The Jeff Pulver Blog: A Look Back at Stream 08 in Athens

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October 07, 2008

A Look Back at Stream 08 in Athens

“Stream is WPP's invitation-only, free-form, camp-like, super-democratised, extreme (non-virtual) social networking, anti-conference.” (from the Stream website)

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I was one of the guests at Stream 08, a very special un-conference co-hosted by my friend Yossi Vardi and his friend, Sir Martin Sorrell that took place October 2-4 in Athens which brought together some pretty amazing people from the creative, media and technology industries around the world.

The format of Stream embraces creativity and empowers the invited guests to both share their passions with others as well as the opportunity to discover new passions.

One of the rules of Stream is that everyone who attends must participate in some way. And whether you choose to lead a discussion or a workshop, participate in the Thursday night Gadgethon (a great place to see some of the coolest gadgets around), Friday evening Extravaganza (think User Generated Entertainment), Midnight Cooking Madness or any number of other activities, it was great to see everyone who was a member of the community give something of themselves during the event. This is a philosophy that Yossi actively promotes at many of his events and it was great to see this respected at Stream 08.

About half the attending community were from the WPP family of companies and represented some of the most interesting people from the world of advertising. I enjoyed listening to a number of the attending delegates share their perspective about the state of social media and what it meant to their business. I am looking forward to continuing some of the conversations I started over the weeks and months ahead.

One of the Stream moments I enjoyed most was when Yossi Vardi introduced Tim O'Reilly at the start of the Extravaganza where Yossi had a chance to acknowledge the influence Tim’s Foo camp had on Kinnernet. I also enjoyed the opportunity to sit down and spend quality time speaking with a number of my friends while attending Stream 08. The fact that Dan Dubno and I had to both fly to Athens to spend quality time together despite the fact we both live in the metro NYC area was a little ironic to me, and a reflection of the times we live in. Getting lost in Athens on Saturday night with Pablo Holman and feeling like we were playing a live version of Zork was an interesting adventure.

One of the unexpected realities of Stream 08 was that for the first time since 1998, I ended up being "disconnected" for 3+ days. While my friend Gary Shainberg did everything in his power (and then some) to provide reliable broadband wifi access to the attending delegates, despite his best efforts, it didn’t work out. On the plus side, it turns out the lack of internet access had the effect of making all of the attending delegates more social. And while the thought of not having broadband internet access is usually stressful to me, in the end I think I benefited from being disconnected. And I think that other conference organizers should consider implementing “disconnected hours” in their event schedules.

Overall, Stream 08 was a great event and I’m honored to have been invited and have the opportunity to participate in the experience.

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(Linda Stone, Yossi Vardi and Tim O'Reilly)