Asymptomatic

Over the weekend, skippy flew in to hang out with me at BarCamp Philly. This was not my first unconference, but it was my first official "BarCamp" experience.

I would like to say up front that the BarCamp Philly organizers did a great job at building this event. Of the many free events I've attended over the past few years, this one was the best run of its style. Kudos to them and thanks for the wonderful effort. I want to spend a little time in this post going over not just what I think they did well, but also where I think all events of this type could stand to improve, either by following their example or doing just a little bit more.

Event Promotion

Interestingly, I think this may be the hardest one for me to judge because I'm not a promoter and I've got enough of a tap on our local community that I hear about events easily in advance of them happening. So instead of trying to see how they got people to attend, let's talk about something slightly askew....

Alex and I have been going back and forth in comments over the areas of our interest that overlap. In his recent post, he asks, "how long can organic communities self-moderate?"

I admit that I haven't read the Starfish and the Spider, although I did just one-click it into my Kindle, so it's doomed to suffer my analysis. Nevertheless, I had some comments about how leaderless organizations can thrive, particularly in open source communities, of which I happen to be a part of a couple.

Obviously, one of my passions is working with Habari and the people that have come together around that common goal. When we started, there were just four of us, each with various levels of ability and availability. I think you can pretty well call that "leaderless", since we all worked in tandem, and any small change any one person made was easily detected and reviewed by the other three. But as the project has grown, I think there is some kind of tragic irony in that the size of the operation inevitably leads toward a need for at least an informal management structure....

When I looked at my GoDaddy account last night, I was sure I've been on crack for the past year - 39 domains. And those are just the ones at GoDaddy. Surely there must be some projects I'm "working on" that people don't know about. Let's see what I can share.

Before I go on let me say this: Will someone please redesign GoDaddy's site? kthxbye

I've got a couple of domains for the kids. I've been trying to convince them to start a little video project, reviewing movies. I thought that a low-impact introduction to the web with a movie review site would be interesting to them. They could watch a movie and tell the camera what they think. Getting them into the idea hasn't been successful yet. I did get Abby to make a video about the cats that I have not yet put online. Whether this is something that you could do (or want to watch) regularly, I can't say. That's two domains....

Over the weekend, I visited Columbus, not just to hang out with skippy at ComFest and buy too much crap at Origins, but to attend and lead a session at PodCamp Ohio.

The side dishes to this entrée are actually better than the meat, but the meat was the point of the dinner, so that's what I'll talk about here. I'm all about focus here. Focus.

I showed up right on time for the welcome session on Saturday and checked in. I hadn't been able to show up for the Friday night meetup because of the previously mentioned "side dishes". I checked in and was shown to the "Speaker Lounge", marked off by signs with martini glasses (with olive!). After a brief welcome from another couple of session leaders in the lounge, we all shuffled down to Room A for the introduction.

I'm not going to do a play-by-play of the rest of the day, because that's already feeling tedious. Let me cover briefly a couple of sessions I did attend, and my overall impression of the camp. more

Staring at the walls in the office is not conducive to constructing posts. I'm not sure how I've even managed the last 9-10 years worth of posts. You'd think I'd run out of material.

I was mentioning to someone the other day that I paradoxically - since the walls are plain white and small - have a lot of good ideas while in the shower. I had another one of those days today. I must have come up with three or four solid ideas about things I wanted to blog, but simply lost them upon setting foot outside the bathroom. Less dramatically, we had plans immediately after I showered this morning, so I didn't really have a chance to act on my ideas.

So I was thinking, if I had some kind of device that I could use to record ideas while in the shower, or in the bathroom getting ready in the morning, I could keep these ideas and be able to act on them later in the day. I'd probably do well with something that is somewhat waterproof, but can somehow be erased. ...