Of community conferences, camps, pits; blowing things up

Bar Camp DallasYeah, it’s nearly 3am, but I figure I need to jump in and post a few thoughts that I’ve been sitting on or else I’ll never get around to it. Helps to have some inspiration, tired as I am.

So Saturday was Bar Camp Dallas, something like the 5th Bar Camp ever. The day after, yesterday, we decided on the spot to hold the second ever Mash Pit. Both events were resounding successes, as have been the previous Bar Camps — and we’re continuing to explore models for effective geek collaboration from the ‘Pits.

So the thing is this. The conference industry doesn’t make sense any more. At least to me. I know that some people make their livelihood running conferences, and that’s fine — really. Keep on keepin’ on. That’s your thing, I ain’t gunna knock it. But what conferences are supposed to offer, in my experience, can now be had cheaper, better, more intimately on the local community scale than what you might expect from the 1000+ person mega-conferences.

…which remind me of Disney World when I was a kid: that hot, sticky, popsicle-drip-drip, crying-babies, broken toy, long lines, sunburn kneecaps, are-we-there-yet, why-is-this-line-so-long kind of thing.

Yeh. You can imagine why that doesn’t sound so happy-happy-joy-joy anymore.

So let’s break it down. Benefits of a conference? Travel, meet people, hear things, say things, collaborate? Oh, and party. Ish.

So let’s focus on those for a minute. How can we bring those things to you today given what we’s gots?

Well, let’s make the whole thing free and more accessible (still need to work on universal access, yes yes). Then let’s make everyone a participant and responsible for their satisfaction with the event, during the event. If you don’t like it, you can fix it. Remember, you’re a participant, not just a passive attendee. (It’s free right? Set your expectations accordingly and then adjust as you see fit!) There are any number of roles to take on at any given point: presenter, documentor, collaborator, eater, feedback-giver, conversation-maker, realist, hacker, coordinator, wiki-editor, design-printer-maker, IRC-chatter, fucker-of-shit-up, and so on. Improvise. Surely your special brand of somefing-foo can come in handy!

Given that, find a medium-sized venue, pick a date, toss in wifi, food, alcohol and coffee, whiteboards, markers, projectors, rinse, lather, repeat.

There you have it, the special sauce that makes the community micro-conferences we’ve been running since August work. Amazing, sure, but they work.

Oh, and it helps that we’ve designated the mark of the event as belonging to the entire community so that you don’t have to ask permission to when starting your own event (you can use the mark however you want, but it’s wise to stick within the rules of the road if you want community support). So y’know, just go to the wiki, grab a page and start editing. Instant fame and riches comin’ up.

. . .

A couple other things. Owing to the generosity of the sponsors (who were capped @ $250 or a meal each) Bar Camp NYC ran a surplus. Yes. A free conference ran a surplus without whoring out the whole experience. The shirts were even sponsor-logo-free. I keep tellin’ ya, it ain’t about the money, man.

So does it scale? Hells yes. Know why? Because these are local community-sized events. They’re run of, by, and for community members with the remote participation from anyone who wants in. Infinite scalability via IRC… and things we’re still inventing…

Yeah, one last thing before I doze off… we’re building the tools to make these events easier to start, easier to run, and easier to participate in. Which means lower total cost and less effort necessary to stage future Camps/Pits/Unconferences.

If not already, consider conferences exploded soon. Very soon indeed.

Me and Microsoft, Part I

Executive summary: Had dinner the other night with Jim Allchin and some other wonderful folks. We talked broadly about open source, Internet Explorer and Windows, Window Media Center, identity management and passport and widely about DRM and how effed the whole system is. And though there were certainly MSFT-friendlies around the table, it was refreshingly not a total MSFT lovefest. Details follow. Part 1 in a series of a couple.

Me and MicrosoftSo I don’t think I had expected to really ever sit down for dinner with the guy who’s responsible for Windows Vista (his official title is Co-President, Platforms Products & Services Division). I mean, who am I in the grand scheme of things? Yet that’s the situation that I found myself in on Thursday, along with Make maker Phillip Torrone and his long-distance ex-MSFT wife Beth Goza, Tony Gentile of Healthline.com, Tara my co-conspirator (she finagled me an invite), Linda the organizer from Waggener Edstrom, Neil Charney of the underarm plasma 40″, Thomas Hawk ( and #655 on ‘rati), Jason Garms who curiously could have fit in on the set of Newsies (owing to his houndstooth jacket), Mena Trott, who I first encountered in Paris ($#!@% — I keed, I keed!) and John Tokash with two Passports.

As introductions were made around the table, I prepared for what I knew would be my outing — I didn’t know whether to expect gasps or sidelong glances… or perhaps even sympathetic eyes (“Poor chap, doesn’t he know that IE has 90% of desktops covered? What’s there to do with yet another browser?”). I began:

Uh, I’m Chris Messina. I work on an open-source browser called Flock and I, uhm, am interested in bringing things like usability, design, fashion to open source to make it more palatable for wider audiences… and I help co-organize and evangelize this event called Bar Camp and something else called Mash Pit.

Cat was out of the bag and no slings nor arrows had been flung. In fact, I felt quite welcome and in good company after all. Huh. All fizzled up for nothing. Ok.

So then Linda explained the dinner — apologized for Robert not being able to make it (no worries, mate) — and for arriving a little late themselves. (Ah, to work for one of the most powerful organizations in the world and to apologize for being late; yes, civilization has advanced some!)

Wine all around and the food started to arrive as conversations got underway. I can’t remember all that was said, but there are a few notable points that stuck with me.

First, there are some very interesting and weird presumptions about “open source people” which are probably as unfair as the generalizations many people make about MSFT folks. For example, Jim acknowledged that they had learned a few things from the open source community that had changed their approach to the Windows VISTA beta program — opting to be more open, transparent and agile, attempting for once to release earlier and more often. Of course this is a great thing for Microsoft and all the folks who run Windows since ideally this could mean that the product they ship will be of higher quality and more accurately reflect the needs or desires of the user community. We’ll see, but what was interesting after revealing this, was what he said directly to me, “…even though that might not be as open as you might like, we are learning.”

I was floored. I mean, wow, ok… I’m obviously an open source enthusiast and proponent, but I wouldn’t want MSFT to go in this direction to appease anyone or score points (of course it’s not that simple, but still). That’s not really the point of being open source, anyway. I’m really not an open source/free software zealot. Cripes, I’m from New Hampshire where our motto is Live free or die! Far be it for me to tell you what to do!

I mean, as anyone who’s tried to go from proprietary to open source can tell you, it’s not about just opening up your code and voila! a million worker bees will swarm to help you with your code! Far from it. I mean, first of all, you’ve got to want to be open source, in everything you do — and to take the good with the bad, the ugly with the magnificent. You can’t do it for anyone but yourself, and you’ve really got to believe in its superiority as a development and tool-building philosophy.

Still, it’s still promising to see that they’re observing what’s going on around them — and seemingly learning what the F/LOSS communities have for so long espoused and practiced.

To be continued . . .

. . .

Mash Pit in Dallas Tomorrow

Mash PitDudes, so I finally made it to Dallas for and ended up talking everyone’s ears off. Oh well.

The good thing is that we’ve decided to hold Mash Pit Dallas tomorrow at the same place, starting at 10am. I’ve gotta get in touch with Matt, Chris and Brad to get the source from the previous projects coz I’m likely opening up an SVN repository for continued Mash Pit work… hells yeah.

Anyway anyway, get it: tomorrow, Mash Pit, Dallas, 10am, Architel, come in via the loading dock (just like today) or join up in IRC: irc.freenode.net/#mashpit!

Ok ok, I’m done.

Curse of a thousand blocked ports

PHX Wifi AgreementI landed in Phoenix two hours ago en route to Dallas for Bar Camp and missed my connection because another plane was in our gate… So instead of arriving at 1:40pm, I’ll be getting in around 4. Yuck.

So why am I bothering to broadcast this on my blog? (I realize this sounds like a big whiny complaint, but there’s a reason…)

Because Port 80 is my sole vehicle for outgoing web communications at the moment.

My email is blocked (another vote for moving entirely to Gmail), IRC is blocked, IM is blocked, Skype IM is blocked… I can’t even send smoke signals via FTP. On top of that, my SMS is totally backed up and I haven’t been getting texts for days.

WTF?

Now I know that more capable geeks would tell me to just tunnel into some other unblocked system, but c’mon, I’m a simpleton, remember? I expect (and need!) this stuff to just work. If this kind of service variability is the future of the networked environment, man, add that to DRM and we truly are EFFed. If we can’t even rely on publicly-accessible (though privately sponsored) wifi for these basic communication channels, we’ve gotta think about who should really be in charge of these networks… Who cares about my robot breathren taking over when we’re already turning our computers against us.

Seriously. WTF.