Back in the big city

The next couple of days will be an immersion in what I do for a living, mostly, because I’ll be at the Idea Conference 2009. It’s all about social and experience design and you can bet that much of the conversation will centre on online communities and technologies.
I had an interesting listen on the way down to Toronto that was a good reminder of important community experiences way before “online” was an option. The current podcast from BBC History Magazine offered excerpts from audiobooks “The Home Front” and “The Second World War on the Air” featuring radio reports as well as personal interviews with people facing the beginning of the war. One man commented that people had no idea what the sirens meant at first, what was an air-raid warning versus an all-clear. Many were given backyard shelter kits to build, from “a heap of metal, a bag of bolts, and a spanner.”