In 1999, David Bowie saw the internet as an “alien life form”. He saw that humanity was on the cusp of something both exhilarating and terrifying: it was a breakdown of the barriers between creators and their communities. Instead of a piece of art or information being broadcasted one-way to an audience, it was becoming more of a dialogue, where the thing that originates from a creator isn't finished until the audience comes in and add their own interpretation. From there the piece evolves, gets sampled and remixed in ways that the creator couldn't have possibly imagined. Bowie called this area where creators and their communities meet "the gray space in the middle": a powerful new area of engagement where the most interesting things happen, and he predicted that this space is what the 21st century was going to be all about…
Idea to Event: Behind the Scenes at ThoughtWorks Talks Tech #1
We take time out of our busy lives to attend things and often forget to evaluate whether or not the returns from our being there justify the investment of that time and effort. I've been to whole-day conferences where there was no information about where everything was at the venue, sessions strayed off the agenda, speakers came unprepared... and on the other hand I've also been to conferences that were easy to navigate, and every session had some gem to write home about. What did the organizers do differently that led to these different outcomes? My experiences and learnings from helping to put on ThoughtWorks first tech talk event of 2018 in Thailand.