Lift09: Where Did The Future Go?

So, I'm back from Geneva now - on one hand it's good to be home and with the SeaMonkey and Mozilla work again, on the other hand it was a really delightful experience to look outside our usual boxes of thinking, hear about, create and share new ideas and spend some time with really great minds from a lot of different areas.

I think it was a really great idea of Mozilla to be a partner of the Lift09 conference which was titled "Where Did The Future Go?" as somehow the pictures of the post-2000 future that were painted quite differently in the 20th century than they look today. We're living in some kind of science fiction world today with things like mobile phones, microwave ovens and the Internet, but common future visions like the flying cars and space ships are not common. Actually, there probably were more flying cars out there in the 1960s (yes, they had those things, even if they were rare and expensive) than today. Still, today's looks at the frontiers of the present and nowaday's visions of the future are quite interesting and worth to see them.

And Lift09's program had quite a few of those:
In Wednesday's workshops, I could explore and discuss the future of society and voting, the semantic web, and new ideas for our economy - and those were just my three of the 25 choices that were available.
The big stage conference talks on Thursday and Friday showed how visions of the future have (not) become reality and why, ambient devices for displaying information from the Internet, and why the experimental organization structures of the 20th century were wrong and the traditional participatorial culture like nowadays the social web and open source projects were always right and more stable. We learned how technology improves life in Africa and India, how cities are evolving and what modern urban design is bringing up and interesting information can be visualized, how the people in the dance club can generate the power for the club while having fun there or how to survive a 14,000 km hike through Australia. We could follow talks on how fake products could be dealt with in a different way, on the history of the world wide web, on designs for the future, including machines that consume flies and mice and generate the power to run from them. We were informed what's important about knives, that privacy is just an illusion and doesn't exist in reality, that cameroonian women are heavily using Internet cafes to get to know their future Swiss husbands, and that metromance (romance in the metro) is the way to our future. And finally, we could indulge in ways to firewall, fake and hack RFID tags, technology changing skin and food, as well as the great Vint Cerf and HIStory on the future of the Internet - or should I say the InterPlaNet?

The whole conference was a great experience of thinking outside the box, letting ideas flow, designing the future and using technology in new ways. And if you want to get some impressions, you can actually view and listen to all videos of all the talks right now - a Swiss TV station made them available within probably about half an hour after the talk was held, which is also pretty cool, I think.

After this experience, I'm pretty sure I'd like to go to such a conference again, maybe even Lift10 next year?