Lift 12, New Futures: Julien Dorra [en]

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Julien Dorra’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

Being together in the same space. But let’s first talk about cyberspace! Looking for papers in the office and we wish we had the “search” feature to find them. Cyberspace is fun, engaging, we learn, etc., most of our time spent in cyberspace.

Meetings are boring, brainstormings fail to innovate, and conferences… we can’t bridge the gap when we go back to work.

University: students on computers, and facebook is always more interesting than class.

In 2009, involved in drupal community in France. Dev sprints. Offline, around a table. In an office. Set a bunch of goals and work on it together. A week, three days… depends.

“Sprint” is not a good word, it’s more a way to be out of the day-to-day flow and concentrate on the product. “What, you’re going to Paris for a whole week, not see the Louvre, and look at a computer 12 hours a day?”

Accelerates the project! Meatspace gives you unlimited bandwidth.

Sprints: self-organizing, physical location is irrelevant, workflow is not formatted. Only developers!

A few weeks later, Julien participated in the first startup week-end Paris.

From the outside, looks like a sprint. But…

• it’s a local event (locality is important)
• variety of communities represented
• the format is also designed.

Learning is the key goal here, the output is not that important.

Now, let’s focus on the output: Artgame Week-end. Produce a usable game in 48 hours, with participation of artists.

People are not always open to this kind of event: “I need a developer. Will I be ensured I’ll work on my project?” Exploratory, diversity of participants, focus on the output.

Artgame week-end impacted mainly the online world and didn’t really reach out of Paris.

Reaching beyond innovations: Museomix. Implement ideas of digital integration directly in the museum. Needed to take place in the museum. You have to design for the place. Strict process in terms of output. At first, museum people very skeptic regarding the output. But now, 5 projects the museum is actively seeking funding for. Now there is a community of museumx-ers. 70 participants but many more in the community.

Wide inclusion, tangible output and impact, remix of a museum. Had to move things around in the museum, not simple!

Different approaches to the place, the community, the output in these four types of events.

Back to the 20th century. Strong historic taboo against this type of event.

20th century, factury is optimum organization. Worker-machine. Information flow is maybe top-down, but nobody needed to know what the neighbour was doing.

Now we’re hyperconnected to everybody, we know what others are doing, and that the factory is not the optimum model anymore. The spring principle applies to many different domains (sprint !== rush).

Serial collaborators are people able to contribute to any type of event. Diverse skills and talents give you stronger, richer output.

steph-note: this is making me want to participate in one of these events… maybe the next startup week-end here?

Don’t set up an event and try and build a community. Reach into your existing communities and then build events for them.

Interesting: had people from other museums coming to work for museumx!