connecting*the*dots

[…] “After four days of networking, dodging vendors, collecting goodies, and possibly mating, the librarians are tired and ready to return home.” […]

Hilarious.

That huge AOL logo behind Lou is killing me.

(photo snapped by Яick Harris and photoshopped by miss_rogue)

Let me fan out my geek cards on the table, face up, before I begin this post…

I’m all about open source, open content, open collaboration, etc., but I’m also East Coast, so please, FOC’s on the West Coast, help me out with this whole FooCamp debate.

Why do some consider Tim O’Reilly’s annual invite-only event of a few hundred friends, employees and people he thinks are interesting to collaborate and have some fun with, such a bad idea?

Dave makes an argument that the closed aspects of FooCamp sync up with the mindset of investors financing a narrow set of “proven” technology, which, he argues, leads to the formation of a bubble culture.

But couldn’t that be said about any closed event? I mean, Yahoo! has “Hack Days” for Yahoo! employees. Isn’t this the ultimate example of a closed event? (thanks to Chris for letting me know in the comments about the open Yahoo! Hack Day coming soon)

At least O’Reilly sends out invites to people outside of his staff… right? Or am I missing something here? Tim O’Reilly’s words:

…”You have to understand the objectives of the event. Its primary purpose is to make sure that O’Reilly’s editors, conference planners, and technical strategists are exposed to new thinking from people who are on our radar but haven’t necessarily been part of our community. Second, it’s to make sure that our individual contacts become collective contacts. Third, it’s to create a great mix of old friends and new, so that it doesn’t become “same old, same oldâ€?, and there’s always new blood.”…

That actually sounds progressive, especially from a business management perspective.

I mean, I dig what Dave’s saying on a philosophical level regarding closed-mindedness, but O’Reilly’s explanation seems to put that puppy to bed pretty quickly. Also, while I’m completely supportive of Chris and Tara’s BarCamp explosion as an alternate, open collaboration vehicle, even Tara accepted her FooCamp invite… so how can it be so bad for the industry?

If we could wipe out closed-events from the face of the planet, maybe open events-only would dent a VC-driven path to another bubble. But back on Earth, in this capitalist society of ours, people go after the short-term buck with the most tested approach available. Absolute conference “openness” can’t compete with the corporate investment mindset of my fellow East Coast money-men (I’m not a money man, I just lived next to them in a past life ;)

And seriously though, doesn’t this noise kinda give the influence factor of Foo a uranium supercharge?

Along those lines, does anyone know O’Reilly’s position on Israel’s right to exist? (heh)

With all of the unconferences popping up on the geek landscape, one has to assume that conference formats outside the technology community will slowly but steadily begin to loosen up a bit.

Thankfully, my favorite conference (TED) is making a move in that direction with TEDTalks.

TED is now releasing their talks, one per-week, under a Creative Commons license, allowing anyone to digest the talks and republish them for non-commercial purposes. I’ve just subscribed to their RSS feed (you can choose between the post, video, audio and email newsletter).

You still have to be invited to attend TED, the price tag remains +$4,000 and the format of the conference itself hasn’t changed, but it’s a great move for them to remove the walls and let us common folk listen in on the happenings.

Thank you.

Tompkins and Adamson at the Austin airport

Well, it took me until today to be able to write my goodbye to Austin. Man, that town and conference kicks some serious ass. Some of my favorite moments from this past week:

• Bruce Sterling’s closing remarks on the state of the world. I’ve never been moved to tears by a public speaker before… I’ve a new favorite author.
• Running into Doc Searls after the Sterling presentation, and chatting with him for an hour about everything from our shared past in Jersey and Greensboro (my current residence) to our love of basketball to our vastly different experiences with the KKK (mine is through my brother’s documentary, you gotta ask Doc about his) and then hitting up a BBQ joint with Doc, Marc Canter, Nancy White and Jerry Michalski.
• Experiencing Kirby Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated and Alan Berlinger’s Wide Awake at the greatest theatre experience I’ve ever come across, the Alamo Drafthouse.
• Adam Greenfield’s ubiquitous computing presentation. (Adam is so very articulate and cultured, I can only hope that experience design is taken more seriously within the world of ubicomp than it is within the web) and Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability presentation. Two very similar topics, yet two very different presentations.
• Finally meeting Tish Grier, Will Giese, Thomas Vander Wal, Peter Merholtz, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina in person after months of blogging, commenting, plazing and flickring each other (did I say flickring?). And yes, I can confirm without a doubt that missrogue and factoryjoe are the web 2.0 version of Bonnie and Clyde.
• Hitting up the town with Khoi, Chris, Ralph and Jeff. We were robbed of the SXSW Web Award for Best Green / Non-Profit site (mediamatters.org) damnit! So we drank more.
• I only ran into one former collegue/friend at the conference — Dan Saffer — but I think I made a handful of new ones along the way.

I had a blast. And I’m looking forward to next year already.

Jim Brazell moderates this panel and kicks off the discussion

The X-Box 360 costs $300. In 1995 the same computing power would have cost $100M.

Ubiquitous computing is the fourth generation of computing; a system on a chip. Cooper’s law says that the capability of wireless computers is doubling every year. The convergence of science and technology is driving this technology.

Dude, he just said that they can control the movement of a mouse, just like a remote aircraft. The tipping point of creepyness?

Serious games are serious. The US Armed Forces, the UN, foreign countries, they’re all creating games for training, social changes and then remixing them with the industry to create n number of emmersive, narrative experiences.

Irwin Kaplan

The Army is redesigning their training corriculumn from level 1 (books) to level 3 (interactive), SCORM Conformant (has to run across a network). They upped their interactive traing from 0 of 150 hours to 82 of 150 hours. They’re trying to equipt soldiers to react in the midst of battle with necessary information available from everywhere.

They have simulation centers as large as the ACC to train soldiers on games. Warehouse sizes.

MLT is Medical Leadership Training. They build realtime scenarios based on field exercises and import them into an interactive narrative, running on the Unreal engine.

He considers himself an educator… and recruiter.

Dr. James Bower

Whyville teaches kids how to eat right based on an avitar/persona thats responds to good or bad choices. There are 1.5 million kids on the site and they stick around (one kid has visited 2000 times over six-years, that’s one visit per day). They play with the social/non-social curve of the game’s narrative to watch boys and girl’s interests shift.

The kids have been writing articles for six years now. They’re running their own government online. They’re replicating democracy.

Now marketing is interested, and smart firms like Toyota, are dipping into Whyville to understand the concept of interactive engagement. They offered Nestle to get involved, but they only wanted to get Purina involved; healthy choices meant more to Nestle in relationship to dogs than kids.

New marketing will enable people to design their worlds and affect mass production.

Michael Whalem

Ignite Learning has developed Reality, Inc., which creates emmersive storytelling games for middle-school students, based 100% on state curriculum. The virtual head of the reality space (Mortimer Gravitas) presents the goals for moving through the interactive curriculum. (very similar to a project I worked on in 1996, “Simon Fefher’s Junkland Jam”)

It’s a linear progression through different activities, such as a game full of levers, which must be moved, created, put in motion to feed some monkeys bananas. If you mess up, it’s ok, try again (the army guys smiled when he said that).

Quote of the day: Bower: “The more games tap into the chemical changes of the brain… the more we will learn.”

Disclaimer: This is live blogging; all quotes are paraphrases.

On Thursday I’m heading to Austin for the 2006 SXSW Internet Conference and Film Festival. It took me a while to figure out if I could make it, but with my latest research project moving into recruitment mode, it looks like I’ll be free… enough. In-between live blogging panel discussions, hitting after parties and enjoying independent films, I’ll probably have to do some work here and there, but I can deal.

Aside from the input of media and ideas (and reconnecting with long lost friends and colleagues) I’m really looking forward to meeting the people whom I’ve shared discourse on blogs or lists for the past six years. This is my first conference since the IA Summit in La Jolla, way back in 2000. A lot has happened since then.

I’m terrible with names, and sometimes even faces, so please excuse me upfront if you see me squinting in your direction as if I’m attempting long-division; I’m not being rude, I’m just being me (can’t help it).

Here’s the SXSW pre-schedule that I’m attempting to follow:

Friday March 10th:
7:00pm - Thank You For Smoking (Film)
9:30pm - Music Videos (Shorts)

Saturday March 11th:
10:00am - Beyond Folksonomies: Knitting Tag Clouds for Grandma (Panel)
11:30am - We Got Naked, Now What? (Panel)
1:45pm - Wide Awake (Film)
3:30pm - James Surowiecki Presentation: The Wisdom of Crowds
5:00pm - Tantek Çelik Presentation: Creating Building Blocks for Independents
7:00pm - Al Franken: God Spoke (Film)
8:00pm - frog design SXSW Opening Party

Sunday March 12th:
10:00am - Design and Social Responsibilty (Panel)
11:30pm - The Future of Education in a Digitally Convergent World (Panel)
2:00pm - Keynote Conversation: Heather Armstrong / Jason Kottke
3:30pm - Running Your New Media Business (Panel)
5:00pm - Serious Games for Learning (Panel)
6:00pm - Flickr, Upcoming.org, and Del.icio.us in the company of Yahoo! (Drinks)
8:45pm - The Last Romantic (Film)

Monday March 13th:
10:00am - Cluetrain: Seven Years Later (Panel)
11:30am - Microformats: Evolving The Web (Panel)
2:00pm - Craig Newmark Keynote Interview
3:30pm - Peter Morville Presentation: Ambient Findability
5:00pm - The New Startup Cultures (Panel)
7:00pm - EFF/EFF-Austin/Creative Commons/League of Technical Voters (Drinks)
9:00pm - Adaptive Path + Consumating + Odeo SXSW Party

Tuesday March 14th
11:15am - Shadow Company (Film)
2:00pm - Burnie Burns Keynote
3:30pm - Democratization of the Moving Image (Panel)
5:00pm - Bruce Sterling Presentation: The State of the World
8:00pm - Hard Candy (Film)

Hope to see (and meet) you there!

UPDATE: I’ll be staying at Homestead Austin - Downtown (wherever that is)