WALLED GARDEN, the 2-day international conference on communities & networks post Web2.0, took place on 20 & 21 November 2008 in Amsterdam.

The conference addressed issues of identity, mobile communities and networks in an online environment that increasingly features gated and closed communities. The goal was to start to sketch a future public garden.

WALLED GARDEN steered clear of the traditional conference format. Structured participative group dialogue was interspersed with inspirational presentations from artists, researchers and technologists. The emphasis was on the process of communication between participating experts. The resulting discussion documents will be used as input for the publication in Spring 2009.

All 75 participants of WALLED GARDEN were divided among 8 working groups: The Network as a Laboratory of New Forms, Mapping the Walled Gardens, Social & Semantic Serendipity, Future Cultural Organisations, flwr pwr: Tending the Walled Garden, Relational Intervals, Art and Net Ontology and Horizon Projects.

What did WALLED GARDEN teach us about the future public garden?

Knowledge and Awareness
It became clear that the level of knowledge and awareness among large parts of society about the implications of the use of social networking sites is very low. Apart from an urgent need to educate people on the basic practicalities we need to consider and question how an individual's data and profiles will be used in the future. “The next war might be a Data-War.”

Networks and Experimentation
Network experimentation takes place within the mixed ecology where many artists, designers, programmers, researchers are working; while intervening and playing with proprietary formats and commercial processes. Networks can be regarded as open-laboratory models or stages that offer space for early stage innovation to emerge and become visible to much larger audiences. These sites for public experimentation have not existed previously and whilst there are still constraints, the degree of access that can facilitate growth and development needs to increase.

Innovation and Distribution of Knowledge
Much online innovation stems from a combination of user-generated activity and commercial systems. However, currently there is lack of good data, evidence and empirical research on the use of Web2.0 tools. Mapping and data visualisation methods prove valuable in tracing the often still messy boundaries and walls, finding the lay of the land and identifying where innovation can occur. There is a potential role for intermediaries to broker and negotiate in these spaces for knowledge and information exchange [1].

The key challenge is how to regain agency in these spaces and gain more knowledge about what is happening now. It is crucial to improve and strive for more network-literacy and establish rules of engagement.

Future and Past
Walled Garden suggested a whole host of future developments in our daily lives: Facebook Sentimentalism; Scalism Sects (from the nano to the galactic); Time Shifting (living at different time zones at will); or Surrogate Selves (taking over decisions for you). To explore these frontiers of science and future one has to fictionalize what might happen and then experiment: unexpected futures come from unintended events.

A follow up on WALLED GARDEN - The Conference in form of a publication is currently being discussed. A summary report will be available on this website.
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INTERESTING LINK (with interviews moderators, video, photo's):
Insitute of Network Cultures.

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[1] As a concrete example, the 'Leaky Garden' tool (www.leakygarden.net/) which was developed during Walled Garden shows which 'walled gardens' leak, and which are watertight. Social network sites and other Web 2.0 services with usernames and logins are analysed by the amount of indexed items in Google. How often have the usernames from the 2.0 sites been indexed by Google? Leaky Garden shows the quantity of leaks per 2.0 service.