Mind Camp Report

Even as an organizer, I didn't really know what to expect from Seattle Mind Camp 1.0. We certainly had a lot of ideas about the types of people we wanted there and how to structure the event; but it was literally "what happens when you put all of these smart people in a big room together". The answer seems to be that they talk to each other ... they (we) talk and talk and talk. Ted and Julie Leung each have the best summaries of the event, but I thought I'd toss my own thoughts in as well.

There were somewhere around 40 - 50 sessions total - lots of things that I wanted to see and discuss, but it was just impossible to take it all in. Michael Laine of Liftport, Inc. gave an amazing talk about their Space Elevator project. I had seen him talk before, so I had a good idea of the subject matter. But it was great to hear his full pitch, especially since he focused more on the science-y technical aspects of the project in a room full of smart, smart geeks.

After manning the registration desk for a bit and meandering, I met up with Ario Jafarzadeh to try to hack together a solution to his "how do I listen to my email in the shower" problem. Initially it seemed like no one else was going to show up, but as we were walking out of the room to find another session, someone joined us. We started chatting and gradually a few more people trickled in. It ended up being an interesting, wide-ranging discussion. I really love this sort of brainstorming energy, when you have a small group of folks all tossing out different ideas to come up with a creative solution to the problem. I think we found a decent answer for Ario - parsing email from a POP3 account into mp3 out to speakers in his shower. Now I just have to hack together a proof of concept.

Before dinner I got to chat with Rob Mensching for a bit. Since I use his Wix software pretty much every day at work, I profusely thanked him for saving me from the hell that is Installshield. He showed me some cool new stuff that he's working on for installs, and we chatted a bit about some feature requests for Wix.

Eric Butler gave an excellent presentation on Ubuntu, and it looks like he even talked one of the Program Managers from MSN Search into dual-booting his laptop. Everyone seemed to be in agreement that Ubuntu is the slickest thing Linux has going for the desktop.

By far the highlight of the weekend was Shelly Farnham's talk on her experiences in New Orleans post-Katrina. She went down there with one of the folks from Groove to help set up collaborative networked environments (something that Groove does really, really well). It was very interesting to hear her thoughts as a social software researcher in a situation where all our normal social cues and roles have completely broken down. The session went way over time and ended up morphing into a discussion about complex systems, narratives and maps, between myself, Nancy White, Paul Saitta and Lion Kimbro. Again, an amazing discussion with people much smarter than me. Nancy also passed along a ton of information that I now have to dig up and read.

From about one o'clock to four or five-ish, I took part in the Werewolf session. An incredible, fun, paranoid game that seems to thrive in these sorts of conference settings. Especially fun when you're playing it with a bunch of scary-smart alpha geeks (paraphrased: "But why'd you do that?" "I don't know - I'm chaotic neutral"). I can't wait to get to play again.

Since I didn't actually sleep Saturday night, Sunday was pretty much a blur. I did get into a great discussion with Brian Zug, a Web Training Developer for Seattle Children's (where Sarah works). I had been trying to chase him down the evening before, but we kept getting interrupted. When we finally sat down, the conversation ranged from project management to modern myths and stories to Christian culture hacking.

We had a great feedback session towards the end of the event - the best idea to come out of it was a geek swap meet. Next time we'll definitely try to encourage everyone to bring more toys - things to play with, things to fix, things to build and things to break. There were certainly a few logistical things that didn't go as well (wireless connectivity and the lack of women being two), but I'll have to address those in a separate post. On the whole, this was a smashing success and I can't wait to do it again.