I just got back from StixCamp, my first ever BarCamp. I was a bit nervous before I went, worried that if people were strange or unfriendly, I would be “stranded” for two days — it was “out in the sticks” after all. I did a spot of informal campaigning in the week leading up to encourage the women geeks I knew to attend. In the end it was fine and I knew quite a few friendly faces, thanks to LUV and LCA.
I got a lift up to the Welshmans Reef Vineyard, outside Newstead, with a couple of Melbourne folk on Saturday morning. It poured rain on the way and it was almost a little bit disastrous — outside Newstead the engine warning light lit up on the dashboard, and although stopping to check it out showed nothing, then the engine wouldn’t restart. But when you’re in the company of geeks, you don’t need to know anything in particular, just cool logic will do. Non-license-holding geek got out and had a squiz, and soon deduced the battery had a loose connection. A random driverby stopped to see if we were OK, and offered a wrench suitable for bashing the connection bits closer so that they had a better chance of actually being in contact. And it actually worked. I was extremely impressed. I had been ready to succumb to “Cars are hard, let’s go call the RACV” as soon as the dash said anything at all.
Possible talks queued up before setting the schedule
So we got there and tents were put up, introductions were made, and post-it notes representing talks were written, lunch was eaten (note: tastiest vegeburgers I have ever had. This will be a recurring theme throughout the weekend. Having vego hosts is AWESOME). I believe around 45-50 people attended. The Vineyard room was a really lovely venue, square with a verandah around three sides, kitchen and Proper Coffee Maker. Outside, a fairly sturdy marquee thing from the cricket club was hosting “Stream 2”. If the weather had been warmer and calmer, I am sure there would have been plenty of hacking and conversation taking place on the verandah too.
I gave a talk/discussion thingy called “So, we ruined the encyclopedia — now what?” (As I promised, I’m now going to use a wiki plugin for S5 to write my slides — wiki source, slides) The premise of the it was to look at the future for encyclopedias, as well as the future for wiki-style massive collaboration projects. We talked a bit about what the future for Wikipedia itself might be. e.g. if the community implodes, maybe someone could just pick up the content and start a productive fork. But maybe someone could do that right now — if they could just pick the right set of community norms, to somehow avoid the current problems. (And had pockets — servers — the size of Google.)
A couple of people said they found my talk really interesting, and I ended up sitting down with one chap and we talked for a number of hours about wikis in general, his idea for an art history project, Wikipedia and notability, the scholarly tradition, academia and its ivory tower, etc etc. I told him my theory about how the Notability guideline is totally unnecessary and represents an attempt to emulate traditional encyclopedias. It was a really interesting talk — I guess exactly the kind of thing BarCamps make possible. So my attendance just paid for itself right there. :)
Pizza in preparation
Dinner for the first day was delicious pizzas of the kind you can see above. Plus beer, and a futile attempt at debugging some MediaWiki skinning. I think I need to re-start that particular project from scratch unfortunately. And I managed to nab the long couch inside as my bed. Score!
On Sunday, breakfast was cereal with delicious organic yoghurt, and then (out of nowhere!) omelette with tomato and feta. REALLY. If Paul ever offers to make you breakfast you should eagerly accept.
Sunday was better for me talk-wise because I didn’t spend it listening to people I already know or stressing about my own stuff. It seems like a few people left on Saturday and didn’t make it back on Sunday, which is definitely their loss.
The first one in the morning was James (lastname?) talking about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and how he has used to it to remake something called Forum 2000. The old thing, which I don’t know the name of, was a site like that one where you could ask questions and get answers. It purported to use AI to produce the answers but in fact they were written by the students in a CS class in the States. When it became too popular they had to shut it down because they couldn’t reply in time. This one works on a similar principle, but uses Mechanical Turk to get the answers.
James did a demo in his talk, asking for Dubya to answer the question “What size are my shoes?” The answers back were excellent — hilarious given each of them was generated for a matter of cents. There was an attempt to do another demo, to get Turkers to come into the IRC room and just say “Hello” and leave. But the price must have been too low because I think we only got one hello. But I did take home this important lesson for any would-be tech speakers: anything you can do a live demo with in an IRC room will be MADLY popular.
So James’ talk was great but I still have a feeling that you need a US address or bank account or something in order to open a Mechanical Turk account, which is a bummer. I don’t think I will go to that effort just to play around with it. (Although I did try Feedbackarmy.com which uses Mechanical Turk, but it’s kinda indirect.)
Next was Josh Bassett with “RESTFUL Web Services & the iPhone”. Which for me raised the question, and I still don’t know a good answer, how can you tell the difference between a REST and SOAP API? And what is the essential difference between them?
Another talk I enjoyed on Sunday was Zach Miller’s “Using TAL+XSLT to achieve language independent views in web applications OR Separation of Data & Presentation Nirvana!”. (slides etc are available) Although I initially thought it was referring to human language independence, it was in fact programming language independence, which is also a good thing anyway.
I was a bit sceptical of this claim of data-and-presentation-separation-nirvana. I tried to have a look for loopholes or limitations. I may have found a bit of a loophole, in that you can store “presentation” information, ie HTML tags, in your “data”, and it is possible to get them treated as such (instead of being escaped), but I guess that in and of itself is nothing too shocking — it would be all about having some process and shared understanding about the Right Way to do things…
Somewhere in there there was some amazing lunch, sponsored by the local council, which involved some local chefs coming in and cooking nothing short of a Chinese banquet. Delicious steamed dumplings, custard buns (!!!!!!), spring rolls, noodles, and then even tapioca and red bean pudding, left nothing to be desired. We were all well satiated… and over-catered for. I ended up taking home a whole tray of leftover dumplings. :D
The almost-last session was a discusson on “broadband in the bush”, led by Dave Hall, the Newstead-based stixcamp organiser. Getting good quality internet services anywhere that’s not a metropolitan city is usually a challenge in Australia, but I reckon if anyone can make things happen locally, it will be Dave, so the Newsteadians are probably luckier than most.
Wrapping up was some miscellaneous discussion, lightning talks, “thunder storms” (I think kind of the inverse of a lightning talk – you get up and request someone else to speak on a topic :)), feedback. I found out about an interesting barcamp-style event coming up in a couple of weeks called Trampoline (as in, “bounce around” ideas), which I would love to attend, but unfortunately I’ll be out of town. We did a “user group roll call” and there is truly an astounding number of user groups that Melbourne supports (but, bizarrely, Python is not among them). Reminder: people, put your events on TechEvents!
The almost-very-last thing was a book giveaway. And despite my name being drawn out last I still managed to pick up Simply SQL, which I was happy with. A useful reference for something I need to spend some time on but haven’t yet.
After bundling masses of fruit into smaller bags and impressing it upon random people in the room, and claiming tons of other left-over food, we eventually managed to get our stuff together and head back to Melbourne. Although it was a hectic weekend with lots to concentrate on, the change of scenery made it a lot more relaxed and easier to cope with. StixCamp verdict: Success! :)
