Webstock used to be my no-miss conference until this week. It’s like a combined rock festival and party for geeks – the learning and fun are intense and amazing. If Webstock was a keyword it would be “awesome”.
Nethui was not a rock festival, and less of a party in terms of headiness. Yes, there were superstars like Lessig. Yes the were miraculous acts of collaboration like the special on-off licence for that audience in that room granted by the BBC for a one-off showing of their documentary The Virtual Revolution. You might have watched it, but you can’t say you’re one of the few people in the country who have done so legally. Both of those wonderful things were not what the three days were about – quite the opposite.
The three days were about New Zealanders coming together to look at the challenges of the future and start the conversation around the question, “What do we do now?” It is easy to be brave in an environment in which one’s heroes are on the stage. At Nethui, we were required to be the heroes, in all our everyday ordinariness, speaking in that drab accent we wince at when we hear it from our neighbours and carrying all of the feelings of cultural unworth we New Zealanders seem to cherish.
There are plenty of good summations of the event available – I recommend Russell Brown‘s usual solid effort as a good starter for ten. You can even be a virtual attendee of large parts by viewing the videos collected here.
But if you weren’t there, and you had a question, answer or idea nobody else in the room did – then it wasn’t just you that missed out, it was all of us.
Don’t worry, libraries were well represented. In the last combined session on access, someone at one of the mics said the following:
“It’s not like you can go down to your local library for a lesson on how to use the internet.”
“Yes you can,” came a voice from the far side of the auditorium. I’m not sure who – but I have a suspicion it might have been a new friend from Dargaville. *waves* Whoever it was, they have my applause. *applauds*
When you’re “at the mic” you can often can only keep one thought in your head. “No, but you can’t just go your local library and…”
And then what you really should have been there for happened.
We, all of us from libraries, sitting wherever we were gave him the SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
Sigh
I wanted too… I really did…
Next time.
Awesome post, yes the ordinary people being heroes was a great way to put it.
Thank you! Funnily enough I was listening to Blur’s “Common People” the other night – must have influenced my thoughts.
I really would have loved to have gone. I feel split so many different ways at the moment.
Have so much on at work. Am loving it all, but feel like I am missing out on stuff too!
I know what I should speak about at our unconference now . . . hopefully others will be just as interested
!
Even though I don’t work in the more IT oriented areas of librarianship, I really wish I could have gone. I got involved on the last day by watching the live stream and tweeting out a few controversial comments that got responses. I really enjoyed what I saw of the last day and wish I could have been there. Only thing is… I think I might have reasonably quickly got frustrated by the real IT geeks there – I am firmly a mainstream adopter of technology – not an early adopter.
There was a great range of people there – not just the “real” IT geeks.
Hope I’m not one of them… in fact I definitely know I’m not. I’m more of a public policy geek.
At the end someone asked the audience who didn’t have an ipad, 3/4ers of the audience put their hand up. Then he asked how many wanted an ipad, and virtually nobody put their hand up. I’m sure this had a lot to do with open-source sentiments, but it does go to show that there is a difference between early adopters and your true IT geek diy mentality.
The conference wasn’t about IT stuff at all, it was about where the internet is going conceptually. It was about the new information commons, both infrastructure and content. It was about was about access and the digital divide and about the necessity for the civic engagement of the community.
Libraries were the original information commons, and we need to constantly remind the IT crowd of this.
Thanks Mandy – yes definitely that’s the sense I came away with.
I felt that some of our colleagues in the profession saw it as a professional development and networking con. Each of those happened, and in abundance, but it wasn’t what it was all about by any stretch of the imagination.
I’ve been exploring the notion of us as the original sharers, which I guess is the same as information commons. I remember a training session where a corporate IT person launched their new product with “Who here knows what a taxonomy is”?
He was mighty surprised to find that someone did, and could describe it better than “a way to organise files on a computer”.