MyTweetMag Blog

re:publica reviewed

After my first impressions from the re:publica in 2010 I joined this quite big blogger- and digital-event the second time in 2011. As I moved from Hamburg to Berlin three month ago the event took place literally in my neighborhood (well, at the Friedrichstadt-Palast, about 10 minutes by bike).

What I like most is the international presence at the re:pulika: This year there were speakers from diaspora or flattr for example, others from uk, africa, and so on. What I did not like this year: The smaller event-location (for workshops and so on) “Kalkscheune” was totally overcrowded and I didn’t had the chance to visit a single event there. What I don’t like too is the quite poor documentation of the event: There have been a lot of film-teams and cameras, but I do not find any streams, any presentations or anything else on their homepage.

Enough critics, because there have been a lot of personal highlights, too. Three examples:

Play the news

Markus Boesch, a guy with a good sence of humor from my old homebase Cologne, gave us some really entertaining insights into the world of newsgaming. I’m quite unfamiliar with this topic, but already thought about integrating some game-aspects into MyTweetMag. You should read his blog if you want to get some more informations about this topic, that had it’s first hype some years ago (in the 2000-ties, as he told us). He also introduced his prototype of a newsgame, quite puristic and a bit trashy, but It’s fun and opens up your mind:

Crowd-Funding (e.g. for movie-makers)

Crowdfunding (and crowdsourcing) was of big interest this year and there was a whole slot at the republika that covered only this topic – with nice discussions from Ibo Evsan, Ulrike Langer or Richard Gutjahr.
The most interesting point for me where the examples of crowd-funding projects in the movie-industry, introduced by Wolfgang Gumpelmaier. The examples show, that the crowdfunding-plattforms provide a lot of new possibilities, but that you must have a clear marketing-strategy if you want to get a successful funding there. The fancy thing in my eyes is, that you can test your marketing-strategy, collect some money and build a pre-launch-community at the same time. But what happens, if you don’t get enough people and if you don’t finish your funding? (crowdfunding is mostly based on the “get all or nothing” principle, so if you don’t reach your funding-limit, you get nothing). Funny but a bit uninteresting in this way was the interview with diaspora (an open-souce facebook-like project), that asked for 10.000 at the crowdfunding-plattform kickstarter and got more than 200.000 at the end. The guy from diaspora was a totally nerdy coder with – I think – a texas-slang, and, well, he seemed to be a bit – bewildered?
Well, here are some slides from the speech about alternative movie-financing-methods:

Map-Activism

I already listened to an interesting discussion from map-activists (maptivism) at the republica 2010. This year I was lucky and stumbled upon a speech of Patrick Meier (not from germany but from africa) about “Changing the World, One Map at a Time”. He is part of the Ushahidi-Project (a free mapping-software) and of the International Network of Crisismapper. It was very interesting to hear how everything started with the Haiti-catastrophe, then raised again in the civil-war in libya and finally helped at the catastrophe in Japan with very detailed crowd-sourced maps. Everything reminded me a bit on the interesting article about the “web squared” from O’Reilly and others, a theory that didn’t hype a lot, but might be visible in such kind of project: That the impact of the web-technology and the digital society to the real world is becomming a main-aspect of the post-2.0-web.





I’m not into theories, but I definitely like that kind of activism. And actually I think about becoming an Online-Volunteer for Live-Mapping at the StandBy Task Force. By the way, I think this is more interesting than the lot discussed initiative “Die Digitale Gesellschaft” (The Digital Society), that has been founded by the republika-initiators, but seems to lack in regard of openess, transparency and so on (well, but it’s a start, maybee they will make their way…).