Barcamp Stanford – Notes from Day Two (rough)

BarCamp Stanford – Sunday Aug. 27, 2006

It’s nice to be in the English building at Stanford. I think of all the times I’ve been here for literary readings (or job interviews). Now… how odd to be here for a computer conference.

*** first session ***
Guy talking about mashups. He’s from the stanford hci group.

henry ford museum. toy thing. little houses, magnetic. close circuit on a map. you can move them around. and it hooks up to google earth for a flythrough.

[Horribly… my first thought is that it has a direct military application as you could make your little models of the war front especially urban, flyable in simulator]

he has a slideshow. Their whiteboard has its own flickr account. big red staples “easy” button, camera in ithe ceiling takes a photo of the whiteboard, sent to python scripts, then you can safely erase the whiteboard.

other guy – can you actually read it?

mashup guy – yes.

Adina – do you have a recipe for it?

speaker – yes , here it is (shows diagram)

mashup guy – shows how they made it a sketch/animated thing.

example #4 – color field cam. like the flickr color picker mashup. but in the real world. point at a color, and you get flickr images that match the avg colo

question – how offten are you updating

mashup guy – not that fast… ilt is cached…

mashpits… start witout a

hci human computer interface. venn diagrams.

– things that live online (green
– live in interface physical space (red
things that live on computer. (blue

the intersections need the glue! most mashups are in the green section of “things that live online”. what goes in the other areas of the venn diagram?

….
liza loop: kids, younger?

mashup guy – lego mindstorms, other ones.

[i’m thinking of nintendogs and tamagochi ]

Back to glue.
green + blue = flickr, python api
red + green – shared phidgets, sensor nets?
red + blue: d.tools

Hotglue. a surface adhesive. duct tape. (screen scrape, poke)
dovetail joints – precise fitting, beautiful, parts know about each other. deep integration (public api)

http://mashup-tools wiki. password is design

easiest ways is not thru keyboard interface
but to arcade controller people… they are these 20 dollar boards…

Kent brewster – new developer network. was a hobbyist.
showing spiffy!search.

myweb at yahoo. tagging stuff.
picocricket….

brewster’s field guide to web 2.666 — kentbrewster.com/spiffysearch

okay, that’s spiffy. search that come s up with popup menu style list of stuff and you click on the side doohickey to get a popup window for you to tag it. works with delicious

Hell yeah, this looks handy. Then I could import it straight onto my blog with rss. my tags I wonder what it will look like using delicious. (is this link going to work… i think not. fix it later.)

Chris Messina – doing tech and flow.

sunday sessions. ID 2.0
tech a nd policy.
Online problem solving, politics and conflict res
Astronomy sim
co-working
mashups lighting talks @ lunch

****

me and a dude from microsoft… Nima… wearing laughing squid tshirt. I demo kent brewster’s thing… he tries it…

I whine that flock has not given me a pony yet. their search yahoo toolbar thing does not have a function for me. kent’s thing is better.

me and tantek talk abut information absorbtion speed and reading and habits. it needs to be fast like a video game. that is what we grew up with. keystrokes. I can play nethack or use vi without thinking. I want to browse, search, and read blogs that way, with fast muscle memory ingrained. tantek says the myweb thing is nifty but like many such tools it assumes way too slow an information stream and that you will maybe look at 10, 20 things… not 300- 500 a day. we need batch tagging.

I need to turn on a bunch of tags so that everything i do in a space is tagged with something.. like if everything i noted today till 5pm was tagged barcamp stanford techie, that would be useful for me & then I could toggle it off again . (again i am thinking of nethack or emacs or something. screw clicking.

****
tech and policy discussion

john pete nima todd tim adina tracy silona christine (mit limewire) tantek liz

Adina – 1) tech policy 2) partisan electoral politics 3) Deliberative. figuring out consensus building etc.

***

bill in congress right now passed house july 26 410-15 vote. DOPA now anything with social network is illegal in libraries and schools.

liz – all libraries or just kids room

pete – just kids room i think

pete – is lookign it up. if you have contact info on it… then it’s too much. blogger comments might be illegal.

adina – it’s not law yet. it’s passed the house it’s in the senate commerce committee. The next step here is to contact the members of the senate commerce committee. senator boxer from CA is on the committee. Contact her office. let’s look for creative ways to get web 2.0 people to communicate with the people on that committee.

nima – a lot of big companies like google, microsoft, yahoo, are affected

pete reads to us from wikipedia entry for dopa. forum, chat room, im, email…

liza – thats like outlawing cell phones
pete – it’s like outlawing http.

adina – they are going on parents who are worried… socially conservative suburban family votes, going into election season.

Adina talks about the stuff they did in Texas. It worked – they affected policy.
there was a billin the tX state legislature favored by the telecom industry , make it illegal for cities and towns to provide wifi and broadband service for that city.

Adina talks about that groups’ specific strategies. blog, mailing list, private wiki. collaboratively wrote the documents and position papers. this was all basically free, using ffree tech and our existing skills.

***
kid break.
Rod (5 years old) is drawing on a white board in a room for Milo & Galen. He made an outline and a diagram and was lecturing them!

***

another kid break – i go up and down 6 flights of stairs several times – they are in the basement on the couches under the stairwell. there is a dungeon.

***

best practices – no unified place..
liza suggests doing a lot of tagging…
silona – yah tagging
liz – but then we’ll just be talking to each other, learning curve for tagging, practice of it… mobilizing mommybloggers
adina – constituency building
liz – cause widget. have easy widgets, meme thingies, with political issues, with un-dopa…
adina – events. time senstivive
todd- freepress.org
liz – countdown. upcoming.org events, a checklist
sliona – a feed
adina – email isn’t useful for us anymore we need rss
liz – a todo list or a checklist sort of approach so on upcoming i do the action
tracy- there coudl be a way to add new suggested actions to the countdown/political action need
liz – and i do the action and i check it off and it’s visible that i’ve done it , a declaration, so you see “3000 other people have done this…”
adina- a calendar/action widget

lack of structure and formal hierarchy. freaks out washington. they like to pick the most famous person in the room nad pick them to give a speech from a very high podium.

todd – it is a west coast east c
oast thing.

adina – this is a good fodder for the hacking mashup doit session. before that do we want a … upstream

tim – is there a microformat use case for activism, issues, etc.

tantek – the closest thing is you could use todo vocabulary from icalendar. todo items that don’t have a defined person who’s supposed to do them.

liz – a social todo list. collective todo list. important to track how many people ahve done it

pete – or how many intend to do it. 100,000 people have noted to themselves to vote you out of office.

tantek – markup… cut and paste in blog post – integrated tools that m ake it trivial for someone to integrate into blog post – in wordpress, moveable type.

43 things site – public todo lists – existing human behavior – so why not put this on your own blog.

liz – repeats what pete said about 100K people vote you out of office

adina – would be interesting for a codeblue tool….

pete – can you subscribe tot he feed of people who subscribe to skydiving…

tantek – hmmm the list of people who have “vote” on their todo.

oooo!

pete – digg thing of a flash visual of what’s being paid attention to. on 43things they are doing something similar but it’s todo items.

liz – imagine the realtime poll thingie in newspapers tracking what people are paying attention to

todd – site called ….? dopa… campaigns wikia

tantek – i’s on wikipedia

tim – voter information guide, getting past partisan yelling, there’s a growing community on that. get a page up on there on DOPA.

silona – he just put a polling piece on there.

adina – the eff page is a good resource for it.

Adina – so, campaigns is different from neutral point of view.

Tim –
Adina – I have no interest in a neutral point of view on DOPA.

Adina – discussion of wikipedia article – it lacks a description of the unintended effects. Let’s flesh that out.

Todd – CPSR, Leage of Technical Voters, EFF – that’s the place for it but Wikipedia isn’t necessarily.

Adina – once you’re up to the point of doing pro and con that means the issue has been framed for you already.

tantek: if the battle ground has been defined you might have already lost.

adina – exactly. for or against is too late in a way, there is rethinking needed of what are you trying to.

todd – talks about campaigns wikia

pete – we could use dopa as the test case for these ideas
***

tim – a wiki edit is hard. we need something that will be like digg-ing.

who is editing. some low number of people, 1700, make 75% of edits…

tim – getting past the yelling…

Adina – taking off my nonpartisan hat. this will ruin your day. here is a map of saudi oil production. this number has been flat. the plateau starts. number of oil rigs. they start to order rig after rig trying to get more oil out of the ground. there are a # of potential explanations. they can’t make any more and they are desp. trying to put in new wells in the ground. timeframe for slope. the panic drilling starts in spring 04. and then jumps up in 05. continues to accelerate now. their producction has been flat. this is peak oil.

tantek – read up on peak oil

adina – theoildrum.com

liz – that coudl be investment banks overoptimistic about investing in exploration and drilling.

tracy -o and keeping prodution flat on purpose …

tantek- a big problem

adina – this could have a huge impact on civilization
tantek – oh it’s so much worse than that. you cant even pick it apart. it’s not even partisan… swap out political party

[I agree with Tantek]

adina – i disagree with you …and i’ll explain why over lunch

tantek – peak oil, read up on it

pete – gigantic value web

tantek – the layout of towns. roads, infrastructure
pete – the way food is grown and distributed

***

lunch

talking about activism
truthiness, wikipedia politics, la times attempt to talk about israel/lebanon, best practices for wiki discussions etc., todd talks about juan cole/al franken – talk page (on wikipedia) – see also timeline 2006 israel-lebanon conflict
todd – they say inaccuracies are corrected quickly but… this one is not
pete – the word “provocation ” – contentious –

history & diff
tracking turbulence on wikipedia
making movie of changes to wikipedia articles.
then you could tag up segments of the movie and note “here is the meta analysis of what was happening”

more intense disc. with adina and silona about social software apps for political action memes. msg to your cell phone or todo list, your five friends all voted on x issue.. you should too… (i.e. blog-based/political dodgeball) using xfn . what if your technorati favorites (or however you tag your blog feeds) had xfn and you used that for your action todo list.

*****
Starting up again.

Adina – what about having a barcamp-style political/tech meeting.
Liz – What about the cpsr conference as a forum for that? a track to the conference?
… is it election week?
Tim – every weekend there’s something going on
Silona – oct. 13 is the code-a-thon
Adina – technopolitics – hey chris, is it possible to call it a barcamp? is there a rule?
Chris: huh? oh… Are you going to charge?
Adina : no. does it matter?
chris: no.
liz : hey chris, are there any rules?
chris: No.
liz: not that i care if there are. hahaah.

***

kid oakland – bloggers united. local bloggers political bloggers…

***
3:00
dopa timescale? senate commerce – after labor day
what can we do right now

right now today
– EFF action alert
– post to your blog the DOPA widget from : http://bumpontheblog.etowns.net/?p=73

– fix to wikipedia entry. it is missing some information. about the scope of the bill

this week:
– 2-3 phone calls to boxer’s staffer, the guy at Public Knowledge who’s working on this, is there useful in-person stuff to do?
– things we can think of??? building a widget or a badge

action: email or call the ALA
adina : public knowledge and boxer staffer

facebook: give them a variant of the badge?
liz: who wants to edit the wikipedia page on dopa? john? You would be good at that.
John: Oh. Um. Actually I’m doing it now.
Liz: Oh. Of course you are.

***

Here’s the badge, from Bump on a Blog

Tracy’s to-do list on 43things, very cool: stop dopa

I signed up on 43things just to see how it works and it’s nifty.

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