May 6 is Digital Death Day
Are you interested in the conversation around digital death? Do you want to learn more about family access to accounts after a death, legal issues like terms of service and digital property rights, or archival and curation of data? What about the individual’s right to delete data and declare themselves digitally dead?
Now’s your chance to get involved.
Digital Death Day North America will see 75 – 125 attorneys, entrepreneurs, researchers, archivists and leading minds gather to discuss the issues shaping this emerging space. Add your voice to the group and share your ideas on how the future could be, and your perspective on what’s important.
From the organizers:
Digital Death Day is a collaborative unconference where attendees will work together to explore how we should deal with our online profiles after death. This is the 3rd Digital Death Day and the 2nd such event in North America. The event immediately follows the 12th Internet Identity Workshop planned for May 3-5 at the same location.
The unconference format allows for an agile event, where everyone is welcome to contribute. Beginning at 9:00 AM we start with a blank wall and though an hour-long, interactive process, create a full day, multi-track conference agenda that is relevant and inspiring to everyone in attendance. Digital Death Day will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin who has designed and facilitated over 100 unconferences for professional and technical communities.
- How can I decide what should be done with my social network profiles and other digital assets?
- How can I inform my online friends of my death and share with them my final messages?
- How can I be sure that big companies (like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft) will respect my wishes?
- Does the past have value? Should we make an effort to preserve it?
- Is it too old school to die and be dead?
- How will the wealth of preserved information change the way that future generations look back at us?
- How are you preparing for your own death?
- What services are available?
- What are the policies for e-mail accounts and social websites when you die?
- What about digital assets that are jointly held?
- What happens to the references to other people in the deceased person’s digital assets?
- What happens to the digital assets with references to the deceased person?
If you are an entrepreneur, Internet service professional, attorney, estate planner, researcher, technologist, archivist, policy maker, funeral director, a member of the media, or planning your digital will, your perspective and participation is needed an valuable.
Digital Death Day North America
May 6, 2011 9 AM TO 5 PM
Computer History Museum
1401 N Shoreline Blvd
Mountain View, CA 94043
12th Internet Identity Workshop
May 3 – 5, 2011
PodCamp Montreal This Weekend
(This has been cross-posted from my marketing blog. I spoke about Digital Legacy for the very first time at PodCamp Montreal in 2009. If you can make it to Montreal this weekend, I’d love to see you at my session.)
Despite not being a podcaster (yet), I love attending podcamps. This weekend is the third edition of PodCamp Montreal and the first time at UQAM’s Coeur des sciences. (It’s also my seventh PodCamp!)
Once again, I am looking forward to a weekend full of tech, social media and great discussions around digital communications and community. There will be 3 tracks of presentations this year; 2 in French, 1 in English.
I’m privileged to be speaking once again. I’ll be presenting a session that is specifically targeted to digital content creators, and is part of my digital legacy series:
Your Web Content : Forever or Fragile?
In the last 15 years we’ve converted analog to digital and put everything on the Web and told that it will be there forever. What if we’re wrong?
Sunday, September 12, 2010
9:30 AM
Chaufferie (hidden away at 175, avenue du Président-Kennedy)
Google Map
The full weekend schedule, including information about Friday’s first ever MediaCamp and the kick off party is here.
Can’t make it to PodCamp Montreal? Check the session schedule to see which sessions will be live streamed to the Internet. (Yes, mine will be.)
Thanks to the PodCamp organizing team Michelle Sullivan, Sylvain Grand’Maison, Laurent Lasalle and Laurent Maisonnave who have done a great job pulling this event together.
Avoiding Extinction in a Digital Dark Age
I’m excited that my panel submission has been accepted to the voting stage of the SXSW Interactive festival, happening March 11 – 15, 2011 in Austin, Texas. More than 2,400 proposals have been submitted for consideration. Please vote for my session from August 9 to 27 to help it through to the next round of consideration. And, if you feel so inclined, please leave a comment on my session’s Panel Picker page, as this may encourage others unfamiliar with me or my work to vote for my proposal.
Avoiding Extinction in a Digital Dark Age evolved through speaking sessions that I’ve been doing over that the last year. It is particularly relevant to content creators and people who put so much of their work online. (Here’s Wikipedia about the possibility of a digital dark age.)
Avoiding Extinction in a Digital Dark Age
Here’s the session description:
Many think that the web is forever and our personal stories, work and files will live on stored on hard drives and online. Driven by low cost storage, easy distribution and social networks we’ve put our lives online at an amazing pace and converted analog to digital. But, are we inadvertently creating a digital dark age?
In the last 15-years, online photo and video sites, blogs, email and hard drives full of files have replaced the previous generation’s analog heirlooms.
Looking at an old family album from 1910, you’ll be able to view the photos today. Will your descendants be able to see your digital pictures 100 years from now?
The web is actually a fragile place where your digital life’s work and can disappear without warning. Stored data can suffer from digital obsolescence and become unusable.
To prevent the loss of historically significant records and collections, library and archival organizations have been working on digital preservation issues for years.
You may not be a person destined for the history books, but, to your family, friends, colleagues and descendants, your stories and work are just as important, and possibly even more relevant.
This session will look at what each of us can do today to preserve and pass on our digital legacy, how to determine what to save, what steps have happened at the institutional level and determine how they can be adapted for individuals.
If you are a prolific digital creator, this is a must attend session.
Five Questions Answered
- Why won’t my digital content be safe forever on the Internet?
- Isn’t the Internet Archive keeping everything?
- Why is the archive of files on my hard drive/CD/DVDs at risk?
- My data is insignificant. Why would anyone care about it in the future?
- How do I ensure that my important digital files survive me?
SXSW Voting
Here’s how the voting works:
- 30% Community Voting (that’s YOU); 30% SXSW Staff Picks; 40% SXSW Advisory Board Picks
- Voting runs from August 9 to 27, 2010
- First 200 sessions are announced September 20, with more following on November 8
To vote:
- Before Friday, August 27, 2010 go to PanelPicker.sxsw.com a
- click “Sign In” at the top right of the page
- If you have never registered on SXSW.com before, click “create a new account” and fill out the simple form
- Once you are logged into the PanelPicker, you can click here to get to my session, or navigate alphabetically to Avoiding Extinction in a Digital Age to vote.
Thank you for your support. See you at SXSW Interactive 2011!
webcom Montreal
I’m speaking on Death and Digital Legacy today at webcom Montreal. The line up from the social media world is incredible – Jimmy Wales, founder of wikipedia, Tara Hunt, Julien Smith, Chris Heuer, Kristie Wells, Jeff Pulver and loads of other people who are at the forefront of the profession. Kindly, before my session the team were kind enough to interview me.
I’ll follow up with more from the conference after I present and have a moment to breathe.
(The next day…)
What a great conference! My thanks to Claude Malaison and the producers of webcom Montreal for a really well-run event. It was quite an experience to speak on that BIG stage, with the UN emblem behind me.
Photo by Eva Blue
(That’s the brilliant Sean Power on stage talking about social media analytics.)
Feedback on my session was good and I hope that I got the audience thinking about their own digital legacy and who they might assign as their digital executor.
Thanks to everyone who came out to my session.
First Digital Death Day A Success
Photo: The Digital Beyond
From all signs, it appeared that today’s Digital Death Day was a great success. The first (un)conference dedicated to death and technology drew 30 participants, including sponsors Legacy Locker, Entrustet and Data Inherit – all services catering to people who want a secure way to pass on the their digital assets after they’ve died.
Twenty sessions were proposed, including:
Session notes will be available in the next few days. In the meantime, you can check out the highlights of the day from the Twitter back channel.
Digital Death Day in Silicon Valley
Last month at the SXSW Interactive festival, I learned of the Digital Death Day unconference happening on May 20 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This is the first unconference dedicated to discussing the ideas of death online, whether that entails wanting to claim your own information and delete it, or, what happens to your digital identity online when you physically die.
From their site:
Death is a part of life but what does death of the physical self mean for the digital self?
This is a conference focused on this question and others around “digital death”.
- What does it mean for loved ones of the departed?
- What does it mean for professionals in end of life care and post mortem services?
- What does it mean for online tool and service providers?
- What does it mean for estate and legacy planners?
- What do people do to prepare for their own deaths in relationship to their online life?
- What do friends and relatives do with the digital assets of a loved one when they die? What if aspects of their online life were secret or just not understood?
- What does it mean for governments and public records?
- What businesses are serving this market?
The Digital Death Day unconferenced has been added on to the end of the 10th Internet Identity Workshop, running from May 17 to 19 and founded by Kaliya Hamlin (@IdentityWoman). Kaliya is a pioneer in the identity community, co-producing the IIW with Phil Windley and Doc Searls. She is also fellow if the Information Card Foundation, one of the few members of the Open Web Foundation and a member of the OpenID Foundation.
It’s great to see Kaliya take a leading role in bringing this discussion, not only to the identity community, but to silicon valley where so many of the decisions about online policy, services and products are made.
This conference is aimed at:
- People planning their Digital Wills
- Online Social Networks
- Companies offering services for digital afterlife management
- Death Care Professionals
- Estate Planners
- Legacy Planners
- End of Life Planners
- Death Attorneys
- Hospice volunteers
Registration for Digital Death Day is open now. Follow @DigitalDeathDay on Twitter.
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Testimonials
@AdeleMcAlear reat presentation last night at #igniteottawa! Really gave me something to think about!!
— Stephanie Luedee @sluedee, Ignite! Ottawa
