Yesterday was the first day of the LIFT Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. The LIFT Conference is a one-of-a-kind conference where people actually get to decide who gets to talk and what gets presented for at least half of the program. This is a kind of "social conference" in some sense, which is perfectly in line with its objectives.

Today was the workshops day. There were 10 AM workshops and 10 PM workshops to choose from. And, of course, those had been previously selected by the participants, remember? Anyway... All of them were probably quality workshops, so the choice was quite tough. I decided to go to the one called "Upgrade your company - Industrial Opportunities for the Internet of Things" by Vlad Trifa from SAP Research. The reason I chose this topic wasn't because I'm an expert in the IoT domain, which I'm not, but merely because I wanted to learn and hear about new things. The workshop was actually a thinking and brainstorming session about the technological, social, interactional and business aspects of intelligent, fault-tolerant, self-reconfigurable, name-your-uber-adjective-here sensor networks, where a sensor can basically be any kind of devices (cellphones, earplugs, cameras, traffic lights, GPS receivers, door actuators, etc). In other words, what kind of concerns consumers could have towards new ways of building ad-hoc sensor networks by connecting new or existing devices together in order to create new kinds of applications and collective intelligence. NB: by "consumers" Vlad actually meant both technology consumers (i.e., the developers) and end-user consumers.

Vlad then mentioned the "New Songdo City" project, a multi-billion dollars project whose goal is to create from scratch a brand new futuristic city located west of Seoul in Korea using all kinds of cutting-edge technologies around and see in which ways it could affect people. According to him, this would be a great opportunity to test the above sensor networks ideas in real-world settings with real people having real activities, and not in some kind of lab were researchers and inventors have no clue of the real needs of end-users.

Of course, the discussion digressed a little bit (pretty natural and sane for a brainstorming session, isn't it). We came to speak about a couple cases were technology was not used for what the inventors had initially intended to. The first memorable case was the one of Uganda fishers who are using cellphones as an e-payment system, but not as a communication medium. It basically goes like this: after getting back from fishing, the fisher sells his fishes to buyers who "text" him some credits by SMS. The fisher would then go to the bank and "cash in" the credits he received by SMS.

A second case: someone can unlock a bicycle by "calling it", and he gets billed for the whole time during which he has unlocked the bicycle. Third case: in Amsterdam, people can pay their parking spot by calling a number and typing in their spot number.

Although, I was a little skeptikal at the beginning, this actually turned out to be a very interesting session, during which I could even identify a couple potential business ideas... I'll probably talk more about that in a later post ;)

The PM workshop, "Online Communities Clinic" by Pedro Custodio, was all about online communities and how to build them correctly. Pedro is a web developer and in the course of his work, he came up with what he calls "Community Design Patterns", sort of like the GoF equivalent for designing online communities. I could unfortunately not attend the practical part of the session, but the presentation was quite good and the slides were nice and polished.

The patterns he presented were divided into four categories and for each pattern he explained when to use it and what kind of potential problem to look for when using it. Here is a quick enumeration of those categories and the related patterns (available here):

• Community support: quick registration, login, welcome area, user profile, user gallery, buddy list
• Group support: group building, invitations, shared editing, reputation, voting
• Communications: messaging, chat, comments, forums/blogs
• Awareness: neighbors, interactive user info, activity logs, timeline, periodic reports, aliveness indicators

All in all, this was a very interesting day. I'll provide more feedback today about the conference. Stay tuned...

Related posts:
LIFT 08 - Day 2
LIFT 08 - Day 3