Life Hacking and HICSS

After four months of hard work in Washington DC, I have spend the last couple of weeks “life hacking” with a minimum of e-mails and blogging. The Christmas vacation was spend in Olney, Illinois and my family and I enjoyed a small vacation on Kauai, Hawaii before the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS).
My HICSS paper presentation went well and the eGov track was very good this year. The key-note speakers were Joi Ito and Irving Wladawsky-Berger from IBM. The IBM stuff was, as usual, right on. But, Joi Ito really impressed me. His thoughts on digital democracy, blogging, free downloads, tags and open source/standard were really thought provoking and inspiring. After the conference, I talked with Joi about the future of academia; And we agreed that more academics must recognize the importance of communicating to the general public (e.g. using blogs and academic journals must be opened up. I think the transition will require a new generation of academics – but we are getting ready!