Experiments in Lifelogging, Part 11: A talk and an interview

I've done short presentations about lifelogging before, at ACCU 2014 (as a lightning talk, in English) and at the local Webmontag (in German). These also served as test drives for a possible longer and more in-depth talk about the topic. The time for that talk finally came at FrOSCon, an open source conference in Sankt Augustin (near Bonn, Germany's former capital).

The talk is embedded above, but it's in German. So if you don't understand German, here's a short summary:

The presentation basically had 3 parts:

1. I talked about the available devices and showed a lot of photos (good and bad) that my Narrative Clip took.
2. I talked at length about the legal situation, which is somewhat complicated and not yet entirely clarified in Germany.
3. Finally, since this was an open source conference, I pointed out that all the available lifelogging cameras are effectively closed and that I can't envisage a useable open hardware version of such a device (that you actually would want to wear) anytime soon (and why). But there's room for open source software around these devices. If only the makers would publish their APIs, we open source developers could create an "app ecosystem" around them, a bit like the ones we have for smartphones. Which would help the users get better and more software and would allow the device makers to sell more devices. A classic "win-win" situation, in other words.

The slides are up on Slideshare. It doesn't have many words in it, but features a lot of photos that my Narrative Clip took :)

After giving that presentation, I was interviewed on the topic of lifelogging. The interviewer actually wore my camera during the interview, i.e. we switched roles for the duration. The resulting photos helped make one of my points from the presentation: You have to let go of the idea of only getting good and interesting photos from such a device. Most of them are blurred, boring, or just missed to catch what you were actually hoping to photograph.

The article resulting from that interview is up on golem.de (in German, again): Lifelogging: Das Leben im Zeitraffer

All in all, it was a fun and sometimes challenging experience. I'm done talking about lifelogging for the moment, but I'll continue doing it.

In fact, I spent the week after said presentation and interview in a seminar in Paris and I have a lot of great snapshots that will help me remember this productive (and sometimes stressful) week. I've shared some of them with the other participants, but they're not for public consumption. I've only put some of the tourist-y photos up on Flickr. I'll also keep adding to this album if you're interested in my continuing lifelogging adventures.