I was at Ireland's "Internet Day 2016" today, which was a sad kind of event
A victim of it's dull focus on "Internet as marketing tool". Good business is boring - or "there's brass in that muck", as one of today's speakers put it - but this dull event today was so many million pointless miles from the equivalent events I've attended many times back in New Zealand that I've been moved to rant about it.
One of the first things I noticed, even before I showed up, was that there was a charge of €50 for the event. A charge - any charge - limits the diversity of people who are going to be there, and you immediately know that you're much less likely to meet tech-savvy grandmothers, such as the delightful woman below, photographed at a "similar" event in New Zealand in 2013. Nor will you see many smart teenagers, comedians, suburban activists, hobbyists, journalists, house-husbands, teachers, tradespeople, etc, etc, etc. Nobody decided to bring the whole company along for the day, just because "why not?". Nobody had to send an email to the whole company of internet developers saying "we're really sorry, but you can't all go to this - please coordinate with X so we have no more than 20 people in attendance".
The event started, in the most staid way possible, with coffee & networking at 8:30, followed by an address from the CEO of the domain registry (obligatory mention of "Brexit" and exhortations about supporting SMEs), and a formal opening by some government person (more obligatory mentions of "Brexit" and exhortations about supporting SMEs). I guess most of the people in attendance settled their voting habits back in the '80s, so getting a minister to come along to an event like this would be like pulling teeth, as there are no votes to be gained.
I didn't manage to find any kind of person in the room with a deep technology background - most were wearing suits (regulation investment-banker-blue), and my general polling of "so what do you do" seemed to land either on "banker" or "marketer", with a sprinkling of "IT manager" types. I think I saw what might have been a university student, but he was elusive and I didn't manage to talk to him.
With all that as an audience, I don't think I should have been surprised that most of the speakers either had strong associations with banking or with marketing. All of the Irish people were on the panel discussions, and the "important" speakers had all been flown over in a classic "experts are important in proportion to the distance they travelled to get there" - a mistake we see all too often in New Zealand, as well, though not usually in relation to internet events :-)
After the keynote, the speakers weren't actually apalling - I'd give them all a solid "B", but they certainly didn't want to hang around Dublin - it was all "have to catch a cab to the airport" as soon as they gracefully could.
This pervasive focus on the Internet as a marketing tool was an interesting one, and perhaps goes some way to explain why websites in Ireland seem so naive in comparison with other countries. People here seem to assume that a government website will take years to get going, and when it's done it'll not work properly, let alone "delight the user". Things happen by speaking with an actual person, over the phone.
I remember when I was applying to get my NZ driver's license converted, the person here explaining what documentation I needed from New Zealand had a direct dial phone number and the name of a person who I could contact - of course they didn't work, but I got onto the relevant NZ website, found the page about getting such documentation from them, and made the request online. That website said it would take three days to process, and it was in my inbox two days later.
Is it, ultimately, driven by a lack of IT education in Ireland? Next year my daughter will start Leaving Certificate, and while she's into programming (currently enjoying herself writing Discord bots in Python) there is no subject that even resembles "programming". I spoke to someone today who said that the curriculum is very little changed from the '80s, when he went through it. In an old country, things change slowly, and certainly not on "internet time". Back in New Zealand the kids were doing programming classes using Scratch towards the end of primary school, and Tracy handed in one assignment which was a text-based adventure game written in Javascript in her first year at high school.
In March this year the news escaped that "Government education advisers have started exploratory work on the introduction of the subject", but continued on to say "It will take some years for computer science to become a reality on the Leaving Cert curriculum". Because: ETOOMANYCOMMITTEES basically.
Ultimately, the Internet Day was a huge disappointment to me. Nothing dynamic. Some banking & marketing people presenting some exhortations to use the internet in banking & marketing ways. An event intended to sell domains, talking to people who already own all the domains they need.
The event even came with a printed report. Yep: printed. Glossy. A report about the internet. Wow.
Contrast this with the New Zealand flavour: an event where people come to discuss "what should we do with this internet tool", and the organisers just get to sit back and watch, and enable the excitement, and the ideas that fizz round the room when you get a truly diverse group of people talking to each other.
People meet, friendships develop, and I would not be in the least surprised to discover that companies form around ideas. I do know that domains get registered and websites get built during these events. No need to fly in foreign experts - all of the right people are right there in the room already.
If you want to sell domain names, what type of event should you be running?
Diversity means including incredible people like the lady in the photo. She's dead now, unfortunately, but in those final months after her doctor gave her the news she was determined to get out and do things and meet young people and see what she could do to get involved, and to help, in the limited time remaining to her.
To me that's NetHui , and I miss it a lot.