As you can see, this video is a summary of the event, as I experienced it. It is not a piece of social reporting, as I promised earlier. Let me explain how that happened.

From the communication around NEXT09 I made two assumptions about the event: one - the theme of the conference is sharing economy, two - this is an English conference.

About Sharing Economy
What an interesting theme it sounds. And what an interesting topic in context of the current financial crisis. Yes, it would be an excellent idea to talk about different angles for our disrupted economy. Applying as a blogger (very formal), I was even asked to point to posts in which I write about the theme. My whole mindset was tuned into the topic, before going to the conference.

I guess you feel it coming: BUT. In the end the whole conference was yet another conference with speakers talking about their own topics. Here and there they managed to squeeze in the odd sentence about the theme, like “…and that’s so interesting about this whole idea of sharing economy.” Lots of speakers and panel moderators didn’t even bother.

So there I was, at this conference in Hamburg, with my prepared question about ’sharing’. The question didn’t fit in at all with what was going on during the conference.

I could have come up with a different idea to involve the participants and see what they’re thinking (instead of yet another interview with the speakers). The reason that I didn’t has everything to do with my second assumption about the conference.

An English Conference
I was only vaguely aware of the existence of NEXT before a lot of my friends applied for a blogger ticket to the event. Nicole Simon was the cause of this and at first I was a bit sad that I would miss out on the party. Luckily, I was able to attain a last-minute blogger ticket.

The communication around NEXT was all in English, and Nicole explicitly pushed for an international group of bloggers coming to the conference. That’s how my mindset got geared towards an English conference.

I should have known better. Why did Nicole push for her international network to apply for a blogger ticket? Right, because she wanted to spark the conference with an international touch (hey, I would push for a vibrant international conference on my home turf as well if I had the opportunity ;-)). That means that it wasn’t too internationally oriented previous times. NEXT, an English-speaking conference? Wrong assumption!

I have to give some credit to the organisers, most of the talks were in English, about 80% as claimed at the beginning of the conference, whereas last year it was a mere 20%. Fair enough. A large number of English speakers and there’s no reason why you wouldn’t want to address German topics and issues in German. But when you as a conference organiser communicate beforehand in English and then open the conference in German, I’m confused.

What reinforced my “ok, let’s not to this social reporting”-decision was my false assumption that people coming to this conference would be able to have a conversation with me in English. I forgot that on the conferences I usually attend, only Germans show up that are travelling a lot around Europe and therefore feel comfortable talking in English. The average German is still SO NOT INTO English. To me it felt awkward to pose the visitors of the conference a question in English and asking for a coherent answer back. If I would have felt comfortable enough in German I could have switched myself, but unfortunately, that’s where I feel awkward (with hindsight, I probably could have managed it, but I guess I’m sometimes a little bit too shy).

So that’s the story of how I went to Hamburg to gain insight in what the participants were thinking about sharing as a professional and came back with a tape of visual observations. I liked putting the film together and my visual summary was well received, so all in all I had my practice, even though on something different than I anticipated.