"etech" in Weblog

Etech is over and a great time was had by all. Our presentation was dogged by technical difficulties that meant I ended up using old slides but everyone seemed to enjoy it regardless. With hindsight I think Charles and I should have been more clear with our objectives: the talk wasn’t about collective intelligence per se but rather complexity and how that effects interface decisions… Still, I really enjoyed speaking and we had loads of interesting conversations off the back of it.

And that brings me on to the most important aspect of eTech - the conversations. I’ve never found that many sharp people gathered together in one place before. Every person I met seemed to have some combination of skills outside of the norm and brought unique perspectives to bear on every topic. Here are some examples:

I chatted with Timo from Nature about getting academia more involved in sharing knowledge and community building, something he’s been doing for a while and I’ve been talking about with my friend Chris at the EES.

Charles and I talked to a chap called Karl from the Rockefeller Institute about socio-political development, the evolution of civilisations, the long tail of micro-cultures and weak signal detection.

We spent an afternoon with Peter Biddle of Microsoft discussing how the internet is effecting our culture, about what it’s like to work for Bill Gates and where his genius is as a businessman, and how Peter’s managed to carve out a semi-autonomous organisation within Microsoft. That was followed swiftly by a chat about his ideas for reverse market applications and massive medieval battles.

Over another lunch we talked to a bunch of guys about fostering types of community through design, game- and party- dynamics, and how online behaviour is bleeding into the real world.

It was an inspiring and humbling few days. I’m not used to having people not just know what I’m talking about but have had similar conversations before and already have an opinion worked out. It’s not just eTech either. I went out for Matt Buddulph’s leaving San Francisco dinner and drinks with Paul Yahoo, Richard Moo, Blaine Twitter, Tom OpenStreetMap and various Flickr and Yahoo folk. Yet again I was amazed by the level of conversation and the passion for the field we’re in. The meandering conversation ended up on whether our online personas that post twitters for acquaintances to see and comment on strangers’ MySpace pages are bleeding into the real world and changing our personalities. Don’t get me wrong - there was plenty of non-geek chat but the fact that a conversation can take such a techno-philosophical turn says something about the culture out here.

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing that London has a vibrant scene for emerging ideas but after this week I’m starting to think that I was wrong. I’ve been quite involved in bits of the London scene for a couple of years and it’s got a very different character to SF. Technology is to San Francisco what celebrity is to Los Angeles or finance is to New York and the result is a culture whose aspirations and ambitions are in sync. In London we’ve got some of the best executors in the world but do we have the innovators too?

On Sunday I’m packing my bags and heading for San Diego for eTech. I’ve always wanted to go to eTech - it seems to be one of the most interesting events on the circuit - and this year I’m incredibly excited to be speaking! Fellow Tramponaught Charles Armstrong and I are tag teaming Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control… It’s a bit of a mouthful, I know. It should be interesting though and I’m looking forward to it. Charles is doing the first half on the human need to build mental models of the tools they use and I’m going to quickly run through the increasing difficulty in letting them do that with modern emergent systems. Yep.

Straight after the conference I’m going to be hopping in a car and driving to San Francisco via the coast road. I don’t exactly know why but it appeals to me for some reason. I did a long drive down to Key West during The Spring Experience in December and really enjoyed it. This time it’ll be two or three days on the road, staying in motels along the way - a proper road trip. Then I’ve got a few days in SF to just chill, have a look around and take in the sights before heading back to London. It should be a good 10 days!

After 5 good years I’m hanging up my freelancing spurs and settling into a more sedentary existence. Well, not exactly. I’m becoming Head of User Experience at Trampoline Systems. As a small start-up ‘sedentary’ is likely to be completely the wrong word… It’s going to be hard work - we’re up against the big boys - but it’s a really interesting field and the product we’ve been working on, SONAR, is absolutely fascinating. I don’t know whether anyone saw the Enron Explorer, which was our technology proof of concept, but it’s a step-change from that in terms of complexity.

Freelancing has been very good to me. I’ve been privileged to work for and with some really talented and inspiring people, made some good friends and learned a hell of a lot. I’ve been on longer term contracts for most of the last 2 years because I wanted to give myself the time to really get involved in some bigger projects. Over that period I’ve become less interested in web standards per se (it’s just how I do things so I take them for granted now) and more obsessed with problems and how to solve them. The logical next step is to get really involved with a single problem domain and see where that takes me. The Trampoline domain includes collective intelligence, social behaviour and semantics, all of which I love so I’m really looking forward to it.

I still have some loose ends to tie up though - if anyone wants a front end web dev job, check out my post on the Content with Style blog), but I’ll be permanent within the next couple of months. It’s going to be a busy period for me… I really want to get the work I’ve been doing with Wordtracker nicely squared away and I’m speaking at eTech in a few weeks too. I’ve also kicked off a personal project with fellow CwSer Matthias and there’s a small festival site to do as well. Crikey, seeing all that written down is quite intimidating! Roll on 2007.