People will ask me, “Where do you live?” I have to pause (or “powza” as Olga, my Russian drill professor, says). Where do I live? Certainly I am going to school in Portland, Oregon, but usually by asking the question people mean where my personal home is located. Well, my family lives in New Zealand, but I’ve never even been to New Zealand. Bainbridge Island? No, now that’s where “I’m from,” because I have not been to Bainbridge for several months. Obviously I have no idea where I live. I have no permanent home, and oddly enough, I’m not bothered by it. Just don’t ask me that question.
Actually, although I have not been back to Bainbridge, I was in Seattle only this weekend. Where was I? Ah, now that’s the primary topic of today’s blog: Seattle Mind Camp. For a while, those three words will bring to me a broad smile and a huge yawn (see? I’m yawning right now). Basically, it was 24 hours of alpha-geeks getting together and discussing their ideas, talking about their projects, meeting cool people, and playing around. I have never been to a conference before, so the freshness of the open format was kind of lost on me. There were several sessions held every hour, usually discussions or presentations in small groups of 5-10 people. Food was plentiful, and the meals were well-catered (no pizza). In the huge central room, there were lots of tables with candy and toy lizards on them. There was a robot, an electric car, and many other cool gadgets I didn’t even have time to check out!
The trip there and back was quite interesting. It was my first time riding an American train, and it was not a good experience. Even Indian trains run on time–but Amtrack? No. My train was three hours later. The ride back was fortunately on time, but it took me a while to find the correct bus. Fortunately, people in Portland are pretty friendly… actually, I had a chance to ride down with Paul Burdick, a Reed alum who lives a literal stone’s throw away from my dorm, but it was deemed a bit too sketchy. Perhaps next time I will know him better and I can avoid the trains and buses completely. Anyhow, on to the content:
The Sessions:
“RSS to Find My Neighbors”
We discussed how temporal and spacial information could be used in building local communities. Many coffee shops are filled with the quiet tapping of keyboards instead of the buzzing of interesting conversation. If people could use GPS and cell-phones to broadcast interests, could it spark more face-to-face communication? If blogs can have locations metadata, would it help bloggers in the same neighborhood get in touch? Although many people expressed the hope of using new technologies to improve real-world communities, there was doubt. Probably the best way to meet your neighbors, in my opinion, is to go over and introduce yourself. The other use for this sort of technology is political activism. However, this requires secure and spontaneous peer-to-peer networks, not a service provided by the government or a company. Even in a purely social context, having a permanent log of where I’ve been is more than a little unsettling.
“Making Masks”
Julie Leung’s “Making Masks” presentation is apparently becoming quite popular, and with good reason! The talk was on how we choose to present ourselves in our blogs. Which secrets do we share, and which to we keep? Julie posits that everyone wears different masks in different social situations. We form our identities in other peoples’ minds by what we choose to make public. Anonymity may provide some protection, but it means not taking responsibility for our words and actions. Julie’s struggle is similar, although much more advanced, than my own. Every time I write on my blog, I choose my words carefully, conscious of how I present myself to the world. Which probably explains why I post so infrequently…
“Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas”
I actually went to Scott Berkun’s presentation thinking it was about bloggers. In actuality, it was about management. For one reason or another, I’ve read many books and papers on management, and I find the topic very interesting. There are many parallels I see between dealing with people in a corporate environment and dealing with people in discourse. Whether we’re arguing about some project decision or an opinion on Thucydides, the debate rarely remains on the plane of reason and logic for long. Ideas become tied to our identities, the discussion devolves into a war of egos where attacks on ideas become attacks on individuals. This is not a particularly new idea, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind (and an interesting thing to observe) in discussions and meetings.
“How are Information Networks Different from Social Networks?”
This discussion was about filtering information to get at what is interesting to us. The principle at work is that searching is not fun; finding is. One idea is to use trusted contacts as filters, so that you can see what interests the people you’re interested in. There was also a lot of discussion on tags in relation to searching. Someone said that tags aren’t interesting in and of themselves, it’s how their used by individual authors. In other words, context shapes their actual and precise meanings. I got really excited when semantic prototypes were brought up–tags represent invividual concepts, but like any sort of lexical entry (read: word), their real power is how they can be used together to create more complex ideas, just like words in a sentence. Although tags are best left in their current form, combining tags and syntax could yield some interesting possibilities for search and tag manipulation. I’ll have to think about it some more.
“Media, Technology, Democracy”
You might think this discussion would involve the promotion of a freer media and more access to information. It did not. Observing that politics has become increasingly polarized, we tried to find the reason behind it. Politicians will manipulate anything to bring down their opponents, so they must be very careful of what they do. Anything they do or say in public, and even most in private, must reflect their stated beliefs and opinions. Inconsistency is worse than being wrong (see “Why Good People Defend Bad Ideas”). There need to be private spaces for discourse, where ideas can be discussed without risking public identities. Blogs (and other forms of media) are powerful tools in today’s democracy, but they are a broadcast medium, and a public one at that — they may encourage polarization of political opinion rather than discussion and compromise.
What I Did All Night Long
After several more conversions and sessions, I ended up talking with Brian Rice and Paul Saitta. Well, I probably contributed little besides questions and enthusiasm, but I had a ton of fun learning about Smalltalk, Squeak, Common Lisp, and finally Slate. Slate is Brian’s project–it’s a language based on Smalltalk, but also a whole programming environment along the lines of Squeak. As I understand it, the eventual goal is to create an environment similar to what’s in CLIM, so you’re interacting with “modern” data (internet, email, images, etc.) but in framework that doesn’t get in your way. I actually dream of such a world, a computing system without windows, files, or applications. It’s slightly difficult to explain because everything on the system is interconnected; see TUNES for more information on the project. I definitely want to get involved–just as soon as I learn enough to be useful!
Sessions I Wish I’d Gone To:
- Women in Technology
- Human Augmentation
- Crash Course in UI Design
- Neo vs. Samwise in a Fight?
People I Met: