Videos and photos
Video of the opening sessions
Here are the opening sessions on July 2, which started with Steve Moore explaining the ideas and experience behind 2gether08, and paying tribute to those who contributed to its very rapid development over eight weeks. Steve said that he wanted the event to be substantially self organising, and developed through creative volunteering. This resulted in about the half the 400 people registered for the event contributing in some way.
Jon Gisby, director of New Media and Technology at Channel 4, welcomed everyone on behalf of the main sponsor. He said Channel 4 were attracted by the scale and ambition of the event, its innovative format, and the way it could contribute to exploration of how we can use technology to make the world a better place.
In the Opening Exchanges Bill Thompson chairs contributions on what are the biggest challenges facing us at the start of the 21st century? with contributions from Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, Umair Haque, Director of Havas Media Lab, and John Naish, author of Enough.
We’ll be posting more videos from 2gether08 over the next week or two.
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© 2008 2gether08. 
John Naish’s claim that we have enough represents a thoroughly middle class and blinkered perspective. 2gether took place on the very site of the
Old Nichol Street Rookery, which until the end of the nineteenth century was one of London’s worst slums. A 100 years on it is known as the Boundary Estate and, like much of London, hardly a scene of affluence. For Naish to have found from personal experience that wealth doesn’t causally map to happiness is one thing. To then tell people who aren’t well off that they have ‘enough’ and shouldn’t aspire to be wealthy is another. As Spike Milligan put it: “All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy”. As to the term ‘infobesity’, apart from its metaphorical weakness, the real problem is that we lack paradigms with which we can understand, evaluate and critique information at any scale. More practically, we are also very poor at presenting information.