New & Improved

All that said, if you were somehow to bleach any memory of the first DE from my mind, this year's would still easily be in the top three events I've ever attended. DE2 only fell short by the astonishingly high standard set in Amsterdam, and I hope anyone reading these words keeps this in perspective.

What was better this year? Most obviously: women! Lots of women! Without wanting, in the slightest, to essentialize anything, or call upon some horrendous notion of a "feminine touch," the sheer fact of something actually approaching gender parity made this a delightful exception to the run of sausage-party tech conferences.

The food! God, I could quite happily have noshed on the hybridized Berliner street cuisine of Turkish/Lebanese staples and more deeply indigenous stuff like pastries and, um, beer for weeks. Whoever Spreeblick arranged to do the catering did a particularly fine job; Nurri and I have already turned our efforts toward replicating some of that garlicky goodness.

And maybe I just lucked out by having drawn the Alexanderplatz group, but I also thought this year's derive was much improved over last year's model. Instead of the algorithmic walks, this time around we actually imposed some top-down ordering. (OK, so technically maybe it wasn't so much a derive.) The result was that I got to wallow quite shamelessly in modernist Ostalgie, in the Cornelian, green-beer-quaffing company of five of the best. My thanks to the delightful Katje and Jörg, who so cheerfully shared their Alex with us.

Finally, at the level of content, I felt that this year's presentations did a better job of actually engaging the world. The participants weren't set with any overarcing theme, but let me try and do what the boys of Stamen might do with their dangerously seductive infovisualizations, and pull a coherent signal out of the clamor. Maybe we'll see a theme emerging from the bottom up?