Ben Kepes has signed up as co-planner, so I’m only half as stressed about it now :-)
The chaps from OnlineGroups.net set us up a free discussion group using their wizzo ad-free groupmail system. They’re making the same offer to anyone running a barcamp anywhere in the world, very much fitting in with the “gift economy” that Barcamp encourages. The discussion there is taking over from the TVIC mailing list, which you should also be on if you’re in Christchurch. There will be a BarCampChristchurch2 at some point, so you might as well join the list even if you’re not sure if you’re coming to the first one!
Lots of people have added their names to the wiki. Despite the fact that it seems to barf every time you try to edit it (just hit refresh…)
I’m particularly looking forward to Joel talking about the Singularity (trivia: I met Joel after looking for something to link from the word “Singularity” on my Technoprogress page), Ben talking about SaaS, and Marek on OpenID. I’m sure there will be many more topics of interest, so anyone who can make it, should do so!
Anyone is also welcome to come to a meeting at CII, 200 Armagh St, 11am Friday 31st where we’ll confirm as many details as we can, then go have lunch somewhere.
If you’re thinking you’ll be coming, make sure you add yourself as a participant on the Wikipage! It seems to me that every time I try to edit the page it throws a 500 error and I have to hit reload, but it works on the reload. Weird…I will have to ping Chris about that…[update: I found the issue thread about this on the PBWiki Bugs forum and posted there]
Ok, so I started this post 3 weeks ago, and have only just got around to finishing it. Bad Seth, slap hand. But there’s been so much going on, and I’d sorta been waiting until Interclue was definitely nearing launch before poking my head up in the blogosphere again.
A month ago was what we in NZ call “Waitangi Weekend” or roughly “the weekend closest to Waitangi Day”. For the last decade or so I’ve celebrated this particular weekend by going back into the past, doing Medieval re-enactment with my friends in the SCA.
This year I instead paid a trip to the future, having scored a late invite to Kiwi Foo Camp (aka “Baa Camp” (an in joke too long to explain), organised by Russell Brown and Nat Torkington, who are both awesome overachievers in their own different ways.
In fact, most of the people I talked to during the weekend were awesome in some fashion. As an invite only event, with the karma of O’Reilly and the two organisers behind it, sponsored by Google and Rod Drury’s Xero, they really were able to pick and choose, and although there were plenty of people they realised ought have been invited, the ones they did choose were pretty damned interesting. I think I may have been one of the last ones to sneak onto the invite list, apparently later on it was more a matter of “Ok, if it’s Jesus Christ come to announce the second coming, then *maybe* we’ll let him in…
So Jayne and Glynn, thanks for prodding me to ping Nat about it when you did! Was good travelling with you (and Damien and Phil).
The event started with everyone introducing themselves with 3 relevant words (eg I was “attention deficit infojunkie”, and Rod Drury was “Stock Options. Hiring”), and filling out forms with among other things, the top 3 things they would bring back from the future if they had the chance (I chose Immortality Pills, a Pocket Quantum Computer, and an iCar, but later I decided I should have gone with a USB2 compatible storage device containing a copy of the future’s version of Wikipedia - or, if their drive was big enough, a copy of the future’s Internet Archive Project…now that would be a big drive.)
Then everyone wrote down on big sheets of paper what they were going to talk about. Goodness, but there were a lot of interesting sessions. The problem was that there were 5 different sessions per slot, and I usually wanted to see at least two of them! Later on I discovered it was even worse, because there was usually someone hanging around the common area who I really wanted to talk to *as well*. So I usually wanted to be in 3 places at once.
Highlights
Our Minister for Communications was great value. I think everyone was impressed by the depth of his understanding of the issues surrounding telco reform. He also was able to get a sense of the consensus in the room regarding the need for peering policy, which is something that has driven everyone a bit batty since the major Telco’s stopped doing it - for a while now traffic that used to travel from one box to another inside the WIX or AIX has had to go via Australia, because our local BigCos are hoping the SmallCo’s will pay them interconnect fees. Judith Tizard was also there, and definitely seemed to be enjoying herself.
A fantastic performance from the Vospertron guys. Conversation overheard in the carpark afterwards was along the lines of: “so, what microprocessor do you use in these light suits?” - “Uh, it’s a PICAXE…” - “Wow, AWESOME, I market those. I’ve got something to write about on our site tonight!”. The other cameraphone in this video belongs to Russell Brown, who I introduced myself to afterwards. He’s a really down to earth and severely clueful media guy, who’s right across technology and politics in this country. I like him.
Showing Interclue to a bunch of people, who were actually pretty impressed on the whole. My actual presentation wasn’t as good as I wanted, I wish I’d spent more time preparing for it, but the week before was just madness. Got some useful feedback on things people wanted to see, none of which we’ve actually managed to implement yet, but it’s all on the drawing board.
Rod Drury’s demonstration of Xero - wow, now that was what I call a presentation. You’d almost think he’d done this sort of thing before…
The Firefox 3 show and tell - some great things coming up there.
Talking with Asa Dotzler, who is a very clever man. In fact, all the Mozilla guys there were wicked smart. But Asa was speaking my language - the big picture stuff, why Google needs Mozilla, how Firefox is assuring the future of the web as a platform, etc. Asa is the head of QA - essentially nothing gets into the final release of Firefox without him signing off on it! He also started the Spread Firefox website, and is a key evangelist for the Mozilla Foundation. [1]
Chatting with Mike from Pitch Black, his friends in the entertainment space, and seeing their awesome multimedia mashup demos. I first saw Pitch Black perform at Roots Festival in Kaikoura - they had the last set of the night and by the end of it I remember thinking “Pitch Blue”. Awesome electronica and great visuals. Kudos to Nat and Russell for inviting some people from the more entertaining side of the geekosphere.
Playing Werewolf for the first time. I didn’t last long. I was a werewolf. I picked the two smartest fast-talking villagers I knew, killed the first one in the first round, but failed to convince the other two werewolves to nab the second one, who fingered me in the next round. Doh! Unfortunately that particular game ended at 4am, I was somewhat drunk, and I forgot to set my alarm. So much for sunday morning :(
Top 3 things I really regret missing out on:
Quinn Norton’s session on Bodyhacking (apparently she was appearing with the aid of Provigil, which is marketed under the brandname “Modavigil” in this country, you can get it for “Shift Worker Sleep Disorder”, and yeah, it’s useful, but it’s not a magic bullet.)
The session from the Public Address bloggers, who are great value.
Chris di Bono’s session on the OLPC project, a project I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while, as it is one of the definitive Philanthrogeek projects of our time…but I was having a good conversation with Asa Dotzler at the time, so I missed it. Bugger.
There are a lot of people I want to get back in touch with and continue conversations started at Kiwifoo, but every time I started an email I got to a certain point and remembered that I didn’t actually have time to talk, and that anyway I should at least get the new website up, which we still haven’t finished. I’ll go back through my drafts soon and ping them.
After it all, I came back, caught up on sleep, progressed an important deal for the company, and then headed out for the final night/day of Canterbury Faire. I was probably the freshest person on the site, apparently everyone had been having a fabulous time, and I’m so sorry I missed all the action, but well, Kiwi Foo was a bit of unique event (well, hopefully not unique, and hopefully not on Waitangi weekend next time). I did make the Steward pretty happy when I fetched cold caffeine for him and his crew during the hot and dusty packdown.
[1] I’m pretty Bullish on Google and Mozilla at the moment, but Microsoft have finally shipped Vista and Office, which means that they have a bundle of manpower that’s suddenly not completely overoccupied, they’ve been hiring some very smart people like Jon Udell, and Google has decided that they want to start charging for their online office apps, so it’s seriously game on at this point. We (Interclue) are intending to stay more or less neutral, and support both IE and Firefox (and Safari, and Opera, and others) as best we can with the resources we have. We wanted to launch with both Firefox and IE supported, but IE just proved to be a bit more difficult to work with than we hoped - we are almost there, but I decided to give priority to giving the best possible UX for one rather than an average UX for both at the beginning. Hopefully I made the right call on that.
There are rather a lot of people and groups I’m intending to talk about on this blog, the problem is that right now I’m insanely busy so it may take me a while to get around to all of them. So I thought I’d give a brief list, and if anyone wants me to write about any particular one, they can let me know in the comments.
So, not in any particular order, here are some incredibly cool people doing great things for the people of this planet:
Steven Clift whose tireless promotion of e-democracy may shortly be rewarded with an Ashoka fellowship. I have been following his do-wire mailing list for at least 5 years now and I think he’s well worthy of that honour. It’s a bit of a fluke, but the company behind the forum software he’s using for his Issue Forums is run by people here in Christchurch.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, who recently suggested that we could be a bit smarter about the way we discuss politics online and may be hoping to kickstart another revolution of sorts. Personally this is an area where the idealist and the pragmatist within me have an argument. On the one hand I’d like to see net culture transcend the pathetic sloganeering of broadcast politics, but on the other hand I’m aware that for the moment a fully integrated strategy that bows to the tyranny of the “swing voter” might be necessary in 2006.
Jeff Skoll, definitely a philanthropist after my own heart says here : “In my case, I like to support causes where “a lot of good comes from a little bit of good,” or, in other words, where the positive social returns vastly exceed the amount of time and money invested.” - or, in other words, he’s a Philanthohacker. One of the very clever things he’s doing is running Participant Productions, who are harnessing the power of the movie theatre for the sake of good with films like An Inconvenient Truth. and Syriana
Benetech, who I first spotted because they employed Brendan Nyhan who was involved with Spinsanity, an amazing blog I was following that covered the unprecedented level of media spin in the post 9/11 era, right up until they re-elected Bush, after which I guess they decided that the American public wasn’t quite ready for this whole “sanity” concept yet.
Dave Pollard who was Chief Knowledge Officer of Ernst & Young before he decided that he could do more to save the world through blogging. A fantastic blog.
The WorldChanging bloggers, who I wish I had more time to read. They are supported by the above mentioned Omidyar Network (it’s funny how often I discover something amazingly cool and then later discover the Omidyars have started funding it)
Richard Stallman, who more than anyone is responsible for the worldwide open source movement. Met him once at a party here in Christchurch. Nice guy.
George Monbiot - who mainly draws attention to big problems, but occasionally comes up with some very interesting solutions, unfortunately they often seem to involve the British and/or American Governments behaving responsibly, so don’t expect to see any of those solutions implemented anytime soon.
Aubrey de Grey, who’s somewhat radical proposal is that we could engineer the end of biological ageing within the next 50 years. He’s causing a bit of a stir in the biogerontology world, many of whom think he’s holding out false hopes and probably resent his grabbing all the headlines, but he’s got enough scientists supporting him that I think he has to be taken seriously. Given the acceleration in scientific and medical research that is being driven by the internet and cheap computing power, I find it all remarkably plausible. It’s certainly an amazing time to be alive - the age of possibility.
…and of course I am still yet to discuss the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation in any detail.
Finally here are a few random links from my philanthrogeek bookmarks:
Please note that this is far from everyone who’s impressed me in a philanthrogeek capacity over the last few years, but it’s enough to talk about for the moment.
Every now and then I read something that makes me think “wow, almost exactly what I would have said, were I three times smarter”. The last guy to really make me think that was Umair Haque after reading one of his insanely long powerpoints, but tonight it was Dale Carrico, after reading this - anyone studying at Berkley, get thee enrolled in one of his courses, I’m sure you won’t regret it.
