ETech: Wrap-up

I think this was probably the best ETech yet -- I personally managed to achieve a more balanced ETech experience and all of the presentations I attended were right-on in their content and depth. As I suspected, the High Order Bits session format worked out really well -- some sessions simply do not need more than 15 minutes to cover the basics of a topic. A number of the High Order Bits sessions opened my eyes to interesting projects that people are working on without getting bogged down in the nitty gritty details. Now I can choose to research these projects in a little more depth on my own time. A big thumbs up from me on the format change!

The gender balance of the past ETechs was improving, but I think this year it didn't change much from last year. Apparently gender balance at ETech and SXSW was just discussed on the Many-2-Many blog. I've never had the chance to make it to SXSW, so I can't really comment on the relative gender balance; all I know is that the gender (im)balance at ETech is about the same that I would expect to find in a Computer Science classroom in many universities in the world. A shame, but a dark reality of the comp sci world.

New to ETech was the Maker's Fair, which I really enjoyed -- and I hope that it will be back next year. ETech is steeped in talk of future systems and lots of other intangible projects that the average attendee will never have a chance to play with. The Maker's Fair gave a bit more immediacy and hands-on feelings to ETech, which contributed quite a bit to an overall more balanced ETech experience for me. I can't imagine what kind of a spectacle the fair would be after the Make magazine has a full year of publishing under its belt. I'll be waiting in anticipation!

Lastly I wanted to mention that the BBC had a very strong presence at ETech -- there were a number of presentations that made it clear that the BBC is thinking about and starting to apply emerging technologies at the BBC. Personally, I thought that old guard media companies like the BBC are dinosaurs that are waiting for extinction -- that is certainly the case here in the US. But it's increasingly clear that the BBC is keenly aware of its predicament and is working hard to make changes to preserve their relevancy. All the folks I met from the BBC and all the BBC presentations make it clear that there is a group of people at the BBC who are hell bent on changing the organization and who have already made some respectable progress. Please keep it up -- the world will be watching your progress!

That leaves me with one last set of questions: If the BBC is out in force working to change itself, where are the other media companies from Europe that are also funded by taxpayers? The German ARD/ZDF was nowhere to be seen. What about the media companies from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and all the other countries that still collected taxes for televisions? Where were you and what are you doing? Do you have projects similar to the BBC's Creative Archive? If not, I urge the people of Europe to start demanding access to the content that they paid for in the last decades!

And that's it for ETech this year -- thanks to Rael Dornfest and the entire O'Reilly crew for making this the best ETech yet!

What were your thoughts on ETech? How about the BBC and other media companies like it in Europe?