed to be the idea of taking off-line the collaboration skills learned online to boost other projects.
Kent Fitch is a programmer working at the NLA. Great to see a member of the NLA’s IT staff take the stage to deliver a presentation. That it was clever and insightful was a bonus. That it showcased a new style of presentation delivery was icing on the cake and of great interest to me. I truly cannot imagine the same from my own organisation’s IT department. I think Kent probably made too much use of quoting historical or contemporary thinkers but his central message that libraries need to embrace revolutionary technologies (as he was clearly doing) made sense and was well supported by his presentation.
Lunch in the library’s foyer was oustanding and catered by the library’s own Bookplate cafe. A great range of sandwiches, tandoori chicken skewers, hot quiches, small boxes of delightful Mediterranean pasta salad, fresh fruit, mineral water, fruit juice, tea and coffee. I regretted having but one stomach to bring to the occasion. Delicious!
I have seen Nick Gruen speak before and he’s good value. I bet he has a wikipedia page. Yes, he does. When he started and said that he’d be talking about the economy as a machine for making and managing information, I cringed and expected a talk I might sleep through. Bzzzt. Wrong. Nick laid out a thesis concerning a spectrum of public good in which governments have a role in maintaining centralised services (e.g. lighthouses) and private concerns generate other decentralised public goods like gmail and facebook and twitter.
After laying some groundwork, Dr Gruen explored the idea of uncolonised parts of the public good spectrum into which government departments might start to deploy services somewhere between the conservative old world and the new frontier while aiming to serve the public good.
The final speaker was Rob Manson from a Sydney based Augmented Reality development company, MOB. Rob has an obvious passion for technology and its uses. He spoke about the ubiquity of sensors now - smartphones have accelerometers, gps, compass and cameras. Tiny sensors are cheap and can talk to a network. These sensors mean that most of us cast a ‘digital shadow’ whether we intend to or not. He finished with his personal wondering… with all of this information convergence, will I feel as much like an individual in the future?
For me, the day was a great success. A series of very thoughtful and engaging speakers. I learned much on the day and I have a great deal more to ponder and follow up until this time next year. Roll on iif2011.