Session Ideas
(below are the ideas from Mind Camp 1.0. The 2.0 page lives here: MC2_Session_Ideas)
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If you have any suggestions for discussions you would like to see, or sessions you plan on giving, please list them here.
* I’d like to see something about ‘’‘Mesh Networking’‘’ from the Seattle Wireless folks. (Justin Martenstein, LionKimbro)
** I’ll do a talk about the current wireless mesh landscape as well as a tutorial on the mindcamp mesh. I can also go into lots of other open-architecture-infrastructure methods and topics. Matt Westervelt
* How about some brainstorming sessions? I’m interested in what kind of language people are using to explain wikis, blogs, and other Web 2.0 concepts to people who are still stuck in the ‘90s. Stuart Maxwell
* Expanding on what Stuart said above, how can we get more “regular” people to appreciate, use, and get value from all of this cool new stuff? Do we talk features, benefits, productivity, or what? Jeff Barr
* ‘’‘What CMS do you use?’‘’ Movable Type? WordPress? Drupal? What best practices do you advocate? What clever customization have you come up with to make these packages do more than they were intended to do? Stuart Maxwell
** Yes—Additionally anyone using Xaraya? Or the http://blogtronix.com tool Scoble’s mentioned? Where are the media rich CMS’s (that handle audio and video serialization well)? Or—anyone have usable sharepoint examples? (it’s quite confusing to most of my end users)Bryan Zug
* ‘’‘Let’s talk about RSS and Syndication’‘’. What (if anything) can and should we do to make it easier to use, more widely applicable, and more popular? Jeff Barr
* ‘’‘Web Services and Web 2.0’‘’ Jeff Barr
* ‘’‘The Mono Project’‘’ - Cross Platform Development with .NET and Mono. EricButler
* ‘’‘Meshwork’‘’ - Distributed, Private, Secure, Cross-Platform P2P Network. EricButler
* ‘’‘Mac Stuff’‘’ - Is there any macintosh related stuff people want to hear/learn about? I’m a cocoa programmer and can help out that way. GusMueller
** Core Data / Core Image programming and its possibilities would be welcome. Brian Rice
* I ‘d like to know more about ‘’‘attention, as in Attention Trust’‘’ and attention.xml. Stuart Maxwell
** There is a related ‘’‘Attention Economics’‘’ meme floating around ( [http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/ 1], [http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/10/19.html 2], [http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/ 3] ), that I’d like to talk about some. Justin Martenstein
** Ditto on the ‘’‘Attention Economics’‘’ meme Bryan Zug
* Mini Lan Party : This probably seems a bit frivolous, but how about some ‘’‘FPS action sometime well after midnight’‘’? Those of us who have powerful gaming machines and the right software can get together in a breakout room, network up, and play Unreal Tournament, Counterstrike, Doom deathmatch or some other equally bloody timewaster. JackWilliamBell
** I’d love to partake in this, but I want to make sure there’ll be a critical mass of FPS gamers before I spend time dismatling and shlepping my machine to camp. Joe Goldberg
*** Added a page for signup: Mini Lan Party - JackWilliamBell
* Separately from any technical session I might be part of, I would like to do a ‘’‘'HowTo’ for advanced coffee users’‘’. This will include information about (and demonstrations of) roasting coffee at home, pump espresso machines and (coolest of all) a vacuum coffee maker. Because of smells, this will have to be outside or in a well-ventilated room. Yes, there will be samples. JackWilliamBell
** That would be fantastic! The question of “How are we going to be different from Foo/Bar has come up a couple of times, and I think the above suggestion sums it up. Neither one of them had a “HotTo” / “Coffee Hacks” discussion. (Justin Martenstein)
*** Whoops! I meant ‘HowTo’ not ‘HotTo’. Fixed above. JackWilliamBell
*** I like calling it ‘Coffee Hacks’. The full session would be at least an hour. JackWilliamBell
* ‘’‘Managing multiple blogs across multiple domains’‘’: I’m interested in discussing and exploring techniques, scripts, software and ideas for managing multiple blogs across multiple domains and servers and bloging software including, but not limited to: time to create quality blog entries, scheduling, adminstration and more. I’d also like to talk about creative ways we can help combat the splogs issues. TDavid
* ‘’‘Web 2.0 hype vs reality’‘’. Join a few industry vets and young startup mavens in a chat about seperating the signal from the noise. All opinions, arguments and fun debates welcome. Scott Berkun
* Anyone interested in ‘’‘geospatial (or location-based) services’‘’, apps, APIs, etc? Michael Gerlek
** I am really interested in this, I want to know what is out there and what people are doing with it. Is it all cell phone based? What was the big deal with that Dodgeball company google purchased? How easy/hard is it to get at the current location of someone? Are there any laws/etc preventing doing this? What cool stuff can we make once we know where people are? Allll sorts of stuff, I am very interested in this :) Collin Greene
** Me too. Collin, you may want to check out [http://future.wikicities.com/wiki/User:LionKimbro notes & links on positioning tech.] FOAF is another neat point; once you’ve found people nearby, you want to know more about them. LionKimbro
** I am interested in seeing GPS and CMS apps linking mobile offices to their small home based businesses ‘’‘Limo, Cabulance, etc.’‘’. Jay Scherrer
* ‘’‘Brainstorming hacks’‘’: the tricks of new ideas. I teach teams to brainstorm for a living: I’m glad to show some fun games and exchange hacks/techniques with others. Scott Berkun
* ‘’‘Crash course in UI design for anything’‘’: bring screenshots, sketches, or laptops with whatever you’re working on and get instant lessons on design, usability and making it easier to use. Scott Berkun
* ‘’‘Crash course in instrumenting UI for improvement’‘’: bring screenshots, task models, technical details. Andy Edmonds
* Developing ‘’‘software for cell-phones’‘’. JackWilliamBell
** Developing ‘’‘Software for wireless broadband’‘’. Jay Scherrer
* The importance, and practice, of ‘’‘good documentation’‘’. JackWilliamBell
* I’d like to see a ‘’‘Ruby on Rails tutorial / code jam’‘’. Especially if we could do a full implementation from brainstorm to deployment. Not sure if it’s feasible, but I’d sure like to try. Justin Martenstein
** I’d love to help out with this. To get pumped, watch the [http://www.chrisdiclerico.com/2005/07/13/15-minute-blog-with-ruby-on-rails/ 15 Minute Blog video] (creating blogging software from scratch in 15 minutes with RoR) Joe Goldberg
** Along similiar lines, I would be really interested in talking with anyone working with ‘’‘Django’‘’ or ‘’‘TurboGears’‘’. Joseph Heck
* ‘’‘Presentations session’‘’: Show people what you’ve been working on in your garage / computer. LionKimbro
* ‘’‘Free/Open Culture Strategy Session’‘’: What are we doing? Where & what do we want to be? What’s holding our culture back? What are our roadblocks? How do we cross over them? Collaboration technology development, plans, roadmaps. Standardization & coordination effort. LionKimbro
* ‘’‘Non-trivial uses of trivial technology’‘’: Stems from a conversation my wife and I have every time someone releases a new gadget. How can we use technology that is generally used for trivial things (e.g. blogs, video iPods, wikis, Flickr) to solve non-trivial problems. (e.g. Finding loved ones after a disaster, providing a compact way for doctors/patients to carry around a medical record). Lazycoder
* ‘’‘Tutorials?’‘’: cool/interesting/fun languages/application domains/algortihms/etc you know something about, and are willing to teach the rest of us (speaking for myself, I could happily do image compression and JPEG 2000, but that’s a pretty limited audience… Ruby and AJAX are two obvious hot topics right now, what others could we come up with?) Michael Gerlek
* I want to talk about CMS software, including a possible head-to-head with ExpressionEngine vs. Plone. I want to discuss technology in the present age, and the different culture that it creates for children growing up today versus children growing up twenty years ago. I would also like to discuss methods of monetizing RSS, and making it both useful to subscribers and profitable to the content provider. Andru Edwards
** I am willing to do a talk discussing ExpressionEngine and web publishing in general. Paul Burdick
* ‘’‘I’d love to get some IQ thinking about what the future of OPML can do for the web’‘’. What OPML-enabled scenarios are out there that are really working? Why are they working? Where could they go. What of OPML’s future? Is there a ‘killer’ OMPL app ‘out there’ waiting to happen? If so, what is it? Alex Barnett
* ‘’‘’‘'Web Annotation’‘’ and other technologies “[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16guru.html that can hold the world at bay]”’’‘. I’d like to present an improved model for how web annotation could work, why we need it, and anything else on the topic of information anxiety and overload.
** How about rolling this up into a session on: the ‘’‘future of web browsers’‘’? Scott Berkun
** That’d be ok, although my particular idea is browser agnostic. I think having a targetted discussion on specific enhancements to the browser experience (sort of like what’s been done in [http://www.flock.com/ Flock], [http://www.flickr.com/photos/ario/54508949/ Firefox], and beyond), along with a seperate session focused on the information overload problem as a whole might be a better approach. Ario Jafarzadeh
* ‘’‘The cult of GTD and lifehackery’‘’ - I think it’s safe to say that that these two things have reached a cult-like status. Lifehack aficionados have their own vocabulary and way of looking at the world which I find fascinating. I count myself as one of the cult members, but stepping outside of this world for a moment… how will GTD and the lifehack phenomenon be looked at let’s say 5, 10, or 20 years from now? Aren’t lifehacks just an outgrowth of poorly designed interfaces (both physical and virtual)? In an ideal world, the stuff we do to “hack” our interfaces would be integrated into the products themselves, but perhaps this is a pipe dream. Perhaps all software should be made more extensible since no interface can encapsulate all the things people will think to do with it. Ario Jafarzadeh
* ‘’‘Finding the software development model that works best for your team’‘’ - So there’s traditional waterfall model, ExtremeProgramming, [http://www.livejournal.com/users/interimlover/381340.html Alan Cooper’s “Triad”], and many points in between. I think these practices can be improved upon to get higher quality products in the hands of customers, without the expense of team burnout and Death March-like tactics. I’d love to talk with folks about the problems in today’s widely used software development models and see what tweaks (or whole other models) others have used to get great software out the door (while keeping a happy team). Ario Jafarzadeh
* ‘’‘Flattening the user interaction paradigm’‘’ - Edward Tufte hails the [http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gui.ars/3 original GUI developed at Xerox PARC] to be the model that other operating systems should follow for several reasons (the main being the removal of the idea of document types and applications). I’d like to explore this subject a bit with others who are interested in UI and usability to see how realistic (or even desirable) this back to basics approach is given today’s current software landscape. I’ve attempted to illustrate this issue visually using a graphic located [http://www.flickr.com/photos/ario/55754656/ here]. Ario Jafarzadeh
* ‘’‘Building a cheap solution to have your email read to you in the shower’‘’ - I’m going out on a limb with this one, but I’ve always wanted to have my email read to me as I’m getting ready to go to work in the morning. I usually like the shower as a time of reflection and get some of my best thinking done there… but I hate how after I wake up and check email, I’ll get drug around on some tangents which inevitably lead to me getting out the door later than I intended. Instead, I’d get up, hit a button in my bathroom that would start reading me any unread messages in my inbox as I’m brushing my teeth and getting ready. That way, I’ve scratched the itch to know what new email I have, but I’ve also kept myself away from physically being in front of the computer. Seems like all you would need is a script that could parse through a POP account, feeding the appropriate text to a speech synthesizer. You’d also need some way to keep the PC running ok with the amount of moisture generated in a typical shower/bathroom. There’d be a one time setup and then that’d be it… no monitor would be attached to the system at all. If you really wanted to get fancy, the system could also read you the top headlines of the day and for super bonus points, you could control the system using voice commands. Ario Jafarzadeh
Possible ways of categorizing this stuff:
* “Things we do.”—gaming session, presentations session
* “Things we want to collaborate on, in person.”
* “Things we want to know about.”
* “Things we want to discuss.”
* ‘’‘Fostering a “culture of innovation”’’’ - Is innovation encouraged at your company? Does your company allow you “20% time” to work on your own projects? Is innovation rewarded? What are the roadblocks to pure innovation? What does it take to get a project born from innovation to get integrated into the product? What does innovation look like across different functional areas and industries? What are the common threads no matter what your job is? Joe Goldberg
* ‘’‘The project lifecycle’‘’ - (Ario wrote about this above, and it was origially his idea). How does your team take a project from start to finish? How does the size of the team, org, and company effect the project lifecycle? How do different functional areas work together during the project? What artifacts (other than the product itself) are born from the lifecycle (specs, mockups, prototypes)? Joe Goldberg
* ‘’‘Interdisciplinary brainstorming’‘’ - I know there will be attendees from a wide variety of fields. It would be awesome to break out into groups with no more than one member from any given field, and just chat about how our different walks of life compare and contrast. Problems that seem unsolvable to one person might be trivial to others. Joe Goldberg
* ‘’‘Physical activity?’‘’ - This might get me banned from the geek club, but is anyone else interested in doing some sort of physical activity sometime during Mind Camp? I’m happy to lead a yoga session Sunday morning, or maybe a group could go for a jog. Just something to get the blood pumping and exercise the body, in between all the exercising of the mind. Joe Goldberg
** That sounds like a great idea, but only (at least for me) if there are showers on the premises (’‘email reading optional’‘)... anyone know if that’s the case? Ario Jafarzadeh
*** Sorry, no showers. This is one of the reasons why the event is ending around noon on Sunday - so everyone can go home and clean up. Justin Martenstein
**** We could still do a light yoga session, if there’s interest. More stretching and twisting than exerting. Joe Goldberg
* Jam session - Acoustic or electronic, loud or soft. I’ll bring my [http://www.korg.com/gear/info.asp?a_prod_no=ES1 Korg ES1] Joe Goldberg
** Added a page for signup: Jam session - JackWilliamBell
** Along those lines, anyone that wants to have a Nintendo DS jam session, bring yours on down. I’m personally a big fan of [http://meteos.nintendods.com/ Meteos] on multiplayer. Ario Jafarzadeh
* ‘’‘The Inklings: A Pre-Cursor to the nCamp Phenom?’‘’—Why do so many of us believe Samwise would beat Neo in a fight? Why will the next big movie franchise likely be set in the land of Narnia? J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were two minds that hung out in an Oxford gathering of the 1930’s & 40’s called the Inklings. They smoked pipes, drank brandy and talked a lot about the implications of big ideas and the best use of gifted minds (with limited lifespans). Bryan Zug (Seattle web-dev, pastor, and Inkling envier)
**Why do we still see the Inkling’s visible legacy today? Anomaly? Pattern? Something else entirely?
**Is the next age of the web a place where Inkling gatherings are more able to happen? If so, what things will emerge because of this?
**Where do the questions of “Why?” and “Should?” live in the Web 2.0+ era?
**In the Cryptonomicon ‘how do like minds connect’ question of Stephenson, “How can he walk across a field salted by the retreat of the last glacier with countless stones and pick out arrowheads?”
* ‘’‘The Good Thing Rapid Discovery Slam—’‘’ Here’s an idea that seems like it’d be cool—Bring something short and interesting to read or show (5 minutes or shorter is probably just right, 10 minutes is probably way too long)—something that has inspired you (or been caused as a result of you being inspired). Can be original or someone else’s work. Bring stuff from every genre—the blogosphere, novels, poetry, tech, business, software/product design, whatever. Watch and listen to things that are inspiring and provoking minds from your tribe. Bryan Zug
* ‘’‘Tools that have bettered your life’‘’ - Dovetailing off of Bryan’s reading session idea above… I’d love to see a freeform show n’ tell session where attendees display and talk about any tool, tweak, hack, app, process, way of thinking, etc that has improved your quality of life. This could be anything from your favorite Firefox extension, a script you wrote that does something clever, to some new Buddhist philosophy you’ve applied to your daily life that has made you a happier person. Like Bryan’s idea, we’d limit each presentation to around 5 minutes so the goal would be breadth rather than depth. After the session, people can talk to each individual presenter to get specifics. I suspect that this may just happen on its own throughout the event in micro-session form :) Ario Jafarzadeh
* ‘’‘Ethics’‘’—Many people and organizations give lip service to ethics, but how many of them are truly ethical? First off, how do we define “ethics”? Does ethics even factor into your work? Do you make ethical decisions frequently? What is their scope? Are your personal ethics driven by religion or philosophy? Do they jive with that of your team/company? If not, what happens? Is a philanthropic company necessarily an ethical company? Joe Goldberg
* Roll your own collaborative editor. I could talk about the hard part (synchronization) of making a collaborative text editor if there is interest. Collin Greene
* ‘’‘Keep it or trash it? Knowing when to start fresh with software development’‘’ - What factors are the most critical when making a decision on when to ditch an old codebase and move to a new one versus building on top of legacy code? There is a huge pull on many projects to go for the latter, which I agree with Joel Spolsky is a [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html a very dangerous avenue] to go down without careful consideration. When you move to a new codebase you’ve lost all those years of bug fixes, edge case considerations, and mainly just time (both backwards and forwards). On the other hand, some codebases truly warrant a back to the drawing board approach in order to deilver the best user experience. Where is that line and how do you go about discovering it? I’m sure there are some good first-hand experiences amongst the attendees to make this an interesting discussion. Ario Jafarzadeh
* ‘’‘Things that help people’‘’—I’d love to see a talk on work that technical people can do that really helps large groups of people, not just those who can afford this weeks gadget. I am thinking more along the lines of deeper strategies here, although specific ideas are also interesting, and more along the lines of large, long term projects than weekend volunteering or donations. Paul Saitta