The document summarizes a workshop held at the Reboot 11 conference in Copenhagen that explored how to better engage technologists and innovators outside traditional policy circles in discussions around European technology policy. Over the course of two days, the workshop included expert presentations on topics like technology innovation and startups, followed by facilitated discussions and brainstorming sessions. Key topics discussed included how governments can better support small businesses and startups, improving access to government data, and enabling more participation in policymaking processes. The workshop aimed to test engaging non-traditional stakeholders in policy debates and generate novel ideas around technology policy.

1. Workshop Report
Future-building for Wikicrats. Workshop held at Reboot 11, June 25-26, Copenhagen
Initiated by Information Society and Media; the department for ICT addressing societal challenges.
Organised for the European Commission by Bror Salmelin and Nadia El-Imam.
Disclaimer: This report summarises the outcome of the workshop held in the Reboot 2009 event. It represents the view of
the rapporteur and the participants, and is not binding the European Commission in its actions.
Report by Nadia EL-Imam :www.linkedin.com/nadiaelimam.com Emailt: nnegash@gmail.com Skype: niasan

2. How to use this document
Document organisation
This document is divided into three sections. The first, “Where we started” presents our hypothesis as well as
some general information about the Reboot event and why we decided to hold the first Wikicrats workshop
there. The second section, “Where we got to”, presents the workshop results and a summary documentation of
its contents including a summary of the major discussions that took place. The third section, “Where to go next
“, puts forward proposals for further action as suggested by participants in the workshop.
I used many quotations from sessions to render the lively participatory atmosphere of the workshop sessions at
Reboot. These quotations are not attributed to named individuals as we do not have written consent from all the
participants to do so. In addition to the author´s own material, some photos used in the document come from
Ton Zijlstra- and Martin Bauer´s flickr accounts ( tagged “wikicrats”) and are used under a Creative Commons
license. Special thanks to Fredrik Smedberg for his help in documenting the workshop.
Report by Nadia EL-Imam :www.linkedin.com/nadiaelimam.com Emailt: nnegash@gmail.com Skype: niasan

3. Aidanmedia
Table of Contents
Where we started
4
Our hypotheses
4
About the workshop
4
Where we got to
7
What happened
7
What was discussed
8
Discussion tied to expert presentations
8
Discussions tied to brainstorming sessions
11
Results
13
Where to go next
15
Final recommendations: the need for an interface
15
Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen
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Nadia EL-Imam
Today, 12:59 f.m.
Added Text

4. Where we started
Our hypotheses
It seems that European technology policy is not discussed by the people most affected by it. This had been the
subject of an ongoing conversation between Bror Salmelin, myself and others at Echallenges 2008 and
elsewhere. As a result of this ongoing conversation the following hypotheses were formulated:
• There is a significant difference in use of ICT amongst netizens and how public administrations work.
The way the net culture is using ICT can be a seen as a model for ordinary users in the near future. It is
therefor necessary to bridge this gap.
• There is a hidden interest to participate in and be involved in European policy processes amongst the
tech literate outside the Brussels circuit. Whether or not people wish to engage with government and
public administration depends on many different factors all of which together render any individual
initiative interesting and credible or not; initiatives that succeed in engaging the community are must be
grounded in the culture and values of the community in all its components from ideation though to
delivery and assessment.
• There is a gap between ICT innovation policies and ICT innovation practice. We think net culture and
communities can be engaged in helping to bridge it.
About the workshop
We decided to test our hypothesis by experimentally creating an interaction locus between Euro- tech policies
and people who normally don´t take part in the policy debate. The way we decided to go about this was to set
up a workshop at Reboot, a hacker conference.
This workshop was an experiment in engaging people outside the Brussels circuit in the discussion about
governance, policy modelling and technology innovation in Europe. The broader objective for doing so is the
pursuit of solid technology and societal policy in the knowledge society in order to achieve sustainable societal
behaviour;
“The workshop/event in Reboot is to be seen as initiator for a deeper debate on the future policy
modelling and governance in the knowledge society, enabling value community building, negotiation,
mediation across those communities and decision making structures; to explore new politics processes.”
We decided to set the workshop at Reboot as we wanted to engage users, creators and innovators of
technology from highly diverse backgrounds who are not the usual “technology policy experts” you come across
Report by Nadia EL-Imam :www.linkedin.com/nadiaelimam.com Emailt: nnegash@gmail.com Skype: niasan

5. Aidanmedia
in European Commission contexts. Why go about it this way? We believe that these meetings of value systems
and frames of reference could generate novel ways of thinking about technology policy.
About Reboot
Reboot is an annual 2-day event that takes place in Copenhagen. The organisers manage venue booking,
catering, ticket sales as well as maintain the website. The schedule is emergent: members of the community
sign into the website and suggest speakers, topics and presentations or workshops by posting proposals,
which then are rated by the other members of the community. The proposals which receive the most votes (or
“likes”) are given a slot on the program. Lacking a top-down schedule management, the quality of the
experience is ensured by the Reboot community´s co-creating the conference they want by having a very active
role in it´s making. Reboot is often referred to as an “unconference” due to its bottom-up structure.
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Every year the conference, its date schedule, location, speaker programme, ticketing, web site and many other
aspects are determined at the last minute. While it takes a little time to get used to, the consensus amongst the
community seems to be “it works out every year, just go with the flow”.
This formula is obviously quite successful. What started out in 1999 as an event with a Danish focus, has grown
into a meetup of the international hacker community that attracts 500 participants from over 22 countries.
Reboot 2009 sold out, and was attended by internet gurus like David Weinberger and Bruce Sterling.
Programmers, designers, innovators, entrepreneurs, thinkers, bloggers, and activists. And many others for
whom labels have not yet been invented frequent Reboot.
“Reboot is a place for people to come together once a year and reboot their minds with perspective,
inspiration and relationships.”
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7. Where we got to
What happened
“it was a pleasure to participate. it was not smooth and flowing discussion, but this is the very reason we
need this stuff - for the difference and incompatibility of these worlds. you did good in pushing and
animating towards something concrete...”
“ How can the people get a place at the government table? lots of small individuals versus a few big
companies.”
“imagine all these digital visionaries used to instant satisfaction working inside a big government. This is
clash of civilisation”
Day 1 of the workshop consisted of participation in presentations held by various members of the Reboot
community, including engagement in the “Future-building for Wikicrats” Session; two consecutive 45 minute
sessions of expert presentations followed by a structured ideation session. Part of the audience from the
presentations joined us for a brainstorming and ideation session in a public space outdoors where we were also
joined by curious passers by who became engaged. The brainstorming session continued for another hour on
day 2 and was followed by some hands-on design work for one of the proposed post-Reboot actions.
Day 1 Session type Documentation
Session 1 Expert Presentations See table 2
15:00-15:40
Session 2 Expert Presentations See table 2
15:40-16:20
Session 3 Discussions tied to expert See “ Discussions tied to expert presentations”
16:20-17:00 presentations
Session 4 Ideation session with post-its See “ Discussions tied to brainstorming sessions”
17:00-19:00
Day 2 Session type Documentation
Session 5 Brainstorming See “ Discussions tied to brainstorming sessions”
11:00-11:40
Session 6 Design and implementation session https://secure.cute.se/reboot/index_old.htm
14:00-17:00
Table 1. The “Future-building for wikicrats” workshop at Reboot11
Nadia EL-Imam
Today, 12:55 f.m.
Formatted: British English
Report by Nadia EL-Imam :www.linkedin.com/nadiaelimam.com Emailt: nnegash@gmail.com Skype: niasan

8. Aidanmedia
Six invited experts and an observer (Freek Van Krevel) from the European Commission. Also present were
members of the Reboot community who either listened to the presentations, participated in the brainstorming or
both. In addition we managed to engage two designers and a programmer from the Reboot community in doing
practical design work to implement one of the ideas generated during the workshop. On average there were
between 10-25 participants in the Wikicrats sessions at any one time. It is hard to give an exact overall
participation figure as people walked in and out of the sessions continuously; a rough estimate would be that
around 50 to 60 of the 500 participants at Reboot were involved at some point.
What was discussed
Discussion tied to expert presentations
Name Info Slides
Alberto Cottica www.linkedin.com/in/albertocottica http://www.slideshare.net/haiku66/technology-poli
cy-and-me
Robin Chase www.robinchase.org/ http://www.slideshare.net/guest861f59e/copenhag
en-robin-chase
Elvira Berlingieri www.linkedin.com/in/berlingieri http://www.slideshare.net/Elvira.Berlingieri/reboot1
1-elvira-berlingieri
Gianluca Dettori www.linkedin.com/in/dpixel no slides
David Osimo www.linkedin.com/in/osimod http://www.slideshare.net/osimod/reboot11osimo#
Gohar Sargsyan unavailable presentation not uploaded to slideshare
Freek Van Krevel www.linkedin.com/in/freekvankrevel presentation not uploaded to slideshare
Table 2. Contents of expert presentations
The distance between ICT innovation policies and ICT innovation practice
“Focus on how government can help new small companies”
“The public sector should start using one-man, start-up and small consultancies etc.- maybe creating a
special office that can facilitate this, a tender office for very small companies”
“When government use consultants/choose vendors they should consider not always using large
companies, but rather mirror the fact that the vast majority of companies are small”
“A lot of start-ups are small but very talented... Don't make laws/regulations. Just hire/use services that
work!”
“Citizens are experts! I know more about building an internet start-up than anyone who has not done it.
Please ask me.”
“We should invest in small businesses innovative research grants.”
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The discussion about which policies that improve out ability to nurture innovation and start-up activity was
initiated with Gianluca Dettori´s description of his experiences as a venture capitalist in Italy and the vast
difference in perspective between commercial investors and government business incubators; He gave one
example of a company that had remained in a government incubator for 8 years, and judging from other
comments and discussions at Reboot this is not an isolated incident. There were several suggestions that
popped up during these discussions, many highlighting the exclusion that many smaller businesses feel from
ICT policy making and investment in nurturing innovation activity in society. Public administrations who adopt a
problem solving attitude are very appreciated, like in the Portuguese case of Impresa na hora, a clever “hack” of
existing legislation which helps entrepreneurs wanting to create a business cut through the red tape. Impresa na
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hora did not require broad reform, and only minimal involvement of the political level. It can be a model because
it is a patch: it works and it can be deployed quickly, consistently with hacker ethics.
On government, governance and participation
“as we're talking about action the most important targets are not corporations, governments or
organizations. We the people are the number one agents for change in this world. In particular small
businesses, technologists, writers. The above mentioned 3 targets [meaning corporations etc.] have
vested interests in not changing things.”
“I... would suggest to create these '10 point' lists for different scopes of influence. What can you do to
create action directly around you, around local gov, around your organisation etc.? (I must admit that I am
highly sceptical about the need to use incumbent structures to act though)”
There was a larger discussion about the role of government and its inability to evolve and adapt to the major
social and technical changes we are all witnessing. Some participants attributed this inability to adapt to civil
servants lacking knowledge, incentive or confidence to push through important changes, or even to engage
with citizens for fear of repercussions;
“Civil servants are not educated to respond to suggestions from people...Government officials should be
empowered to engage in open conversations with citizens. It should be OK to admit failure as
government official.”
“We should discuss how to enable government officials to be participants in communities”
“I am impressed by how common it is for civil servants to be dismissive of their own culture, that of public
administration. They basically go out there and tell everyone “we are lagging behind, we are slow and
can’t achieve change”. And of course the hackers, who are very very proud of their own culture, buy into
that. But that is just plain wrong. Public administration is an ancient, powerful culture which achieved
wonders. It gave us water pipes, railways, roads: even the internet started out as a government project!
With all due respect, those achievements are more impressive than launching YouTube. I would like to see
more bright, enlightened civil servants at Reboot. The techies need to know that there are other
interesting people out there besides themselves. Self-referentiality is a poison on both sides.”
The question of the role of government and governance surfaced in many different forms. One underlying idea
that permeated several discussions was that government should focus on creating a simple, reliable and
publicly accessible infrastructure that "exposes" the underlying data. In other words, the government should
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become a data platform, exposing their vast amounts of data to the public -- i.e., via API -- and let the private
sector mash it up to make helpful services for people: such as http://www.policymap.com/. Alberto Cottica on
the other hand pointed out the risks of having American companies as infrastructure of public services 2.0 from
his experiences of what happened with the Kublai community (funded and run by the Italian Ministry of
economic development) when their service provider suddenly changed the terms of service. Robin Chase
brought up a similar experience with Facebook suddenly changing the rules of the game when her latest social
transport project, Go Loco, went live on the Facebook platform. The demand for transparency and easy access
to government data it seems is a shared value in the Reboot Community;
“Open the structure of law/regulation making – make it open and transparent...we are already seeing
examples of where this is successful in journalism: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/four-
crowdsourcing-lessons-from-the-guardians-spectacular-expenses-scandal-experiment/”
“ we need to have citizen involvement through the whole process, see review of power of information
task-force report, see stimuluswatch.org, or egov20.wordpress.com”
“Enable. www.wecollaborate.org- From attitude to action. Put the tool to work in contexts relevant to
average people.”
“It’s not a matter of ideas, it’s about doing and how it’s done. The ‘how’ is the ‘what’. Inviting to give ideas
is an illusionary participation system. How to implement?”
Discussions tied to brainstorming sessions
After an initial discussion tied to the “expert” presentations, we decided to make use of a structured ideation
methodology in order to generate actionable ideas as the discussion was being dominated by one participant.
We started by asking each workshop participant to contribute three ideas for change based on their Reboot
experience, and write each one on a post-it. All the submitted post-its were read out aloud and placed on a
board. In the next round they were clustered into groups, giving rise to tag cloud-like formations. The act of
determining where a post-it should be placed served as a trigger in generating many interesting discussions,
telling of anecdotes, and sharing of examples. It also made the contributors of the ideas elaborate on their
thoughts and gave them the opportunity to receive feedback, questions for further clarification which in itself
proved to be a useful exercise: it brought to light how important the differences in language use and terminology
is in engaging people outside the culture of public administration in important policy discussions. For example
Gohar Sargasyan´s use of the word “infrastructure” set out a keen 10 minute discussion in the group. Every time
a formulation was deemed ambiguous, the author was asked to re-write it.
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Though these discussions were lengthy and generated much frustration, it seems there was a consensus about
their importance as people stayed involved and engaged in the workshop. Apparently they were engaging and
accessible enough to get the attention of people who happened to be nearby - new participants spontaneously
joined the workshop and made contributions to it. After more discussion and moving around of post-its four
themes emerged. For each theme I have reported the content of the post-its in its tag cloud.
THEME 1 - Creating a new culture of Government:
Post-its tag cloud: Translating government culture into net culture and vice versa, less rules and more
rights, finding a common language, strategic policy making, Internet governance, better rules for
government procurement of technology, open standards and open platforms methodology, bring the
Reboot spirit and energy to Brussels, Better processes for government investment into IT.
Example ideas:
• invest in putting a 2.0 public infrastructure in place
• “Brunch with Brussels”: build on the success of the experiment at Reboot with regular informal
meetings between civil servants and members of general public in a “safe” environment.
• create a directory of Reboot-minded civil servants, to act as a communication channel between the
public sector and the techies.
THEME 2 - Transparency and how to get it:
Post-its tag cloud: Mapping out power structures, more informed decisions, publish user feedback of
publicly funded projects, promote information on law regarding internet in the EU states, open APIs
between government services such as tax services and bank services etc., open up public data sets,
make peaceful attempts to get local government to publish data.
Example ideas:
• Deploy a small, test project where processes of design, implementation and evaluation of calls for
projects and project-funding applications are crowd-sourced and social-network based.
• Engage civil servants in pushing for change from centralised IT structures.
THEME 3: Citizen engagement/ Inspiration and sharing of best practices:
Post-its tag cloud: create debate on technology, attract talents with challenges, figure out how to engage
innovators and make the system work for them, adopt a politician or civil servant and get him into the
conversation, collective action, find rewards for openness, gather stories about people and personal
insights based on experience, , (investigate) how to be representative of users, larger public ownership of
policy decisions
Example ideas:
• “Adopt a civil servant” program for advanced web users to bring civil servants knowledge and use of
various technologies up to date.
THEME 4 - Incentives:
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Post-its tag cloud: Accountability on results not procedures, open up the pre-selection of projects to be
funded by government, create new business models for politics, invest money in good ideas, find win
win--> why change?, if a government is ineffective or slow...what can we do about it? will private
companies be more effective and if so why?, the cult of done to deliver (close the loop of projects).
Example ideas:
• Create social incentive structures for engagement, participation and exemplary performance amongst
civil servants and members of the general public “citizens” in everyday life and work.
• Invest in finding new business models for political engagement
Results
Both objective and subjective indicators such as feedback from the participants lead to the conclusion that the
workshop went well. After running the workshop it seems safe to say that yes, there is a very clear agreement
that “bridging the gap” (David Osimo) between net culture and public administration culture is needed and yes,
people are indeed willing to participate. Participants offered several suggestions for ways in which this could be
done. Suggestions tended to be framed as projects to be deployed by groups of civil servants and hackers. By
way of example: someone proposed creating a directory of Reboot-minded civil servants. We even got as far as
actually designing and programming an interactive form to launch the initiative (with the help of students from
CIID and Fredrik Smedberg) : https://secure.cute.se/reboot/
The workshop proposal, “Future-building for Wikicrats” was amongst the top 10 most voted for proposals out of
the 188 submitted for this year´s event. The overall number of participants in the Wikicrats sessions was around
50 persons in total. On average there were between 10 AND 25 participants in the Wikicrats sessions at any
one time. It was given three slots in the official program schedule (which is exceptional). Thomas Madsen-
Mygdahl, the organiser of Reboot, offered access to the Reboot mailing list for one of the proposals to come out
of the workshop sessions. An article about the Wikicrats workshop and initiative is being published in the
Reboot Book. The conversations generated are still ongoing after the workshop both through the mailing list I
set up, and through blog posts by Wikicrats workshop participants and comments left by their readers. A few
excerpts;
HACKER CULTURE AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION CULTURE: A FREE SPACE FOR COMING TOGETHER
From Reboot, besides a healthy immersion in the web’s countercultural matrix, I brought back good
news: it can be done. The gap between the culture of the European Commission, that designs policy
technology in this continent, and that of the producers and advanced users of technology can actually be
bridged. I think so because the Reboot community, which kind of stands for the most hack-tivist and
tech-savvy part of society, showed a clear interest for Wikicrats, the “European” session on technology
policy designed by Nadia El-Imam and Bror Salmelin: participation was strong and very diverse. The
session produced many interesting comments and at least one good idea, building a resource list of civil
servants that share - or at least are friendly to - the Reboot Culture...
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REBOOT11 FOLLOW-UP: A FRESH LOOK AT EU POLICIES
My first time at reboot, and I really enjoyed it. At the beginning I felt there was too much hot air, but then I
really liked the design and inspiration that the overall discussion gave me. I particularly enjoyed the mix of
non-technical talk, and technical hands-on workshops.
Overall very inspiring especially as a way to organize conferences: incredible how interesting workshop
were added on the same day. I loved the light management touch applied to it, and hope to apply it
elsewhere. In particular, it was important to get confirmation on the importance of design skills in today
complex world.
Anyway, the real reason I was there, was to discuss in a workshop set up by the EC and Nadia on the
future of EU ICT policies. We all recognized the problem: the ICT innovation policies are SO FAR from ICT
innovation practice. We need to get them closer, to bridge the gap...
LET THE HORSES RUN FREELY
At Reboot11, joining the discussion after the talks in the workshop “future building for
Wikicrats” (organised by Nadia El Imam) and discussions after other things are merging as well and the
past days I seem to be talking about nothing else...
Workshop report: Future-building for Wikicrats, Reboot11, June 25-26 2009, Copenhagen
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15. Where to go next
Final recommendations: the need for an interface
“In Wikicrats we had two very different, very interesting cultures trying to have a dialogue with each other.
One is the hacker culture which spawned Reboot: a culture of sharing, meritocracy, radical transparency.
The other is the culture of public administration, shared by the Commission and some participants: a
culture of accountability, impartiality, equal access. Right now they are not talking to each other. Bridging
the gap between them would be an invaluable contribution.”
The workshop at Reboot was an experiment at getting people from two very different worlds engaged in a
dialogue on future policy- modelling. This resonated with many presentations related to how we re-imagine
citizenship and government in the age of participation, which took place at this year´s Reboot in contexts other
than Wikicrats. Most highlighted the implications of whether the Internet is conceived as an Information source
or as a platform for citizen participation on the outcome of attempts to engage citizens in government and
policy-making. It is clear that in this context, netizens see the Internet as a platform for common action; they will
not accept the role of people who partake in surveys alone. It is not enough to just tell people that there are
European programmes out there - Rebooters can very well Google-search, click on links and download calls for
submissions or read posted programme information. But they don´t.
Why not? Because this material does not convey any genuine interest in engaging netizens on behalf of public
administrations or governments, neither in content nor in form; it is clear that the appropriate interfaces are
missing. These interfaces must consist of people and interaction loci; Wikicrats worked well because for
duration of two days during Reboot and few weeks before it, there was interface. The interface consisted of
myself, Bror Salmelin and our working together to design and implement the workshop at Reboot; and of
Reboot itself, with its orientation towards knowledge sharing and its informal atmosphere.
Of course, Wikicrats was only a small-scale experiment. A fully functioning interface needs to be persistent and
to address the problem of interaction among the different agents.
The interface needs to be persistent
Interface building is an ongoing process, and the interface evolves as it is maintained over longer periods of
time, gaining effectiveness as people move from getting to know each other to actually contributing. An
occasional one-shot attempt at interaction is both costly and ineffective at building and maintaining trust and
engagement.
Report by Nadia EL-Imam :www.linkedin.com/nadiaelimam.com Emailt: nnegash@gmail.com Skype: niasan

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Phases of development of a community
Time
CONNECTING HANGING OUT HELPING OUT
The interface as an interaction design problem
The “coming together” of the public administration culture and the hacker culture can be framed as an
interaction design problem. For example, the Reboot workshop highlighted the need for “safe spaces”, contexts
in which civil servants feel they have permission to interact and engage in common action with interested
citizens as individuals, as opposed to representatives of large impersonal institutions. No safe space, no
interaction, no result.
Interaction design decisions contributed to shaping the Reboot workshop. In particular:
• the experts were selected so as to achieve a finely tuned mix between net-literate civil servants/public sector consultants
and technology makers/users interested in (and generally sympathetic to) policy making. Diverse enough to propitiate out-
of-the-box thinking, not too much to ensure good communication.
• a high level of attention was given to organisation and administrative details, from centralising hotel-booking to give
experts a chance to informally hang out together to speeding up reimbursement of expenses (thanks Anni!), in order to
convey the message that the experts’ input is valued
• the Reboot context, with its high energy and “creative chaos” rhetoric, encouraged participants to “go with the flow” and
interact more or less freely across cultural barriers
Final recommendation
Given the overwhelmingly positive response at Reboot, I would recommend that the European Commission
attempts to unlock the potential in bridging the gap between the two cultures in Wikicrats by building an
interface between them. However, successfully designing and delivering such an interface means addressing a
number of nontrivial interaction design problems. What is the appropriate mix of online vs. offline interaction?
Should the interface try to group people who live and work in the same place or those interested in the same
issue, Europe-wide? Should offline meetings be spread (seminar series) or concentrated (yearly conference)?
Should they be stand-alone events or piggyback on existing conferences and meetups? And which ones? And,
most important of all: what is the appropriate mix of debate and action taken jointly by civil servants and
hackers, given that common action was strongly called for in Wikicrats?
I strongly recommend that these problems are addressed explicitly, with a interaction design approach, in the
planning stage of any further move. Failure to do so might lead to ineffective action. It would probably make
sense to start out with a small-scale, pilot activity to reduce the cost of failure as the interaction design learning
curve is climbed.
By way of example
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There are several ways that pilot activities could be rolled out. Two examples are sketched below - many more
can be thought of.
1. “More of Wikicrats, but better”:
• Further develop and expand the Wikicrats concept as a series of regularly occurring participatory and web-enabled
face-to-face events that brings together citizens, policy-makers, technologists, design-thinkers, change agents and
media creators.
• Future Initiatives should include building on the success of the Reboot initiative by deploying workshops that piggy-
back on existing events as well as stand-alone events, on a regular basis.
• In addition to further developing and improving workshop formats, it is clear that people require a plausible (and
attractive) promise to be made explicitly if we are to elicit their participation. For example, one of the realities of
running a workshop at events such as Reboot, where people are investing personal time and funds in order to attend
is that there is an opportunity cost attached to participating in our workshops i.e missing other interesting ongoing
sessions. A significant attraction of the Wikicrats workshop lay in the line-up of expert presenters from various
backgrounds to whom participants could listen. A few of the experts had presentations styles that catered to more
formal “death by powerpoint” cultures than the one at Reboot and could have benefited from coaching ahead of the
event; We could significantly increase the traction of the workshops if we invest in bootstrapping expert presentations
to match the presentation culture of the events at which workshops are held.
• Another valuable improvement would be to invest some resources ( time and code) into finding and aggregating the
on-line presences of participants and people who express interest in participating in Wikicrats workshops in a manner
that makes it easier for us to connect with them and them to connect with one another. One idea for how to do this
is by way of a search agent; You would provide such a search agent with your own account data of all the
environments you are part of that you want to have searched. And then it comes back with a number of likely search
results that might contain any or all of the following for instance:
• Possible blogs of that person
• Possible Flickr Feed, or 23 feed
• Possible Skypename
• Profile in OpenBc.com
• Profile in LinkedIn.com
• Profile at 43people.com
• Possible Plazes account
• Possible del.icio.us account
2. Common action:
• Launch small initiatives where people from hacker communities and civil servants can work together on small actionable
projects. The notion of participation tat hackers have calls for common action, on the other hand the cultures of hackers
and civil servants are very different, so the projects must be handled with care, led by very credible people, etc.
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