Webstock turned ten last week. It is a conference that celebrates the web and its makers – the creativity, the magic, the craft and everything in between. Although Webstock is hosted in Wellington, they have an excellent reputation and attract great speakers from all over the world. It has been on my radar for a couple of years and this year I finally managed to go to Wellington. It was an amazing experience, an emotionally exhausting ride on the rollercoaster – in a good way. Hands down, the best conference I’ve ever been to.
Speakers typically have a tech background (web development, software engineering, UX design, long-time bloggers), but the presentations were mostly non-technical. While the Above All Human conference three weeks ago in Melbourne focused on startups and entrepreneurship, this conference focused on the web and its values and culture. You get a good idea of what Webstock is about from last year’s closing note by Natasha Lampard, where she talks about onsens, entrepreneurs and the long-game (also written up here).
A key asset of Webstock is the diversity of its speakers regarding gender, background, race and topics. None of the talks could or should be compared with each other. Therefore, by the end of the first day I stopped trying to figure out what my favourite talk was – they all were really good. Because of this diversity in topics, it took me some time to recognise the common thread: They all talked about a shared set of values, promoting and preserving values like openness, contributing, inclusiveness, simplicity and caring deeply about your work, not your ego. It is a conference that is undeniably, beautifully, human.
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