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 sem ...
Anytime
