Katie
Learnings from Webstock 2016
Last week I travelled down to Wellington to attend the 10th Webstock. Webstock is a celebration of the web and it’s makers, featuring industry leaders delivering TED talk quality presentations. The conference itself is incredibly well organised, and is attended by about 800 friendly, talented, helpful and knowledgeable people. As usual, there was specially brewed Garage Project beer and this year, coconut ice cream, which are two things I particularly love - thanks Webstock!
Leading up to the conference some people were grumbling that it wasn’t going to be a particularly tech focussed conference, despite the fact that many of the speakers are the leaders in their fields and leading the way in areas such as responsive design, web usability, content strategy, CSS architecture, etc. And while I’ve attended and loved some of the more technical talks at Webstock in the past (Kitt’s 2013 presentation on automation and the command line is one of my all time favourites), sometimes it is more important to address the bigger, overarching issues that affect us all. Besides, Webstock has historically had poets, musicians and activists speak, and if you’re wanting to learn something technical, you can usually find another attendee who is willing to have a chat and point you in the right direction.
So, while Keavy could have talked about her role as an engineer at GitHub and Harry could have taught us about CSS architecture and scaling - that can be learned in many other places - instead, with each speaker we learned insights about our own identities, about community, about trust, about rejection, about ignorance, about fighting global surveillance, about reframing experiences, about being good people, about helping others become happy and healthy people, about new ways of interacting and communicating with people, about ways that *things* interact with us.
Despite some contradiction and contrast between talks, combined, these insights created a critical yet somehow balanced overarching theme about how we, as individuals, as developers, as companies, as communities, can make a change through the way we interact with others. Have integrity in yourself and the work you do. Give people as many tools and as much freedom as needed to create with as much autonomy as possible. Have passion and enthusiasm for what you do. Create what you can with what you’ve got. Leave old ideas behind. Invest in the planet. Have humanity. Be real.
There were so many highlights, it’s impossible to pick a favourite presentation, but at the same time it feels like Webstock was bigger than the individual presentations. Even now, I’m still digesting everything I soaked up and making connections between various points the speakers touched on and how they relate to ongoing conversations and thoughts we’ve been having here at Webscope. I recommend you keep an eye out for when the presentations are available to watch online. And don’t forget, the internet is more than just what we do.
