All good things must come to an end…

But my head is still buzzing. My lunch date today said “everyone who was here was relevant”… and “I learned to my limits”. I have to agree that even I have been fully saturated with participatory web (web2fordev) these past 5 days which is truly amazing. I didn’t think that could happen.

Is this the beginning of a movement, paradigm shift, breaking of silo’s and re-landscaping of the development web? My father worked his whole career in development. I wonder how he will respond when I explain to him how we have set up a facebook group with the IICD local partners and are going to try out the “web to text” functionality, keeping each other up to date on our moods.

Getting back to my lunch date, I was actually working alongside him for almost an hour before I realized who he was! I blame the coffee cup in his picture. Ismael Pena-Lopez from amongst other things the ICTlogy blog. His is a blog high up on my list of blogs I try to follow when I have time. And one whom I wondered if I would ever meet live. I am very grateful I did. Besides the fact that we realized he probably met my father years ago, he reminded me of the importance of reflection.

User generated content is needed, and is good, and is a revolution on the scale and availability that it is now… but I might easily forget how reflection, analysis, and abstraction can help us learn to a higher degree. Especially after days, weeks, months of running… not only for this conference but other activities, it is time to reflect.