Some of the Guardian development team attended this year’s dConstruct. Two themes emerged:
(1) Both the web of services – that is, an internet made up of sites that connect and/or feed off each other via APIs – and the wired city, where there is no longer an offline/online duality, have been pretty much accepted as the current status quo or the shape of things to come asap.
A good example of both is the Cycle Hire Scheme in London, where you can check online or via apps where to book, plan a trip, pay the monthly fee. At the same time, cycling moves from an ownership model to a lease model, in other words, it becomes a service rather than a product.
(2) There was a surprising number of talks stressing the importance of working together, of processes – not with other companies or crowdsourcing, but inside a company. From talks about how making a site is like a film, a quite frequent metaphor, to the value of improvisation to feed off each other’s energy, to a closing keynote, half standup half horror story, about the nerd who knew absolutely everything about one technology and one day found there was no more work because everyone had moved on (eerie music).
This felt like the web industry is having not so much a mid-life crisis as a mid-30s sense of loss and frustration. Maybe this is from not having achieved as much as there is potential to in spite of all the technological advances. Maybe the way it is currently operating, siloed from other departments within a company, is amounting to a whole which is less than the sum of its talented parts.