Two interesting days at “re:publica”

Yesterday was the opening of re:publica, a 3-day conference in Berlin “focussed on blogs, social media and digital culture.” This year, the emphasis has been put on Network Neutrality among others, with no less than ten talks on the subject, including speakers like Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net; or Tim Wu, one of the firsts who came up with the subject of Net Neutrality.

republica2010But of course, there are many other interesting subjects, and yesterday one of the highlights was about privacy, or merely about publicity with, as a pretext, the “German Paradox” (yes, yet another paradox about privacy…). This paradox comes from the fact that Germany is culturally very meticulous on privacy issues, and yet Germans don’t have any problem showing their private parts in saunas.

Anyway, all that stuff raised a lot of interesting questions and concepts and I have taken so many notes, I’m sure some blog posts will come in the near future to give my views on them. Fortunately, if nothing big comes to my head within the next days (wish is unlikely to happen, since things are always on the move on the European Level about the Digital Agenda and Open Standards).

Finally, since I will argue about the “benefits of publicness” I decided to do something concrete there. I have now published a wide selections of my bookmarks, collected since 2008 on http://delicious.com/hugoroy. So, am I going to benefit from this publicness? Or am I being too public here? Of course, I can see some benefits: on the one hand, my bookmarks have “tags” depending on what people who have the same bookmark write there, so it makes my bookmark collection more relevant. On the other hand, some links are highly political and the reason I bookmark them is not necessarily because I support the opinions expressed there, sometimes it is the case, sometimes it is quite the contrary. Moreover, that collection gives a detailed overview of the subjects I follow, the sources I read the most… and this is a very valuable information on myself, that could as well turn against me.