- Yahoo’s having a public Hack Day which you should all attend Should be really good fun. Unfortunately I’m unlikely to be in the US otherwise I’d be totally there.
- A pretty good Infographics pool on Flickr Some nice stuff, to lead you deeper.
- Ryan Carson on the Four-Day-Week challenge I’m jealous, but I don’t have time to get the stuff I want to get done in a five-day week. I’m often sprawling over weekends, as I will be this weekend in fact, and did last. Bloody knackering.
- Tom Watson MP puts his letter of resignation on his weblog I’ve met Tom and I believe that he’s doing this for honourable reasons and that he honestly feels that Blair needs to go. I’m not sure I share those feelings, although I’m pretty clear that the authoritarian streak of the Labour party is creeping me out.
- The Sun has its own take on what’s going on with Blair and Brown I honestly don’t believe a word that The Sun says. It all seems like campaigning with their florid rhetoric. Still interesting to see where their loyalties lie.
- Marvel reverses labeling policy for gay characters This actually happened a week or so ago, so I apologise for clumsily referencing the labelling policy a couple of days ago without checking. Good news anyway.
- Russell Davies (note not Russell T Davies) and friends take on “In Our Time” with “In Our Own Time”, this week about Buffy the Vampire Slayer I’ve only listened to the first ten minutes of the programme so far, but for an amateur effort it seems relatively entertaining. Love the idea though. The BBC should encourage this kind of thing…
- The Web Credibility Project Another interesting project from Stanford researching how and why people evaluate what to read or believe online.
- Danah Boyd is trying to collate current research on Social Network Sites I might steal this idea. I’m looking to find some interesting stuff around collective intelligence and social motives.
- “Online video vault YouTube is place to see and be seen” Medium-dull article features some less dull insights into why people do this kind of stuff in the first place from Clay Shirky, who – frankly – gets around a bit online…
- Alex Russell writes a really nice (and personally flattering) summary of FOO Camp Really glad to have got some people’s attention with the Dirty Semantics stuff. I’ll probably be putting in for a talk at ETech around the subject, if I can really get a grasp on it before then…
- Magma have some of the best dedicated design stores in the centre of London And it looks like they have a pretty good mail-order outfit too for design books, t-shirts, posters and assorted sundries.
- Cabspotting I didn’t link to this at the time, and I’m mystified as to why I didn’t – beautiful and fascinating visualisations of cab paths around San Francisco
- My Society put up some beautiful travel heatmaps a while back that I wanted to talk about but haven’t had time One thing I’d suggest is to overlay maps where the starting location is different (either each major city or tube stop, or at the end of each square half mile). That should give you a sense of which areas in London are best and worst connected…
- Trustmojo On ongoing project investigating trust on the new web. Interesting ideas, beautiful site.
- PICNIC ’06 looks pretty interesting Difficult to believe that I’ve only just noticed that it existed. Thanks to George Oates for pointing it out…
- Meet The LocoRoco Kid on Kotaku See how she sings! Beautiful singing! I miss Loco Roco. I may have to go and play more.
- Motivating participation by displaying the value of contribution Looks like an interesting article, which I will attempt now to buy and read.
- Suw Charman on how to speak at and organise conferences This is a good solid piece that I don’t think would necessarily please a lot of the people who think about these things. The gender thing is a particular community flashpoint.
- Dion Hinchcliffe reports on ‘Five Great Ways to Harness Collective Intelligence’ I agree that the harnessing of collective intelligence is one of the core big ideas of the new bubble, but I’m not convinced by some of these examples.
- Nat Torkington on ‘Rewarding Users for Contributing Data’ I couldn’t agree more with a lot of this – points-based reputation / prestige systems and financial incentives are generally bad ways to reward contributions in social environments.
- Cameron Marlow talks about privacy, transparency and the Facebook controversy I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and have come to the conclusion that it’s never so much about how private something is, it’s about how much it deviates from what people expected the privacy level to be in that particular service…
- The question, ‘Daddy or Chips’ has long confounded man. But Google trends has the answer… It turns out that until the middle of 2004, it was very definitely all about chips. Now however, it’s all about Daddy. Who knew!
Author: Tom Coates
Wrapping up my coverage of FOO sessions, I just thought I should probably mention the two last I attended, even though I don’t have so much to directly say about them. I’ve got one more post to come though, so don’t get your hopes up. No one gets out of here without hearing about the Space Invaders.
One session that I found astonishingly awesome, but honestly don’t know if I really understood 1/100th of, was on Terahertz waves and imaging and was presented by a guy who used to grow diamonds for NASA. He has since moved on to trying to build a small super-hi-tech terahertz whatsit that he plans to use for everything from building a tricoder to heating up collagen beneath the skin and smoothing wrinkles. His talk was … hard … for a non-scientist, and it probably says something about it that the things my brain caught upon were the beautiful silver wavers with tiny grooves upon them that clearly fulfil some purpose that I was unable to focus upon. It was a talk useful for putting the rest of the talks in perspective I suppose – and maybe reminding you of your limited place in the world – if nothing else. Humbling.
The final talk I went to of the weekend was presented by Ron Hornbaker of Alexaholic. Alexaholic is a service that uses data from Alexa’s traffic rankings and provides ways of interpreting it. It was an unusually well-attended session, with Stewart Butterfield from Flickr and Joshua Schachter from Del.icio.us both in attendenace. According to Ron, Tim O’Reilly is also an enormous fan of Alexaholic and uses it to observe trends in the market. Stewart and Joshua are clearly both well versed in tracking what’s going on in the market through Alexa as well – all commenting on a recent upsurge in Web 2.0 properties that was apparently more of a consequence of the removal of spammers than an unusual upspike in their respective traffics (which continue to grow quite solidly). They particularly commented upon Seth Godin’s List of Web 2.0 properties and their respective rankings. Tim O’Reilly apparently arguing that the removal of sites like Google from the list missed out on the ‘harnessing collective intelligence’ aspect of the emerging ecosystem. It was a pretty interesting session, and the product will – I think – get more interesting still when you’re able to assemble your own list of sites to track regularly which was mentioned as the next stage in functionality for the site.
Right then. That’s the sessions all done. You’ve got one more post to endure about FOO, and it’s a fun one – it’s about all the extraneous activities and projects and installations around the place that I experienced, and I’ll be putting it up tomorrow. Thanks for bearing with me through this long series of posts. Next week – San Francisco and the Future of Web Apps. But for now, sayonara!
There was one speaker at FOO this year that would literally have blown my brain away if he’d happened to have had his equipment with him. Ed Boyden talked about transcranial magnetic stimulation – basically how to use focused magnetic fields to stimulate sections of the brain and hence change behaviour. He talked about how you could use this kind of stimulation to improve mood and fight depression, to induce visual phenomena or reduce schizophrenic symptoms, hallucinations and dreams, speed up language processing, improve attention, break habits and improve creativity. Frankly, the whole territory sounded extraordinary. Some examples – a depression study found that stimulating parts of the brain for half an hour once a week massively lifted mood and that the effects lasted for around six weeks after the treatment had stopped. Another study found that by stimulating deep reward centres associated with addiction you could ween someone off smoking.
The whole session was sort of terrifyingly awesome and itself rather brain-melting. Apparently complications from this kind of treatment have been reduced to nearly zero after some safety rules were proposed in 1998. There have been over three and a half thousand papers written around the subject in clinical settings as well. It’s pretty much mainstream science. The only reasons – apparently – that it’s not more widespread is because of (1) the disjunction between neurologists and psychiatrists and (2) the cost and size of the units themselves.
So Ed Boyden’s proposal (along with some colleagues) is to create an open source community that could develop and apply safe brain stimulator technology. They’re currently using Sourceforge, following in the tracks of the Open EEG project. Apparently to construct a brain stimulator is surprisingly easy – you only need a reinforced coil, a high-capacity capacitor, a power supply, control circuitry for discharging the capacitors, hardware for holding and positioning the coil on the head, safety circuitry, optional measurement devices and some form of software and hardware combination to act as an interface. Absolutely fascinating. I shall expect to see pictures of Schulze and Webb experimenting with one shortly.
He ended by telling the story of one prominent thinker in this field who developed a wand that she could touch against a part of your head and stop you being able to talk. Apparently she used to roam around the laboratories doing this to people. She also apparently had her head shaved and tattooed with all the various areas of the brain and what direct stimulation to them (with a wand) could do to her. She has, apparently, since grown her hair. I’d love to meet her.
- Marvel Comics¬†will have no gay characters in its mainstream books Only books labelled ‘Max’ or which indicate that they are for older people will contain any gay characters. I understand why they’re doing it, but it’s basically selling out one culture to bow to the Christian right
- Aaron Swartz writes about ‘Wikimedia at the Crossroads’ and announces that he’s going to run for a position on the board He’d get my vote – he’s evidenced a particular level of passion, enthusiasm, intelligence and commitment over the last few years.
- Aaron’s second essay on Wikipedia – “Who Writes Wikipedia” – is a bloody important read if you’re interested in social software If his contention is true – and it seems entirely plausible – then there are a lot of things we can learn from the existence of editors and the massively distributed content generation that’s going on with Wikipedia
- An interesting post on ‘Why You Tube works’ I actually pretty much buy this – I’ve never understood why advertisers (for example) so infrequently put their ads online for people to talk about and link to. You Tube has solved this, and I suspect is busily making a lot of advertiser’s lives a lot eas
- 3-2-1 Countdown Widget for Mac OS X Every Travian player’s dream come true – an easy way to set countdowns so you know when you can do the next bit of building in your village…
- Stowe Boyd discusses ‘Efficiency v Belonging’ in social tools There’s a bunch of research on why people participate in online communities, but very little on why they contribute to projects like Wikipedia (as far as I know). If anyone knows of some, could they tell me?
- Stanford University have a ‘Persuasive Technology Lab’ They call their field ‘captology’ and use it to mean how you can use computing technologies to influence and change behaviour, which sounds kind of creepy but they seem to be mainly using for good. Weird / interesting stuff…
- Wikipedia’s (slighty) artile on Captology Confession: My first reaction is to be horrified by the neologism. Apparently it derives from ‘Computers As Persuasive Technologies’ (CAPT-ology). If you went back to the Greek you’d discover that the word for persuasion is ‘Peitho’ and that there’s a Goddess associated with it. There’s even a discipline called ‘peithology’ that studies the nature of belief. You could do great compounds with that.
- Wikipedia’s article on Peitho, goddess of persuasion Funny goddess. Not enormously popular. Didn’t get out much. Occasionally confused with Aphrodite.
- Wikipedia’s entry on Mark Shuttleworth It seems slightly weird and stalkery to mention this, but I met a man who went into space at FOO and he had a weblog and he was really nice and quite good at werewolf and I promise I won’t mention it any more.
One talk from FOO Camp 06 started off fascinating me and end up driving me to distraction with frustration. Chris Csikszentmih√°lyi from the MIT Media Lab did a talk about the implicit politics that lies behind all technology. Initially I found this highly engaging – it reminded me a lot about the cultural studies work that I’d been involved with during my incomplete doctorate – only with a more practical bent. Specifically Emily Martin’s article The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance based on Stereotypical Male-Female roles leapt into my brain – an article that argued that scientific discourse was regularly distorted by cultural prejudices and explained how unexamined assumptions made a mockery of concepts like ‘good science’.
Csikszentmih√°lyi described his work as exploring the implicit assumptions of technological work and science – the difference between what the scientists think they’re doing and what actually happens. One of the interesting facts he revealed was that only 3%-5% of experiments in advanced science are ever reproven (ie. the experiments are successfully replicated) for a whole range of reasons. This is not because the science was wrong (necessarily) but simply because some of the experiments can only be performed using incredibly expensive equipment that might only be owned by one laboratory (CERN’s particle accelerators?) and that many of the experiments could only be replicated with the ‘tacit knowledge’ of the people who had performed the initial experiments – knowledge that often was not successfully captured in the write-ups of the experiments. He argued that, ‘scientific conflict is not resolved by individuals replicating stuff like that, it’s resolved in a remarkable social process’.
Anyway, so far so good. He then talked about tool neutrality and how where you received funding from – and the perspective from which you were viewing the research – inevitably revealed that all work was political, and that ideas like ‘tool neutrality’ (I’m making something neutral and it can be used for good or ill) and ‘technology is out of control’ were both missing the point and were completely irrelevant to the debate. That the politicised nature of science was indisputable, but did not necessarily result in anti-technological standpoints.
The parts that got difficult for me were when – accepting that there was no science that was not political – Csikszentmih√°lyi seemed to me to wander rapidly down into relativism, almost seeming to argue that there was no such thing as empirically ‘better’ or ‘worse’ science, but simply different political takes on the same field. I tried to get him to expand around this and challenged a few points that seemed to be logical extensions of this without much success at all, and left frustrated and irritated by the whole enterprise. It seems to me that the inevitable idea that science is politicised needs to be kept distinct from the quite abhorent concept that there is no qualitative difference between different theories, only perspectival ones. This seems to me to be an idea that’s seeped into the world from my old discipline to the good of precisely no one. It seems to me that there remains some way of arguing that a theory that was demonstrably disprovable was conceptually ‘worse’ than a theory that fitted the available data, and that this metric was implicated in and connected to but orthogonal to the inevitably politicised nature of the science itself. That is to say that the politicisation would inevitably exist and would always and inevitably obfuscate any model of a ‘real world’ that one might wish to posit as a useful mechanism to think against (subject to disproval, of course). But that while we accepted that, there were metrics that could often be used to measure practicality, utility, plausibility or whatever that could be a debased but functional analogue to ideas of ‘what makes good science’.
I have no sense of whether I managed to successfully challenge Chris on these theoretical issues, whether he simply did not get what I was trying to ask him or whether I was just evidencing my stupidity in public again. However, the whole thing did seem to reach a nasty point when I said that he seemed to be arguing for the death of logic itself, only for him to say that he believed in logic – as a fundamentally perspectival and human way of interpreting the world. At which point I could not help but feel he’d managed to destroy the platform on which he himself was talking – running hard into the wall between modernity and post-modernity that left feminism with no concept of a woman left to defend.
I’m still thinking around this talk, and would appreciate any insights anyone else might have on it out there in the world. From talking to many of my ex-colleagues in the humanities it seems that much of the sociological and philosophical frameworks for these kinds of the positions are being rapidly abandoned by community after community – but this is purely hearsay. Anyone got any thoughts?
- Chris Messina talks about, “The yin-yang of FOO and Bar” Interesting comments from Robert Scoble surrounding the contention (which I agree with) that FOO and Bar are entirely compatible parts of the same ecosystem…
- Islam vs. Christianity – it comes to a head on The Daily Show Frankly it’s about time a primetime TV show tried to answer the question, “Which religion is correct?”
- Sprites sing a song called, “I Started A Blog Nobody Read” on Odeo It’s like it reached into my soul and sang me a song based upon the activities I do on the internet…
- Awesome pictures of an iPod Shuffle case mod using an old Nintendo controller Probably – definitely – the most fun thing I’ve seen so far this week.
- Mr Webb has relaunched his ‘dirk’ project on the interconnectedness of all things I remember this from the first time around when he launched it in 1996 and promoted it on Lance Arthur’s glassdog.net webnerd artistic community. This time I believe it’s built on Ruby on Rails. If you think about it, it’s sort of a proto-anti-tagging…
- “The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes” – a piece on design and style by Adam Greenfield from 2001 I read this at the time, but was sent it this morning by a friend and re-read it. I’d be interested to know what he thinks of the current state of the design industries – certainly it’s got a bit more function focused, at least on the web…
My third FOO post in a row, and I’m only just getting onto the talks themselves. This time I learned from my experience last year and made sure that I tried to steer myself towards talks that were outside my natural territories. I think I only really screwed up twice – once by going to a session on the democratisation of media hosted by the guys from Digg, Kevin Kelly and Dan Gillmor and once by going to Steven Levy‘s session on the future of the music industry. Steven’s always good value and it was great to see Dan again (however briefly), but realistically I knew these territories too well and wasn’t likely to get my mind very satisfactorily blown. It’s possible of course that my presence was useful for other people, but to be honest I kind of doubt it. Two things however do stick in my head – firstly when I told Kevin Kelly that most magazines were just regurgitated press releases (having completely erased from my head for a moment that he was the founding editor of Wired). Not the right context to go about making massive generalisations, really. The other thing that really made an impact was how nice the guys from Digg are. Simon, Paul and I did some exploring around Digg a while back for work and my impression of the site completely changed from it being a trivially easy proposition to a highly polished and carefully crafted piece of work – both things that seemed to be reflected in the people who had worked on it. Smart, decent, honourable people. Very interesting.
Anyway, the talk that I really wanted to start with was one by an old colleague – Matt Biddulph. He was talking about some of the things he’s been doing (during his year of slacking off) that hybridise Second Life with the rest of the web-based internet. I’d seen his Flickr screen in-game, but the thinking he’s been doing around it was really fascinating to me. In particular he’s been thinking about Second Life as a useful prototyping environment for ubicomp stuff of the Adam Greenfield Everyware variety and his thinking pushed me off in all kinds of interesting directions. A few of the key concepts he described that stirred me up:
- The Invisible Tail – being the sheer number of real-world objects or products that are currently not represented in data at all (with the result that you can’t yet leverage any of the long-tail benefits supplied by the Interweb). Lots of Age of Point at Things stuff in there, but more interestingly framed;
- The relationship between the above and concepts like thinglinks.org, which allow individuals to give individual items identifiers that will make them annotatable over time;
- Ubicomp Middleware – specifically, “what’s the outboard brain for an object in second life” and what could you do with it – lovely concepts there;
- Each AIBO becoming not an individual object but an endpoint for a global AIBO consciousness – and if that didn’t get you salivating then you’re dead inside;
Lots of things occurred to me during the talk, including the possibilities of using in-game architectures as structures to layer visualisations of extra-game information. So for example, could you have a huge structure that was designed to reflect the spacial territories in the Google NewsMap? That is to say, could each room in the structure represent a story and could its size be influenced by the current significance of the news story in which people could discuss the story in question. Could you basically create a virtual building that actively guided the discussions within it – literal forums for short-term topics of interest that grew or shrank depending on various metrics.
Another thing I started wondering about was to what extent you could use collaborative filtering mechanisms (or mechanisms like the old BBC Homepage patina) to alter objects in-game in real-time to reflect the usage patterns of the people who used them – and what implications this could have to automatically reconfiguring objects in the real-world. When I mentioned this to Matt he said it was like your Powerbook automatically getting smaller when you got onto a plane because it had discovered that people who used the smaller ones tended to bring them out more often on planes. I started wondering about evolutionary algorithms and slowly evolving functionality spreading virally across mobile phones. I don’t really have a sense about whether this is all one great conceptual dead-end but something tells me that objects that can learn from how all other objects like them are being used is an idea that will have a time.
Anyway, that’s enough to be getting on with. More later.
- Stargate SG-1 to end with (cough) tenth season Stargate is one of those desperate guilty secrets that it’s difficult to justify, particularly in the presence of Battlestar Galactica which frankly craps upon it from a very great height. I’m not sure I’ll miss it enormously…
- BarCampers spot the unusable bathrooms Ah Flickr, my true friend. You’re always on my side. Hug.
- Awesome Human Space Invaders on You Tube I have no concept of how long this must have taken. Thanks to Euan Semple for pointing it out.
- An interesting Flickr set of people hanging around on the set of Lost No spoilers as far as I can see, although there are sets I don’t recognise. Realistically they could be not parts of the set at all.
- Steve Irwin dies, South Park has the story Okay – I’ll accept that there’s an element of tastelessness to the link I just posted. Let’s be generous and call it a tribute, eh?
I’m sure Tim actually gets quite annoyed by the amount of times that people ostensibly talk about FOO Camp but actually end up talking about Werewolf – a game that is played pretty much solidly throughout the Friday and Saturday nights by up to forty or fifty people at any given time. If he does, then it’s a shame, because I genuinely think that the Werewolf action is an absolutely necessary gelling agent for the whole event. There are a lot of people at FOO and geeks are not necessarily the most naturally gregarious of people. Speaking from personal experience, without Werewolf I’m not sure that I would have been able to get passed my inhibitions last year and actually talked to anyone at all. It’s not why you go to FOO, but it definitely makes the rest of the event more pleasurable and interesting.
This year’s Werewolf action was among the best I’ve ever experienced – playing with a new group people changes the dynamic dramatically – taking a couple of games before you start to get a sense of the people around you and when they’re feeling awkward or lying. It’s always easier with people you know well who haven’t played much. By way of an example, I cite Paul Hammond’s first stint as a Werewolf. He turned sort of purple and kept smiling all the way through. Very odd behaviour. Other players were more inscrutable, with Cal in particular ploughing his way through unsuspecting villagers with a great big grin on his face and a card around his neck reading ‘villager’.
If you’ve not played Werewolf, I’m not going to describe it for you – you can find much better representations on the web of the kind of game it is. I’m just going to thank Jane McGonigal, Danah Boyd, Chris DiBona and Artur Bergman for hosting the games, and particularly Danah and Artur for taking most of the strain this time, allowing Jane to actually play for a change. She’s written up a lot of the experience of FOO on her site: It’s Foo-tacular! and remains one of the most terrifyingly good Werewolf players I’ve ever competed against.
There’s no way on earth I’m going to remember the names of all the other awesome Werewolf players, but obvious kudos goes out to Sam Ruby, Michael Buffington, Rabble, Greg Stein, Julian Bleecker and Mike Migurski. I’d like to put out a special w00t to Suw Charman and Mark Shuttleworth for the fascinating / exhausting game on Saturday night and say finally that it was particularly good fun to actually get a chance to hang out with Erik Benson, who I think is now a full Werewolf convert and hopefully a solid new friend. Colleague Simon Willison also deserves a mention for being unusually but stunningly hopeless at the whole thing.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about or why this was so much fun and so worth talking about, then can I advise you to run to any environment where you get to play a few rounds with smart people. I believe there was one such place over the weekend at BarCamp. Hopefully this should mean that an appetite for more games will emerge in the UK, that we can start moving towards the creation of a local regular Werewolf event in the UK and that in the end we’ll all be able to participate in the proposed “World Series of Werewolf” – an idea that’s time has clearly come…
I’m going to try over the next few days to capture retrospectively my FOO experience in a little detail. I didn’t think I’d have enough time to do it, but it turns out that when you’re trying to avoid writing your talk for major conferences in the US there’s no end to what you can accomplish (as long as it’s not in any way related to the talk in question). So my flat’s almost completely clean, I’ve scanned in every photograph I own into Flickr, I’ve ordered food, and done lots of washing. I’ve caught up on a month of back e-mail. I’ve even cooked, for god’s sake, and I never do that. It makes sense that the weblog should get some much-needed attention in the process.
But before I get into the substance of the event I wanted to stick my oar in about some of the FOO elitism arguments that have been roaming around the Valley recently. I’m not going to comment on my personal beliefs on why Dave Winer was not invited – that’s between Tim and Dave – and in fact you can read some of Tim’s reasoning on Om Malik’s site that might give some clues, but I do think the whole thing is rather overblown and here’s why:
Everyone who attends FOO feels honoured to be there, but let’s be clear – invitation-only events happen all the time in the tech industry. There are more conferences and seminars happening in and around Silicon Valley than there are days in the year. And any individual or company is free to start their own event and invite whomsoever they choose. I went to a Microsoft Social Research Seminar earlier this year with a lot of the smartest people in that part of the industry and no-one batted an eyelid. If all events were invitation-only then I might have some more concerns, but they’re not. It’s never been easier to show off your great work in the industry and have it seen, nor to find places to show it off to people who will respond to it. I find it ridiculous that anyone can look across the valley to Sebastopol – past MIcrosoft, Apple, Google and Yahoo! – and somehow come to the conclusion that O’Reilly have their iron grasp on the creative direction of the Internet and are leveraging a couple of hundred person camping trip to cement it. I just don’t buy it – and as a consequence I’m pretty sure that the arguments that protesting FOO is about the misuse of power or influence or propriety or something are just bunk.
Another thing I’ve heard expressed is some concern that FOO is some kind of power-brokering Web 2.0 dark-masterplan dominance play, but I can only say that in my experience it’s quite the opposite – the value in FOO is not in bringing together the powerful in order to assert control, but in the cross-pollination of disciplines. It’s about meeting people who are talking about brain imaging and hacking, seeing the robots playing football, listening to the sociologists and chatting to the people who grow diamonds in their cellars and are trying to build tricorders. It’s about stepping out of your worldview for a minute and seeing a larger picture. Confounding yourself. That’s why there are ten talks going on at any given time and why some of them get barely one person attending them – because it’s an event based on multiple voices rather than establishing a consensus. I think anyone who came to the event looking to assume their rightful place in the cadre of the dark cabal running Web 2.0 would be more than a little disappointed by the general lack of interest in playing that particular game. Unless I went to the wrong sessions, of course. Which is quite plausible. FOO seems to me an oddly and beautifully innocent event. I’m sure people do business there, but it does generally seem to be more about genuine enthusiasm and excitement about technology than these larger questions of politics.
But still the charge remains that it’s the same old group of people who wander in and out of the event each year, and I’m afraid I don’t buy that either. I was lucky enough to go last year – my first and I thought at the time plausibly my last opportunity – but this year was completely different. There were something like three times as many people at the event this year, which means necessarily a couple of hundred new people were there. If that doesn’t convince you, then maybe you’d be convinced by Tim’s assertion that one model they were considering for next year would include none of the people present this time. I don’t don’t know if they’d make such a severe change – and I’m obviously deeply hoping that I get invited again next year – but there does generally seem to be a committment in O’Reilly to find a way to bring in lots of exciting new people. Again, I don’t buy that it’s the old guard. And I’m unconvinced by the idea that only the powerful and influential get invited. I’m pretty sure Jeff Bezos would still be there if that was the rule, but that wouldn’t explain why they let me in.
No, FOO is a great experience but a necessarily limited one – and what people should be thinking is how can they learn from it to create a variety of other events, private or public, invitation-only or free-for-all that keep a vibrant culture moving forward. The Bar Camp people – for all their initial hostility to FOO – have actually stolen many of its best elements and made it their own – ad hoc and fully open gatherings of creative nerds. It’s a different experience but it’s an exciting and complementary one. I just wish more people had followed their lead.