Attending Webcoast un-conference
This past weekend, the 18–20th of March, Flattr attended the Webcoast un-conference in Gothenburg.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the un-conference concept is about allowing all the participants decide what will be talked about at the conference, simply by talking about it themselves. It’s a participant-steered conference. I, Marie, wanted to talk about Flattr and I knew that people wanted hear more about it.
The session was more of a Q&A than anything. I took a feel for the room, and decided to talk in Swedish as it felt most natural, which means I can’t treat you to the Bambuser stream, unless you understand Swedish. Hoping to be able to transcribe and translate it soon, and if you want to help out give us a shout!
Over all there were a few in the room that had no idea what Flattr was, and not many used it very actively. This shows that some people knew what Flattr was, but there were a few questions that I managed to straighten out.
One of the participants wrote an awesome analogy of how Flattr works:
You go into the kitchen (create an account on Flattr), bake a fantastic cake (load your account with a sum of money, between 2 and 200 euro I think[It is actually 2–100 Euro Flat-rate fee, but you can upload more]), you get the course of a month to decide who will get a piece of this cake, how many slices of cake there will be. At the end of the month there will be a big party and your money will be split between all the things you’ve “flattred”.
You can read more about what she wrote about Flattr, and my session here.
I posted some QR-code posters here and there, which I had used in my presentation. I spread them out around the place. People who know what QR codes are, often are curious to scan them and see what will happen. We were also lucky that the iPhone app had just reached the app-store days before, so all the Apple-fan boys/girls could try it out as well. Curious to know more about offline flattring? You can read about it in an earlier post of ours.
Some of the reactions from other bloggers who were at Webcoast, relating to Flattr (translated from Swedish):
The session ended with the entire room with their hands in the air promissing to start using Flattr immediately. [swe]
Biggest Disappointment: Lack of Flattr stickers. [swe]
Going to dig into this a bit more, and I think you should as well. [swe]
With Flattr you can really actively show that you like something [swe]
I also took part in another session, with a discussion about Social Media for Social Good, where Flattr was brought up as an alternative way to supporting good things — Especially now when you look at helping out activists all over the world doing “Good shit”.
So last but not least I want to leave you with these words:
Be honest and do good shit!
