summary of re:publica 11, day 1

Today was the first day opening the re:publica XI, the conference about online trends and digital stuff. To sum up: A lot of workshops, interesting speakers, exiting topics and… nerds.
LOOM was of course there and has attended couples of speeches & workshops:

The first speaker, Philipp Schäfer head of the Munich’s office of ideo presented us the project open ideo, a platform similar to open simsim from Berlin. However open idea is more oriented to daily life improvements. With the difficult mission to open the conference, he has once again proven that design thinking and cross-sourcing can have a huge influence on human conditions.
Share inspiration, comment, evaluate…everybody can participate in its own way.

The second lecture was about privacy & freedom. Gabriella Coleman explained us how Anonymous appears (on 4chan) and the evolution to Wikilieaks’ and Tunisia’s cases. This community is - as far as we know - the biggest hacker group ever gathered for offensive purposes. During the Anon Op agains Paypal, VISA and Mastercard, more than 7.000 people were present online on IRC, ready to attack.
It will be now interesting to observe what will be the future evolution of this community: how will be the next generation integrated to the group? (since this one has its own code and is indisposed to share with previous one) Will they succeed to stay anonymous? Can they continue surviving without real leader? All these organizational questions have to be solved for the community’s sake…

Then, the Deutsche Welle talked about digital revolutions, in particular the role of social media in the Middle East & Africa conflicts. Claire Ulrich and Amira Al Hussaini emphasized its importance in the way of transmitting information. Ludger Schadomsky nuanced this last point in affirming that al jaziera is still the major media actor with the biggest influence in the arabic countries(despite its arguable objectivity in these conflicts). Facebook stays for example a second plan actor with a penetration quotient inferior as 1% in some countries in Africa.

One of the last lectures was Sasha Lobo’s with his troll study and theory.
His experience is based on his own blog: 344 troll comments, 200 troll-free.
To sum up:
- A troll isn’t provoking by itself but can provoke the feelings of the readers.
- A troll doesn’t necessarily use “I”, it’s all about the virtual “we”-perspective
After showing us (classical) successful examples of trolling (that can be typically found on apple forums), he finished his speech in relating several trolling situations that happened to him in the past.
This guy is like AC/DC, you’d better see him live (German speakers, we advise you to check his video as soon as it will be online).

To conclude this first day has mostly gravitated around the ethic role of internet and its possible consequences in the (offline) reality. The intervention of Sascha Lobo gave fresh note to this “trollful” day. We can’t wait for day two !