Etech is over

• 4^th April 2007
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• Filed Under: Weblog, The Internet
• tagged with: etech, twitter, yahoo, dopplr, san francisco, london

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?

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