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BuildingBlocks

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on November 7, 2006 at 10:07:37 am
 

Building Blocks

 

  • Blogger. Independent publishing. Blogger was launched in August 1999 and enabled people to easily publish on their own independent sites and since inspired many more: Movable Type, WordPress, etc. Freedom of the press brought to the people.
  • Creative Commons. Re-use, re-purpose, and remix. The initial set of Creative Commons licenses was published on December 16, 2002. CC licenses make it easier for independents to create reusable content building blocks. You can re-use without having to communicate which is another level of independence.
  • wikis. Independent iteration. Asynchronous collaborative authoring. Wikis enable independents to contribute and collaborate, typicaly without having to sync-up or coordinate with others. Independence of time, and a way for otherwise independent folks to more easily collaborate to build something much larger/better together than any of them could have purely on their own. Reduced the barrier to entry so that anyone could make small improvements, and one such result is Wikipedia.
  • irc.freenode.net. Independent realtime discussion channels. While various corporate instant messaging services offer group chat services, NONE of their user interfaces compare in terms of speed, efficiency, and real-time "feel" as IRC. Sure, you can't tell when people are typing, but that's about it. Freenode has emerged as a defacto IRC network for folks looking to chat independently at conferences (AKA the backchannel), or looking to organize and plan something new.
  • tags. Classification: Tags lowered the barrier for anyone to add keywords and organize anything. Delicious, Flickr, and Technorati aggregate tags and enabled independents to classify collaboratively without any extra effort.
  • microformats. Enable millions of web authors, not just programmers, to share structured chunks of information about people, events, reviews, classified listings, etc. This is also about the freedom to easily share chunks of data. Sharing requires interoperability = another word for standards. Thus microformats. We have to make it easy for *content* people - see microformats principles. Other format efforts focus on the programmer. But EVERYBODY is a content person. Only a few are programmers. Microformats focus on the publisher. Think like a content person. Make it easy for publishing and presenting. And relatively easy / possible for coding. For more, see Microformats: Evolving The Web.
  • SuperHappyDevHouse. 2005 SuperHappyDevHouse by Jeff (progrium) and Andy Smith, hosted by David Weekly. All night hack fests, think LAN Party but with creating brilliances of code and art in the company of other highly enthusiastic peers, fueled by Krispy Kreme, pizza, sodas, Red Bull, and other energy drinks.
  • FooCamp. In 2003 Tim O'Reilly implemented participant driven tech conferences with FOO Camp. Conference grid started empty, then filled up, then changed over time. I was fortunate enough to be there for the 2004 FooCamp and was at the right time and place to invent hCard and hCalendar, and have Ray Ozzie encourage me to go for it. 1.5 years later he's demonstrated web clipboard built on it at 2006 ETech Conference.
  • BarCamp. [Editor's note: this entry needs to be greatly shortened/summarized with more detailed text placed on sub-pages]. 2005 late summer, Tim is putting on FOO Camp again. I wasn't sure if I was going to be invited back. Heard of other folks getting invited, and the dates were coming up quick. One night, I shared my feelings and thoughts with friend and co-worker Ryan King and I said to him, I remember everything about the events and process of FOO Camp, and I know that a small group of folks could rebuild it. I told them the format for the participant driven "Camp" that Tim ran last year that I had the good fortune to experience. The 3 word intros. The empty grid beckoning signups. The plentiful space to camp/crash. The regular meals to syncup, take a break from the keyboard and projector and talk while in line for food, while sitting around round tables. The morning sessions with Tim O'Reilly himself setting the tone for the day. I told him: we could do this, and call it BarCamp, the complement to Foocamp. What we needed: a venue with at least a couple of rooms with power, wifi, seating, projectors, whiteboards. Easy access to food, preferably brought in to avoid having to leave the venue. Space for tents. Ideally: a place to shower. We bounced the idea off of a few more friends, Chris Messina, Andy Smith, and Matt Mullenweg and they sounded interested as well. Yet all were way too busy with their "day jobs", Chris and Andy crunching to get a release of Flock done for OSCon, and Matt wrapping up things at CNET and assembling his new startup. Still the idea was planted, and with such emotional force that rather than be forgotten, it's attractiveness only grew. The weekend before, Chris Messina pinged me on IRC and asked if I thought we could still do it. So we (Ryan, Chris, Andy, Matt, and I) went to Ritual Roasters to go figure it out. I invited SF newcomer Eris Stassi to join us as well. I repeated the outline of requirements and the group said why not? Andy Smith registered the domain name and installed kwiki within minutes. We cloned the details from the FooCamp wiki (thanks to Tim for putting all the stuff on a wiki, another inspiration). Over the course of the next few days, each person found their natural roles in helping make things happen. With an IRC channel for rapid discussions, and the wiki to capture roles/decisions, progress was made incredibly quickly. Friday afternoon, just six days from when the domain was registered, the first BarCamp was kicked off. within days, interest from other cities poured in to do their own BarCamps. We took the model of FOOCamp of pick a room and do your session and expanded it to: pick a city and do a barcamp. We documented what we learned so others could copy without any permission or direct communication. In the weeks and months following, self-organized BarCamps were held in other cities around the country and world as far away as New Delhi and Shanghai. Not only have over a dozen BarCamps been held, but it has spawned numerous mutations (as any rapidly growing species does) - MashupCamp, MashPit, Virginia Woolf Camp etc. Many more BarCamps are being planned by and for people in their local communities. In fact, BarCampAustin was happening at the Thistle Cafe during SXSW 2006 at the same time as the original Building Blocks for Independents presentation. For more info go to BarCamp.org.
  • nerdcurious. new! nerdcurious is a series of small informal participant-organized gatherings that was founded to help bridge the worlds of those who are curious about new technologies, terminologies, etc. but are not techies themselves, and those familiar with such things who wish to enable and empower more people via increased techliteracy and help them become more active participants in our rapidly evolving modern technoculture. nerdcurious events are shorter, smaller, and focussed on a single introductory hands-on topic in order to be more accessible and easier to organize than BarCamps which are in contrast intended for larger crowds and often present an expectation of a more intermediate or advanced familiarity with modern technologies. See WhatIsNerdcurious for more details.

 

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