B. Mann Consulting

Photo by Ariane Whew. /me lets out big breath.

As always, this year's BarCamp Vancouver event was absolutely fantastic. Ideas, social media, intense thinking, tossing around concepts, learning from everyone, lots of fun, beer, eats, etc. etc.

Feedback and thoughts in no particular order.

Here we are at noon on the eve of BarCamp Vancouver 2007. Duane Storey and I are hacking some phone VoIP stuff, I'll be doing geo logging (surprise!) and....and I don't know what else will happen.

It was great to read through Roland's retrospective of BarCamp's we've been involved in. I think he missed BarCamp SF at the Microsoft offices...I caught part of that after a late flight in.

BarCamp Amsterdam has to be one of my favourites. Chris Pirillo came in with a big donation that helped (European) beer-fueled hacking, the Mediamatic people and offices were fantastic, and lots of my European friends were there that I don't get to see very often. Oh, right, and I got to cook for 50+ people over an open flame indoors :P

I love unconferences. I wasn't involved in organizing this year's BarCamp Vancouver, so thanks to the many organizers and helpers. Here's what Jordan Behan has to say:

After last year’s event, I was so amazed at the things I learned and the people I met that I wanted to help out anywhere I could this year. So I joined (invited myself onto) the organizing committee, and thus I feel it is my duty to share a bit of Barcamp How-to.

That's exactly the spirit we want to see. See you tonight...

• every event should make a list of "fun URLs" that get thought up at events -- and then registered, like http://www.myurlistoolong.com
• there were are as many great presentations that I couldn't make it to as I did attend
• we need to find a kit to stress-test wireless networks ahead of time...or revert to wired connections
• I got to talk to many great people...and also missed spending time with others (too many to mention...but Zug is definitely in my thoughts)
• Google needs to point out who the heck is going to talk about identity issues (from technical interop to privacy); also, say things in public about your logging policy
• every time I talk about microformats I passionately argue the opposite case; they are a great solution for putting mixed, structured content into one big text blob (i.e. a blog post with an event, a location, some people, and a resume); they are not a great solution for passing structured data between systems and/or for presenting a pure feed of one type of data (events, people, etc.)
  

BarCamp Vancouver is coming up quickly. It will take place in Bryght's new offices at the edge of Gastown. Now we have to talk to the construction dudes and make sure they finish in time. Add it to your calendar on upcoming.

Stewart Marshall actually emailed me, concerned that my name wasn't on the list...I stuck my name on the attendee list -- technically we're maxed at 90 people, so there are only 3 slots left as I am posting.

It's a great list of folks on there already, and I keep bumping into more that should come. Specifically, I attended the Google presentation at VanHPC last night, and bumped into a few folks:

• Michael Stewart, who works at BCIT and is digging into identity (and who tells me his friend Kate is moving to Vancouver...excellent, more cool locals)
• Chani, who is going back to school for a CS degree at UBC...she reminds me of some other smart, cool geek girls I know like Sacha Chua and Leigh Honeywell (that's a compliment)
• Michael Dyck, who spends time working on the Distributed Proofreaders project that helps with Project Gutenburg (he should talk about this at BarCamp Vancouver)
• Dale McGladdery, who is  my partner in crime in helping to organize the Vancouver Drupalleers and is looking for something to get into outside of his BigCo dayjob

I see Michael Stewart and Chani have already added themselves, and of course Dale is #5 with a bullet on the attendee list. So much other tech (BrightSide display tech) and people (yay! Bre is coming from out of town, Alex Williams will be podcasting) Good stuff!

Greg Narain and I had a long discussion with the Jive Live team at BarCamp San Francisco. They take high quality video of all sorts of live events, from art openings to the Pride Parade here in SF, and then post it to their website. In some ways they think of themselves as a daily video newspaper.

We talked about using blogs and RSS and existing video communities to spread their content everywhere, to get traffic going to their site. They currently host their own videos, and Greg and I were of the opinion that as soon as they actually got significant traffic, their video costs would start going through the rough. The difficulties of success when it comes to video content on the Internet today...

A large part of the discussion centered around what we all would and would not do on the Internet, including talking about who subscribes to RSS, uses tags, etc. As I have said time and again, feel free to ignore the small part of the population that uses these tools directly....just stick the functionality on to your site, and the structured nature of RSS, the tag glue, and the automated tools and aggregators that are in place will blast your content around the Internet, which has the net effect of raising your Google ranking, which is really how everyone finds stuff on the Internet today. RSS = higher search ranking, enough said.

I just landed in San Francisco and took the BART directly to BarCamp San Francisco. I grabbed some coffee, some beer, and some North Beach pizza from the common areas, and then landed straight in an intense session about microformats.

Tantek and Chris Messina are trying to herd us cats in the room as we think about what "actions" we can do if there is lots of data that is microformat-enabled online.

I'm hearing lots of actions that at their base sound like publish and subscribe actions. But we're trying to stick at the UI layer -- one of Messina's stated goals was actions that are the same across sites for the same type of data. e.g. a Greasemonkey plugin that could do "add as contact" when given an hCard, no matter which site you are on.

Looks like Mesh Conference was just announced -- a "Web 2.0" conference for Canada. At $350 for 2 days, I have to think about this vs. Gnomedex. Of course, those are Canadian pesos, so lots less. Many interesting faces, but not a lot of details on tracks, conference style, etc. The blurb from one of the first blog posts goes like this:

There is all this buzz around Web 2.0. But what’s really happening, especially around here? Does anybody know? Can anybody help me understand it, and what it means for me? My business? My future? My family? My world?

mesh’s mandate will be to answer this question in as compelling, credible and authentic a way possible. Everything to do with the event will be around furthering that objective, and the content itself will serve to help mesh participants (not attendees :-)) to really start to get it, this year and in years to come. We will create the Canadian forum for next generation Web ideas and leaders.

So I kind of stealth launched the concept of BarCamp Brussels in some posts wrapping up FOSDEM 2006, slated for around September 2006 to coincide with EuroOSCON.

I just found out about BarCamp Brussels ForTheImpatient -- for April/May! Boy, those Europeans sure are impatient :P Being organized by Peter Forret.

Hey, Ton, I'm hoping you and your crew will be interested in one or both camps. What do you think? (and yes, I still "owe" you a post on the 4 jobs meme...it might end up being a podcast or something suitably different).

Sounds like fun...wish I could attend lots more European events, but I have to ration out my travel a bit. Hopefully the ForTheImpatient crew will be able to figure out some good areas and set things up nicely for a bigger (or at least...more international?) attendance in September. I'll be watching it with interest.

It was my great pleasure to meet the three guys from ClipperZ (The image is a little blurry, but that's because I had them shout "Identity 2.0" when I took the picture :P).

We sat down for several hours to discuss Identity 2.0 and some of their thoughts on blog owner centric vs. comment maker centric systems, talking mainly about SXORE (Marco has a post with SXORE feedback) and coComment. No comments from the SXORE team on that post, although Bryan Rieger found it. Go Vancouver people!

In any case, they are thinking about portable reputation (or maybe federated reputation would be a better phrase) as an initial application that can be built on top of Identity 2.0 systems. A reputation manager (a reputation provider? store?) would support multiple identity systems for authentication, and also share reputation with other reputation managers. This would initially be based on some very simple metrics, like perhaps whether or not a comment was approved, but certainly could support multiple other values (which gets quickly into a discussion about designing karma systems, perhaps, although it would depend on the feedback loops involved). Definitely subscribe to their blog if you want to keep up with what these guys are up to.

The other exciting thing I found was that here was a new "Web 2.0" style startup company based in Italy that had a lot more in common with Vancouver or San Francisco than anything else I had seen up to that point in Italy. We discussed the difficulties and benefits of a distributed team (although they are all in Italy, they live in different towns), and the usual roundup of tools -- they tried Basecamp but ended up using Trac, their user interaction diagrams are in OmniGraffle, we discussed Campfire vs. Skype bookmarked chats, or perhaps a Jabber multi-user chatroom.

It's nice to see such interesting things happening in Europe, and I have more of an interest in cross-pollination with European companies and clients than I do in jumping down into the scrum in Silicon Valley. I'm already scheming what the next European event will be: perhaps a BarCamp Brussels? Could be organized around Euro OSCON 2006 at the end of September 2006 (the Call for Participation deadline is March 6th).