A day at BlogCamp Switzerland

What do 200 Swiss bloggers gathered in Zurich talk about? Blogging, of course -- we're all somehow obsessive. But also about concerns with Putin cranking up censorship in Russia, how to get a business started, and living in a monastery in Germany, among many other things. I spent part of the day at the first Swiss BlogCamp, which took place in the premises of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and was organized by my friends Peter Hogenkamp and Remo Uherek together with Dominik Tarolli and William Lüthy, all engaged entrepreneurs/bloggers/innovation evangelists based in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. It was the first time I attended an "un-conference" (model: BarCamp), where basically the organizers provide an equipped venue, coffee, and an empty board, and whoever wants to give a talk picks a time slot and posts a notice about her/his talk on the board. (This being Switzerland, Peter said, "we've added a thin layer of organization by putting up a wiki page where people could sign up to attend and to speak", giving everybody some advanced visibility on who else would be attending and on the topics of the talks -- but speakers still had to claim a slot upon arrival).

As always at conferences, it has been an opportunity to catch up with some friends, but also to put a face on people I'd previously come across virtually but never met in person, and to make some new acquaintances. People like Gabor Cselle, a smart software engineer from Google; artist and "perennial expat" writer Julie Galante (an American in Switzerland) and cultural explorer Jens Wiese (a German in Switzerland); Sarah Genner, who writes the Zueri-Berlin and the Blogs und Politik blogs; or Evgeny Morozov, the director of new media at Transitions Online, a Prague-based online publication covering the former Soviet region (I used to be an advisor to TOL); and many others. The "un-conference" format worked out very well, generating a good mix of talks in German and English that quickly filled the board. And the discussions were vigorous. I gave a speech about the BondyBlog as an example of citizen media and a metaphor of how journalism in a p2p world is not about either/or but rather about complementarity and hybridization (I've written parts of that story here and here and here, and Stephanie Booth summarized my talk in English while Sarah Genner did so in German), and the small group of about 40 people that heard it engaged in a very lively discussion afterwards. The same energy permeated the breaks. The Swiss blogosphere may still be searching for its identity, may still be trying to define its contours as a social actor and, as I said during my session, we are still a couple of years behind the US and other countries in terms of the political impact of blog-empowered citizens (I use the word "blog" here as shorthand for an ensemble of tools), but the thoughtfulness and no-nonsense and smart that I saw today was inspiring.

I was so occupied talking with people than I only attended two speeches. Here are my short running notes.

Stephanie Booth is a blogger from Lausanne and spoke about the challenges of multilingual blogging (she does so in English and French). The Internet collapses space and rubs out borders, she said, but not cultures. How do we know what's going on in the other language-spheres? We need to find a way to "travel". I you don't speak Portuguese, you can still go to Lisbon and walk around the old town and enjoy it. You can't do that online -- walking around the Portuguese blogosphere -- if you don't know the language. She stresses the need for bridgebloggers to fill that gap --  “weblogs that reach across gaps of language, culture and nationality to enable communication between individuals in different parts of the world”, to use a definition by Ethan Zuckerman -- offering some strategies: creating translation networks ("getting people together that are going to translate a couple of posts a month from others in the network"), for example, setting up translation portals; add foreign-language excerpts or summaries to blog posts.
Stephanie actually hits on a problem that's not exclusive to blogs. It actually exists in most information-spheres (including the traditional media, where the role of the "bridgeblogger" is supposed to be played by correspondents and international reporters, who are in charge of "translating" foreign news and cultures for their domestic readership) and is becoming an issue in software. On one hand, more and more of our daily life is being supported by software; on the other, an increasing number of people know more than one language to some extent. Yet most software (and most blogging tools) assume that you are working/writing/reading/thinking/interacting/blogging in only one language.

Remy Blaettler is a young entrepreneur and co-founded three months ago a company called Supertext, which is an online text-tuning agency -- people e-mail in texts, flyers, brochures, etc, and the Supertext network of writers and texters "fine-tunes" them. He and his colleagues found inspiration for how to run the company in a book published by 37signals, a Chicago company that's well-known in tech circles for having developed online tools such as the project management software BaseCamp and the open-source application development framework called RubyOnRails. The guys at 37signals distilled their way to start a company and develop a software product into a controversial book called "Getting Real" (buy it in PDF or read the free HTML version) and Remy's speech was a cheat sheet for people who had not read it (like myself. I know about 37signals and their products, but never came around to read their text).

• The main claim of the book is: Less is more. "Underdo your competition". You cannot outrun Microsoft with more features, says Remy, but if you try with fewer features (but more ease of use, speed, etc), you might succeed. "Use the 80/20 rule: 80% of the users need only 20% of the functionalities, so build for that 80%. Leave out what doesn't matter. Ask people not what they want, but what they don't want: if you implement everything that people request you would have the most complex system ever". It's not against adding new features, of course: it's about adding them only selectively.
• Second point: Feel the pain. Have all the staff in the same place; put developers into customer support (so that they get the complaints about the system they developed); make them use the system they built.
• Third: release early and often. Remy worked with big corporations, developing huge project with cycles of 3 or more years (specifications, testing, etc). What 37signals suggests is: build small pieces, release them, get feedback, then you can develop the next thing. "Never extend the deadline: if you're late, cut features". "Don't wait until you have the perfect product, put it into the wild as early as possible". But of course, doing half doesn't mean doing half-baked.
• Fourth: delete your to-do list. 37signals claims that they read the requests for features that they get from users but they neither log them, track them, nor build to-do-lists based on them. If a feature request is important, there is no need to track it: you are reading them, so it will come back again and again and again, and you will know it.
• Fifth: Easy on, easy off. Let people get into the app easily (most developers focus on that) but also let them get out of the application easily. (He's talking about signup and cancellation; about data import and export: "don't lock people in: build trust instead".)
• Six: Bad news are good news. "Don't fear bad news; don't hide your mistakes, explain them; be transparent".
• Seven: Where is the fire? Know who's talking about you (use Google Alerts, Digg, etc), know if someone is trying to clone your business; talk back, be an active member of the community, monitor and learn from competitors.
• Eight: your idea is worthless ("The most brilliant idea with no execution is worth nothing; a weak idea with great execution is worth millions"; "Don't hoard your ideas").

There are many other points in the book, and most of the above can be challenged convincingly (for example the fourth point: sometimes a really good request only comes in once). My interrogation however is: can these ideas be applied to other fields than software (or software-based services and information)? Can they be applied for example to journalism and publishing? Or to the creation of complex physical products? You can't put a "half car" on the market, or a "half aircraft" in the air, or can you? Maybe you can, actually: after all what EasyJet and Ryanair and the other low-cost airlines basically did is taking costly features out of the traditional airline business, releasing an "essential" version of flying to people for which that was enough.

PS: As Peter Hogenkamp reminds in the comments, there was a makeshift photo studio at BlogCamp, organized and manned by Christian Leu, where attendees were asked to take a picture of themselves (through a remote control). 140 of them did. The result: the first collective portrait -- albeit very very partial -- of the Swiss blogosphere. It's up on Flickr -- or see them in a 23-seconds animation:

PPS: Who is Christoph Blogger? The question was asked at BlogCamp as an experiment. It's a made-up name that sounds like that of the Swiss Minister of Justice -- Christoph Blocher. Another Swiss Minister, Moritz Leuenbenger, launched a few days ago his blog -- first member of the government to do so. The organizers of the BlogCamp decided to test how fast the "Christoph Blogger" meme can spread around the Swiss blogosphere, created a blog, and let it loose. It's here.

Comments

[Peter Hogenkamp]

Thanks for attending and for the summary in typical Bruno-style.
Have you seen the pictures on Flickr? I like them. (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/leumund/sets/72157600024685707/)
It was a great idea by Christian Leu (http://www.leumund.ch) to set up the photo station. He borrowed all the equipment from a friend, dragged it to Zurich, managed the station all day and uploaded the pictures. That's BarCamp spirit.
Glad you were there.
Peter

[BrunoG]

Thanks Peter. Here another example of BlogCamp spirit: during my speech in the morning I used Transitions Online (http://www.tol.org) as an example, and pointed out Evgeny Morozov of TOL who was in the room, saying a few things about them. Which apparently offered him a context for a speech, since after the session he went to check the board, saw that a slot was still available, and pinned the title of his talk on it.
Thanks for organizing. B-

[leu]

Thanks Bruno and Peter
For those not having time to look at 150 pictures in Flickr, there is the fast Version with all pictures in a movie. Blogcampers in 23 seconds.

Thank you for taking also the time to make a photograph of yourself.

@peter
I'm preparing a photobook for you and the other guys organizing blogcamp.

[Fredy]

I see I missed a great event, but I'm on the way to the Global Peering Forum http://www.peeringforum.com/ and unfortunately I had to decide.

[Remo Uherek]

Bruno, thanks for this great summary!

Greetings from Cannes,
Remo

[Remy Blaettler]

Thanks a lot for mentioning my speech in your blog. We put the slides online today:
http://remy.supertext.ch/?p=16
Maybe we get a Swiss Version of 37signals soon.

[Stephanie Booth]

Here's a link to the notes I had more or less prepared for my session on multilingual blogging.

http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/03/25/blogcamp-multilingual-blogging-session/

[Greg Vernon]

Bruno: Thanks again for letting me tape your talk.

I have uploaded a video of Bruno's talk. The direct link is:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3695037112486801938&hl=en

I will have three other videos uploaded soon as well from Stephanie Booth, Dannie Jost and Evgeny Morozov's talks. I will post links to them when they are uploaded, via my blog:

http://cascades2alps.blogspot.com