A fan of “unconferences”, I made it to PodCampDC this weekend. The Pod in PodCamp is not specifically about podcasting, but in general was focused around “New”, or “Social” media (e.g. media casting, blogging, interactive media).

For a full recap of PodCampDC, being a media conference, there is a plethora of blog posts, photos, videos, and of course twitters.

The Un- of *Camps

Contrary to other *camps I’ve been too, PodCamp is more “face-forward” and less round-table discussion. The sessions and speakers were pre-arranged, and so had slide decks and specific messages they were conveying. The conference was still open in that there were open questions, and available rooms for new talks, but in general it had more of a traditional conference feel. I spoke with some at the conference about this, and they agreed and speculated on why PodCamp doesn’t exhibit the full un-conference style. Many of the speakers and attendees don’t have experience with unconferences, so may feel uncomfortable or unsure of how to act in that kind of setting - however, I think you can just have it happen and they can learn and the experienced ones can help mediate. I also have suspicions that not being Tech Central on the East Coast there is a general lack of prevalence of expecting everyone to be up on folksonomy, geotagging, twitter, and the like.

Expanded Insights

It’s great going to non-technical conferences. And not only that, but going to sessions that are outside my normal expertise or “things I do”. The reason I enjoy building things is addressing a variety of issues and users - and it is beneficial to understand broader concepts and use cases in order to build the right tools. In particular, I really enjoyed Whitney Hoffman’s “Education 2.0″ talk on using technology and interactive, new media for learning and cooperation between students, teachers, parents, and community. The talk was well attended by educators of all sorts, and I think very few “techies”, who were probably off learning details of lighting and sound capture. So when I spoke up to ask the question, “As a tool developer, what do you see is missing from the Education2.0 ecology” there was a flash of bright ideas and excited people.

Nii Simmonds also gave a great talk on Venture Capitalism and emerging markets in Africa. He specifically pointed to the Business Week article, Can Greed Save Africa, highlighting that businesses investing in, rather than giving to regions like Africa lead to better outcomes. I’m traveling this fall to South Africa for FOSS4G 2008 and hoping to also connect more into the African developer and entrepreneurial community.

Thanks to all the hard work that went into PodCampDC. It was terrific to become connected with members of the DC community.

Over the past several years, Google has been holding an increasingly broadening “developers meetup”. Two years ago it was Geo Dev Day, last year they just had Developer Day.

This year, they’ve decided to follow other industry giants and hold a full-on, pay-to-play, conference: Google I/O.

It’s an interesting move for Google, who’s tools are almost all open and free to use. The community has gotten large enough where there is a market for paying to attend their event and at least cover their cost of employees answering (often innane) questions about how to get more web traffic and AdSense revenues. By charging a fee it also limits attendance to something reasonable.

The agenda also includes what they are calling “lightning 20 minute ‘unconference’ sessions” - where attendees “vote” on topics they want to hear presented by other attendees. I think that sentence could have included a couple more buzz-words.

Back from ETech and consuming the inspiration and ideas that were created and demonstrated. The past several years I had considered that ETech must be filled with people beyond imagining, working on bending light for time travel or using mind control to remove spots from carpet. However, I was happy to find out they are just really smart people doing interesting things with technology. Sometimes this is with cutting edge, or emerging devices, or just new techniques for biological entities, and others even just repurposing old technologies in new ways.

A couple of the highlights:

Chris Anderson’s Blimp Bots reminded me of the four years I spent developing high-altitude, autonomous airships, but instead Chris is trying to dramatically decrease the price and difficulty of building these internal vehicles for encouraging school kids to learn and experiment with robotics and hardware.

Kyle Machulis’ talk on “Really, Really Intimate Interfaces” was inspiring for ways other than the obvious. Kyle is a game developer but seems to have become fascinated with sex toys and intimate devices. His point is that too often with user experience and interface design we settle for “good enough”. But when it comes to designing interfaces that deal with some of our most precious, and private, body parts just good enough isn’t enough.

We should consider all concepts with the same care and precision that is appropriate for intimate devices. Also, there are some really interesting open-source projects and excellent business opportunities.

Ethan Zuckerman pointed out how LOLCats are indicators and devices of the activist movement. And Bre Pettis made me think what I need to do to prepare for the inevitably approaching apocalypse (summary, download Wikipedia).

While I didn’t get much sleep at ETech, fortunately I headed back up to SF to recover while less fortunate souls continued onto SXSW where they will deal with 4 more days of little sleep (but lots more inspiration to overload their minds).

Last minute opportunities made it a good idea to head the O’Reilly ETech Conference in San Diego. I’ve wanted to go several times in the past - ETech is an enlightening look into what cutting edge techniques and concepts companies are using - typically outside of the norm.

As my global network of contacts grow, it’s always great to meetup with people that I’ve digitally conversed with often. Jeffrey Johnson,aka Ortelius, is going to meet up and show off some of his very cool Aerial Imaging with RC Airplanes, part of the Open Aerial Map project.

The first day I’ll be sitting in on a part of Marc’s Food Hacking Workshop - though this past Thursday I got a very in-depth tutorial on proper cooking concepts and culinary design.

So if you’re at the conference, make sure and find me. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader on figuring out how to do that.

My trip to San Francisco was timed to ensure attending one of the “thematic” Foo Camps - this one on Collective Intelligence, held at the GooglePlex. The concept of an emergent intelligence from a group is not new. It is the basis of democracies and also more recent books such as “The Wisdom of the Crowd”. However, the evolvement of the web has made engaging a huge amount of users not only possible, but incredibly easy. And the ability to monitor nearly every single action they take moves the question from “what if you could harness the collective”, to “what do you now do with all this data”?

From what I gathered at the conference, it is very early stages for the web crowd on discussing these ideas. The fact that there was a very small representation of sociologist or anthropologists that no doubt have a greater understanding of the general concept is indicative of typical technologists having difficulty engaging traditional experts and gathering experience being applied to new techniques. There was an interesting mix of business/market analysis, developers, designers, and technophiles. Because of this broad representational range there was a difficulty in having a common conversation since the taxonomy of collective intelligence is not well understood.

I’ll go into this more in follow-up posts, especially as applied to Geo, but there are many varied aspects of CI: collaboration, collection, explicit and implicit, superlinear vs. mechanical turk. Each has incredible power and capability, but it’s ineffective to apply a broad brush stroke of design and understanding across the entire gamut.

Kim Rachmeler, VP Customer Service at Amazon, Inc., summarized it best in her “award-winning” quote:

The network knows what the nodes do not.

There were a number of notable projects, a few summarized here:

Beth Noveck showed the very excellent Peer-to-Patent review system that is leveraging public analysis of patents in order to help alleviate the mess the USPTO is currently in. Blaise Aguera y Arcas had an excellent demo of SeaDragon, scaleless image zooming - and hoping that we can do something similar with OpenStreetMap. More CI based, Eric Horvitz had interesting concepts on selective sharing of user-gps tracks for route and traffic prediction building. Humans as sensors.

There was also discussion about “reputation”, which really is like saying Collective² Int. - identifying experts and then using their intellingence to solve problems or make suggestions. Which gets to more underlying questions about whether a “crowd” can really be smart, or if it is just extra power behind a few smart kernels.

I did find it particularly humorous of the potential the underlying purpose of the conference on “Collective Intelligence” was in fact to get together a number of intelligence people to garnish their ideas.