Post Conference Notes and Links

Posted on 02/17/2006

I am sitting in a hotel beside the airport in Portland after having just attended the wickedly cool code4lib conference. There has been lots of conference coverage captured at the code4lib planet, but here are a few scattered notes before I grapple with the impending reality of a seriously early morning flight.

Lightning talks are amazing. Seemingly invented at Open Source conferences, lightning talks are short presentations, five minutes maximum in this case, with little mercy shown by the timekeepers. The session where 22 talks were presented in rapid succession was the most intense and gratifying conference experience I have ever seen. Between the lightning talks and the regular sessions, some where between one fourth and half of the audience were also presenters. To say nothing of the breakout sessions and the Q&A, this is a level of participation unimaginable at most conference events.

Solutions defined on the ground sometimes trump all others. The format and sequencing of the lightning talks changed from day one to day two in order to help the presenters deal with the transitions between machines. My laptop was particularly troublesome in talking to the projector so this was much appreciated. Both the lightning talks and the breakout sessions emerged out of the interplay between presented topics, emerging themes, and problem sets that the audience wanted to explore. A library hackish improv of sorts, it reminds me of why the poetry slams at Access 2002 and Access 2006 worked so well, put the wetware together in the right forum and amazing things happen.

Virtual communities create real connections. Many of the attendees at code4lib knew each other from the #code4lib channel, and it established a context that allowed discussions to leapfrog into deep waters really quickly. In fact, sometimes the discussions seemed to realize threads that had started on chat, and will likely continue to be woven in and out of real and virtual worlds for the next few weeks.

Podcasting, presentation software, and IRC need to find common ground. I actually started working on something to this end on the plane, but suspect it had a lot more to do with avoiding the final edits of my slides than anything else. I was fascinated by the moments when the chat channel appeared on the big screen during the conference, and there seemed to be a vibrant conversation on the channel going on during the sessions. I get distracted so easily that I can't handle chat while trying to do anything else and there was lots I wanted to take in, but it would be great to bring the power of the IRC channel more fully into the presentation layer. I suspect I will be working on this during my plane ride home as I switch my aversion to finishing slides over to my distaste for finishing reports, one of which I have dragged with me in an attempt to guilt myself into coming up with one more draft.

Panizzi is the ultimate lightning talk closer. Imagine a foul mouthed Italian supybot that steals the show. Kudos to Peter Binkley for setting up this incredible performance, and luckily, no one was faced with the prospect of trying to follow Panizzi's performance with a talk. The movie showed at the end of the conference, on the other hand, brought everything together nicely. I was even humming Air Supply songs by the end, and that does not happen often.

Now time for sleep.