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Transitions and Flow
- created
- 4/30 11:57 PM
- content
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I attended the Diggnation party at Mighty tonight. Having driven yet not had dinner, did not partake of the drinks offered. Earlier I had tended to a few appointments and the Data Portability meetup on rel="me" - Chris Saad had invited me to attend and help with Q&A.
A number of things happened over the course of the evening which made me think. Most of them were events occuring in a longer sequence, pieces that helped complete thoughts in progress. I won't go into details but suffice it to say it has inspired a change in focus. Here are some of the topics.
I had most of a blog post written about the etiquette / apparent rules that I'm using for accepting / following / leaving / blocking people on various (semi)real time services like IM, Twitter, Pownce, Dodgeball, Dopplr, and most recently BrightKite - this was going to be my SXSW Tip #2 (and may still be). However, since such rules are always in evolving and changing as new situations occur, I realized that the documentation of such etiquette is much better suited to a wiki. A couple of mini-tips for now: add nice people that you meet in person, drop people if they're mean or noisy (by your judgment).
Such etiquette inevitably touches on the topics of friendship and flirting, two things that I'm still learning lessons about, and as a self-acknowledged late blooming introvert, will undoubtedly continue to do so. However I've learned enough to share, and again, will do so via wiki. Until posted, I'll leave you with the principles of transparency, respect, and compassion.
As can be easily concluded from the above, for a while now I've been very inwardly focused.
I've made progress on some key areas: GTD, fitness, fear, insecurity, will power, assertiveness, and focus. While still "in progress", I know the improvements are pronounced enough to affect changes I myself have noticed in things like my average comfort level across a variety of situations, and even punctuality.
In mid-April I went to New York City to see my sister in a play ("Paris Commune" at The Public) and ended up packing nearly hour with various informal meetups and appointments. The part that stood out for me personally, besides getting to meet and hang out with great friends old and new, was that I made it on time (often with many minutes to spare) to every appointment. Doing so consistently for a week was a total first for me, and IMHO is a reflection of increased abilities in the areas of will power, assertiveness, focus and having a better sense of time's flow. Perhaps the pulse of NYC helped. By no means have I conquered punctuality for good, however I feel it is finally within my grasp.
March and April were very much months of transition for me, to make key decisions, be more assertive, be more spontaneous, and be more open about recognizing and openly declaring my own limitations to friends and business contacts, especially limitations to do with expectations, obligations, and dependencies.
In continuing with this transition, I've realized that it's time to turn that inward focus outward. The Data Portability meetup hosted by LinkedIn (thanks to one of the leading microformats implementers Steve Ganz) really helped me realize just how much work there is still to be done with making microformats as easy to understand as possible, not just for publishers and implementers, but for users as well.
I've decided to immediately increase my travel to spend more time with those that matter to me, and share the messages on the efforts I care about.
I'm looking forward to the next couple of months. May for me will be a bit of a microformats sprint. I've already arranged meetings with a major software company on Friday. Workshops in New Zealand after that, and issue resolution meetups when I return to San Francisco. June will bring more travel, with BarCampSeattle, and a return to San Francisco with the Supernova Conference (get tickets before a) prices go up, and b) it sells out!), for which I have the honor of chairing the "Open Flow" track. Coincidentally the book I'm currently reading is titled "Flow", thanks to my new super friend Tara Brown, who somehow knew exactly where my head was at and gave it to me to read just last week. It's a really good sequel in many ways to David Allen's Getting Things Done that I previously mentioned. Give them both a good read, try incorporating elements of both into your life, and then let's chat.
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SXSW Tip #1 what to pack
- created
- 3/6 4:04 PM
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I've seen numerous people twitter wondering what to pack for SXSW today. Per my communication protocols, I'm blogging my answer. Note: I'm basing this purely on my personal packing list, so if you're a girl, or wear something other than black, you may want to check other suggested packing lists as well
First, you must unpack what you have packed.
If you are one of those urban superheroes that walk around with useful gadgets like swiss army knives (or any kind of knives), and allen wrenches (or anything that looks like it could be used to take apart an airplane), remove them from your utility belt, your jet pack, and any other part of your supercostume. Unless of course you're willing to pack a bag to check-in (which I highly recommend avoiding, due to risk of loss etc.).
Wear the essentials
The key to being prepared is wearing the essentials. This seems obvious but perhaps that's why it comes next.
- plain black socks, underwear, and t-shirt (American Apparel works well).
- plain black pants. either simple work pants, like Dickies, or black jeans, but flexible enough for any number of emergency activities, like running and climbing obstacles to ditch crazy stalkers or emo drama queens. Volcom slacks and jeans have a good fit.
- plain black belt (you never know when you'll need to cinch around something to hold onto, and also a useful yoga prop), consider a solid heavy belt buckle that you can swing around on the end of your belt like a mace if need be.
- plain black shoes (must be very walkable, I'm very happy with my Keens, and apropos for SXSW, they even have a new "Austin" model which I may just have to pick up).
- plain black hoodie (again, American Apparel comes thru, though some OBEY hoodies are also sufficiently dark).
- plain black coat, preferably something waterproof or water resistant. it rained today in Austin and last year it rained several days. Spiewak has some good options.
Fill your pockets with:
- sunglasses (prescription or clipons if necessary)
- some sort of smartphone, one you can easily and rapidly text message. phone calls just don't work at SXSW because it is nearly always too noisy, and too rude (you're nearly always around other people) to talk on the phone. texting is where it is at. and your old dumbphone won't cut it. T9 = FAIL. Get something with a full QWERTY keyboard and an unlimited (or at least 1000) texting plan. BlackBerry is the best option here IMHO. We'll see how well those with iPhone touch keyboards do under the pressure of SXSW.
- small digital camera, including spare battery and SD card. My trusty Canon SD400 is still rocking out. If I were to buy a new one, I would get the SD1000.
- lip balm. yes it can get dry in Austin. no one even likes looking at cracked lips much less anything else. Burt's Bees lip balm is a good one.
- small pen and paper pad. sometimes low tech works really well. redundancy is a good thing.
- small iPod (or other music player) with earphones - fully charged. helps discourage the crazies/beggars from hassling you when you're darting between venues.
Over the shoulder equipment
With the above outfit, you're fairly set to survive a variety of temperatures, climates, and social situations. However, you really need a few more things to make it through an event as geeky and lengthy as SXSW. Pick out the items (or their equivalents) from below, and then find a small (yet robust) backpack / messenger bag like thing (I prefer Boblbee backpacks) that will fit them, and will of course fit fully underneath the seat in front you.
- small flashlight - like a mini maglite - test before leaving
- ocular backup device. in other words, if you wear glasses, pack contacts and sunglasses too, if you wear contacts, pack glasses.
- simple hat/cap - for use in the cold, extreme sun, or if you happen to skip a shower (e.g. because the city turned off the water to your hotel, yes I've had this happen before).
- laptop, with power supply, and recovery/boot CDs/DVDs.
- small DVD case of videos (e.g. exercise like yoga or pilates - Kristin McGee's MTV Yoga series is excellent, and maybe a movie or two).
- USB cable to charge your phone and download photos from camera to laptop
- noise cancelling earphones/headphones - these really help on the flight.
- secondary communication device. a 2-way, or a spare cell phone with EVDO.
- a book to read on the plane. I recoomend either "Getting Things Done" (even if you've read it, reviewing it helps), or "Snow Crash".
- minimal bath kit: toothbrush, toothpaste, comb, contact lens fluids/case, shaver
- a minimum of two (preferably four, one for each day) changes of socks, underwear, tshirt. tightly rolled to take as little space as possible. buy a SXSW interactive tshirt at the show and wear it home on the Wednesday flight. get free tshirts at parties etc.
- a couple of energy bars, e.g. Clif bars.
Rollaway the remainder
The above is pretty minimal for a four day conference. If you want a bit more flexbility in outfits, or are staying through SXSW Music, you're going to need to pack another bag, and might as well make it a rollaway. In addition to shifting the clothing, bath kit, and perhaps some of the powersupplies from the above to the rollaway, you'll want to include:
- expanded bath kit. fingernail clippers, perhaps some hair product (essential for music) and whatever else you would include in a larger bath kit. maybe some extra vitamin C and Advil.
- extension cord and powerplug splitter (so you can turn one outlet into four or more for all your power supplies / devices).
- Airport Express - so you can create your very own wifi-cloud from the Ethernet provided by the hotel, since many hotels have very spotty wifi in the rooms.
- power adapters/rechargers for your phone, camera battery, secondary communication device.
- audio/video cables to connect your laptop to a stereo/tv/flatscreen/projector. Some hotels have the ability to connect to the in-room TV and use it as a second monitor. And if you have DVI/mini-DVI out rather than VGA (e.g. a Mac laptop), bring an adapter that will let you connect your laptop to VGA.
- half a dozen energy bars, like Clif bars (I recommend the apricot Clif bars, or chocolate Clif builder bars) to hold you over when you inevitably forget or skip meals.
- more clothing: a plain longsleeve black t-shirt (again, American Apparel helps here) for another layering option (over or under t-shirts), a second pair of pants, a second black hoodie, a second (perhaps lighter) black jacket, and maybe a few stylistic t-shirts that express thin-slices of your personality.
- swim suit. most hotels have pools, even hot tubs. put them to good use.
- thin black sweatpants (American Apparel) - for sleeping in if it gets cold, doing yoga or pilates and just lounging around your hotel room.
- climbing shoes. see GeeksLoveClimbing.com. Enough said.
- business (e.g. Moo) cards, stickers to promote your product, your company, your personal brand, or all of the above.
Start with that and iterate. See what you missed having with you this year, make a note of it, and bring it next year. Finally, if you lack any of the above, call your hotel and ask them for their "shipping address" (typically it will be "Attention: Your Name" followed by name of hotel and their normal address). Then order whatever you need from Amazon.com and have it shipped overnight or second day air directly to you at your hotel.
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Three Human Interface Hypotheses Update: Email is Efail
- created
- 2/19 11:59 PM
- content
tags:
humaninterface
hi
userinterface
ui
design
humaninterfacedesign
laws
rules
hypothesis
hypotheses
twitter
im
email
blogging
users- email
efail
A year ago I published Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design which in short provided some analysis that demonstrated that the simpler and faster a user interface is, the easier it is to use. The response has been quite amazing, with over a hundred blog posts and comments across various sites (Digg, Reddit etc.)
I was particularly humbled that Ev Williams incorporated a summary of the three hypotheses in a few of his talks last year: Web 2.0 Summit (referencing slide) and LeWeb 3 conference (see video discussion starting at 6:00). Ev is the rare "serial entrepreneur" that can be proud of that label, having successfully founded and sold two innovative ground-breaking companies (Blogger, Odeo) and now working on Twitter, a feat far more impressive than a few hypotheses in a blog post.
Last year when I posted The Three Hypotheses, they very much helped me explain why I was finding email so much less useful/usable than instant messaging (IM) and Twitter. Since then, I have found that while I can keep up with more people contacting me over IM and following more people on Twitter, email has simply become less and less usable, but not for reasons of interface, as I'm using the email application now as I was a year ago.
I'm probably responding to less than 1 in 10 emails that are sent directly to me, even fewer of those that are sent to a set of people or a list. The usability of email for me has deteriorated so much that I exclaimed on Twitter recently: EMAIL shall henceforth be known as EFAIL.
I think there are a number of factors why email is failing for me while other communication methods such as IM and Twitter are scaling. However, I think two specific reasons in combination account for most of the problem.
1. Point to point communications do not scale.
All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of "To" in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit. If you are really good you might be able to respond to dozens (some claim hundreds) of individual emails a day but at some point you will simply be spending all your time writing email rather than actually "working" on any thing in particular (next-actions or projects, e.g. coding, authoring, drawing, enjoying your life etc.) and will thus experience a productivity failure. The obvious solution is to push as much 1:1 communication into 1:many or 1:all forms such as public blogs and wikis. My CommunicationProtocols wiki page describes this preference.
However, while 1:1 email is not scaling for me, I feel like 1:1 IM is scaling which would seem to refute the above reasoning. There are two reasons why this is not so:
- You are only busy with instant messages (IMs) from people when you are active in your IM client. People can only send you IMs when you choose to be online, rather than whenever they choose to do so. This gives you much tighter control over both how much and when you IM, as opposed to email which continuously piles up whether you are online or not.
- Perhaps IM simply has a higher scaling limit than email. That is, per the three hypotheses, since IM is much more usable than email, perhaps there is a factor of 10 or more in terms of the number of IMs you can receive and respond to as compared to email. In otherwords, perhaps IM also has a 1:1 scaling limit, but just one that I haven't encountered yet.
The second reason that I think email is becoming a worse and worse problem is directly due to its higher usability barrier, that is:
2. Emails tend to be bloated with too many details and different topics.
Email requires more of an interface cognitive load tax than IM (as compared to the time spent on writing the content itself), thus people naturally put much more into an email (perhaps in an unconscious effort to amortize that interface tax overhead across more content). People may feel that since they are already "bothering" to write an email, that they might as well take the time to go into all kinds of detail, and perhaps even add a few more things that they're thinking about it. Such natural message bloat places additional load on the recipient, both in terms of the raw length of the message, and in terms of the depth and variety of topics covered in the email. This results in a direct increase in processing time per email thus making it even harder for people to take the necessary time to process and respond. I know I've left numerous emails grow stale because there were simply too many different things in the email that required a response, and I didn't want to send a response without responding to everything in the email because then I would inevitably receive yet another email response without being able to file the original as being processed and thus have the situation worsen!
I don't have answers to all of these problems. I do have some suggestions that appear to be helping, though I'm far from solving the larger problem of scaling communications in general.
- Publish how you prefer to be contacted. E.g. here are my preferred communication protocols.
- Move as much 1:1 communication into 1:many or 1:all mediums. Rather than email or IM someone specifically (even in response), push yourself to publish things publicly somewhere with a permalink (wiki, blog, twitter). This does two things:
- It increases the chance that someone else that might have asked you the same question may find your answer on the Web, and thus avoid a 1:1 contact.
- For those that don't find it and ask you the same question anyway, it provides a URL for you to quickly send to them in a reply.
- Reduce your use of email as much as possible. This is definitely a work in progress for me. See my Email Reduction project for what I've done, and am doing to puruse this goal, as well as references to others' work in this area.
- EMAIL is EFAIL. Pass it on. There is a strong cultural bias among technology workers (and perhaps most tech companies, at least from my experience, e.g. Microsoft folks love email) to use email as the default solution for all communication, whether 1:1, signing up for services, or registering to leave a comment on a blog. Most of the signup/registration cases can be (and are being) replaced with URL based solutions like OpenID and hCard profiles. But we must actively fight this cultural bias for email. Yes, we have to tell people that they are wrong, that their cherished communication tool is inefficient and does not scale. We have to stand firm and let emails die or at best respond to them slowly, letting urgent matters find us via other preferred methods of communication. People will learn and adapt.
- Remember there are worse things than email. Long before email failed to scale as a communication medium, other methods failed first (exceptions in parentheses). Faxes (legal matters only). Printed letters (handwritten letters still have value). Phone calls (limit them to: close friends, family, and last minute event coordination only), and of course voicemails (don't bother, send a text message instead).
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One year wikiversary
- created
- 1/22 5:22 PM
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My personal wiki turned one year old today. That was fast. As I've picked up and used additional tools such as a wiki, Twitter, and perhaps most recently Pownce (congrats on the public launch BTW!), I've found that each serves a specific purpose in my life, and that's ok, there's no need to try to force each to be all things. See my "Identity facets" sidebar for the full list of sites I'm currently actively using for various publishing purposes.
My wiki (hosted by the nice folks at PBWiki) has mostly served as a place for me to record notes, incomplete thoughts, works in progress that may help other folks out. I've also used it as a place to keep current contact information, work on some collaborative efforts (such as the upcoming Body Optimization session at SXSW 2008), and other projects.
It's also a place I've kept notes or documents that I expect to keep current / update in place, as opposed to blog posts, which are more like snapshots of thoughts in time. For example I put bug reports and feature requests on my public wiki, rather than hassling with the login and TOS hurdles of the myriad feedback systems of the products and services that I use.
I've shared my wiki password with a few friends, a few of whom have made edits/fixes here and there. I'd like any friend or colleague that I'm currently collaborating with on a project to have access, so, contact me for the password.
I've found a personal wiki very useful for publishing information that I felt needed to be published but couldn't quite figure out where to put it. The beauty of it is that if/when I do later find a more "proper" place for the information (such as a feedback forum on a product site), I can simply put a URL to the page with the information on my wiki, which I can then update as necessary without worrying about checking yet another forum site.
I recommend that everyone start their own personal wiki for capturing and updating these kinds of random thoughts. Go to PBwiki.com to get started.
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Open as possible means public domain plus a strong community
- created
- 1/1 7:46 PM
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My journey implementing and/or iterating/improving/creating "open" standards began almost 10 years at Microsoft when I was assigned the area of CSS support in Internet Explorer for Macintosh. Along the way I've learned a lot about the longterm value of open standards, open source, and open content, and as a result the plethora of "open" licenses out there. Having seen real difficulties that different "open" projects have had working together due to license (or even philosophical definition of "freedom") incompatibilities, limitations, friction, barriers to developing derivative materials to help "open" projects, and even FUD used inside many corporations to limit use of "open" resources, it led me inexorably to one conclusion.
If you want your "open" project to be as open as possible for maximum benefit and reuse, you have to (a) release it to the public domain, and (b) depend on the community for strength of cohesion and identity. Both are important, and only recently (the past few years) has the latter been made truly possible by the Web, blogs, and real-time search and update services.
Perhaps the most common question I've been asked in response is whether I'm worried about someone (or some organization) taking such material in the public domain and "abusing" them, whether creating a incompatible variants (of formats), forking, commercially benefitting etc. The latter is the easiest to address. Standards work best when there is commercial incentive to implement them and implement them interoperably. The former aspect requires analyzing underlying assumptions.
The implicit assumption in the questions of the form "what if someone/something takes your work and does something bad with it" are as follows:
- your - implies a personalization of the work. Standards work because they are easy for others to use and implement interoperably. Not you. Inventing a standard for yourself is not really that useful (though many standards efforts seem to be of that nature, a person or company inventing a standard just for themselves, perhaps as an academic challenge of sorts). A true test of the effectiveness of a standard invented/created by person A, is whether person B and person C can (at least semi) independently create interoperable implementations of that standard. As a result, lone-inventor standards almost always fail.
- bad - assuming we've already disposed of implied "bad" uses which actually are not bad (and perhaps even good for a standard, such as commercial use), that leaves the implicit assumption of recourse, and the implication that without public domain you would otherwise own a copyright or some other legally enforceable intellectual property (IP) right that you could use to retaliate or curb such "bad" behavior, effectively at that. This is a very bad assumption. The reality is that unless you are very wealthy with deep pockets, pursuing legal action to fight abuse of a standard is a futile effort. Even with legal funding, the progress of such recourse is so slow that the battle is often already won or lost in the marketplace, leaving legal victories typically pyrrhic at best. These days, perhaps the strongest actor in that "marketplace" battle is the community built around the standard, and the realtime feedback and coverage they can provide as mentioned earlier.
Rather than grasping at the false sense of security that copyright or other IP protection seems to afford, the irony is that it is actually stronger to affirm and accept that for practical purposes (given time and costs of enforcement) there really isn't much IP protection available to individuals or open source projects, and thus you must depend on the community built around the standard. This open acknowledgment of dependence on the community and absence of any other support provides much more open incentive for the community to stay cohesive, rally around, and strengthen itself in order to preserve the openness and fidelity of a standard.
Thus, on this "Public Domain Day" as noted by the Creative Commons blog, I encourage anyone and everyone creating or developing an "open standard" or "open data format" to do so completely in the public domain.
If you're going to start a new wiki, whether for a new web standards effort, or for a random community topic, consider requiring that all contributions be placed into the public domain. The Body Optimization wiki (first to do so AFAIK) notes this requirement in its PBWiki login form with a reference to the Creative Commons Public Domain license (CC-PD), and has so from its inception.
If you are leading an existing "open" standards effort, whether for a data format or protocol, I encourage you to strongly consider doing what we did with microformats:
- (a) requiring any new contributions be placed into the public domain (per CC-PD or any future version).
- (b) encouraging existing/past contributors to explicitly agree to release all past, present and future contributions (with some reasonable time to do so)
- (c) afterwards, going through and cleaning previous contributions as necessary to place all the work into the public domain.
Everyone that works on any open standard can make a big difference to the greater body of open standards that all of us depend on to freely build use and iterate upon tools that interoperate. Make it one of your new years resolutions to either take the leap to public domain with your open standards efforts, or at least take some of the above-noted concrete steps toward doing so, and make your open standard as open as possible.
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Wrapping up 2007: microformats public domain contributions and LifeCamp
- created
- 12/31 11:51 PM
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It's been quite the eventful year, so perhaps it is only fitting that a couple more big things got squeezed into the last few days.
Requiring public domain contributions
As of December 29th, all new contributions to the microformats wiki are required to be released into the public domain. This has been a project that I've been working on for microformats for quite some time, was much harder and took much longer than expected, and was really important to me personally.
See the blog post on microformats.org for more details, reasons why, and historical events leading up to this first of a kind decision to make a standards effort as open as possible.
What are you doing with your life?
Aside from the party going on (that I'm briefly hiding from to write this up), this year concluded for me with LifeCamp, a BarCamp/Foocamp-like event 12/30-31 that focused on one question: What are you doing with your life?
My friend Julie and I thought this up when discussing end of year rituals, and threw it together quickly and roughly in a matter of days (like the first BarCamp). We invited a bunch of people (also coarsely brainstormed, certainly not comprehensive), a few of whom were actually available to attend, and shared an incredible two days of reflection (what did you do) and projection (what are you going to do).
We quickly decided at the start to make the event both off-the-record by default (similar to Foocamp and a few other such conferences) and even fairly "in-confidence" to create a more comfortable and safe environment for sharing personal, sensitive, and vulnerable aspects of ourselves. However we also decided to very much document the abstractions about the event, in the hopes of improving the replicability of the event, both for ourselves, and for anyone wishing to organize a LifeCamp in their own town, with a few of their trusted friends and colleagues. Check out the LifeCamp wiki.
I've got more thoughts on the microformats example of making open standards as open as possible, and the LifeCamp variant of Barcamp that I'll post in the new year. For now, there is champagne and sparkling cider to hand out.
Happy New Year and see you in 2008!
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NaVloPoMo: Bulldozer crossing on 3rd street
- created
- 11/10 2:05 AM
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tags:
sanfrancisco
soma
3rdstreet
freeway
bulldozer
concrete
urban
fence
chainlink
chainlinkfence
vlog
vlogpost
video
NaVloPoMo
It's not every day that construction equipment literally crosses your path. This particular bulldozer was clearly just entering the job site to get some work done.
- License: This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 license.
- Taken on 2007-04-20
- Location: San Francisco, California
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NaVloPoMo: April explains big O and little o
- created
- 11/9 1:58 PM
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I have no idea where we were or what we were doing, but my friend April who I had just met at SXSW, was wearing a t-shirt that said big O little o and while I first thought of the computer science notion of big O vs. little o, I had a feeling that's not what the shirt was about. So I asked her to explain it.
Update: April has reminded me that I recorded this at the "im in ur web2open partyz drinkin ur beerz" party this past April, where I also met iJustine.
- License: This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 license.
- Taken on 2007-04-17
- Location: San Francisco, California
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NaVloPoMo: Robin summarizes the history of the internet
- created
- 11/8 7:41 PM
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tags:
Robin
RobinJones
history
internet
internethistory- vlog
- vlogpost
- video
- NaVloPoMo
collegepal
alumni
Stanford
This past April I had the fun experience of getting in touch with a college pal who I had not seen or heard from since then. In short: we lived in the same dorm at Stanford one year during which time we did a bunch of things like go for motorcycle rides etc. but the most memorable was attending a Apple Holiday Party together (I was an intern at Apple at the time) and being surprised with a private performance by Ella Fitzgerald (yes the) - one of her last performances. Yes that's the kind of party Apple used to throw, even a private one just for employees.
Being Stanford types we both just got super busy and lost touch after that year. Fast forward to this year. Robin found me on the interwebs, and we ended up grabbing a bite together in LA and catching up on many years since we last saw each other. Our lives had taken very different paths, and over the course of the evening she made me explain how the internet came about. To see if I had made any sense, and see how well she retained it, I made her summarize the history of the internet for me in 30 seconds (actually 40, but what's 10 seconds among friends?). Judge for yourself, I think Robin did quite well.
- License: This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 license.
- Taken on 2007-04-DD
- Location: San Francisco, California
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NaVloPoMo: Take a break and walk in the surf
- created
- 11/7 11:59 PM
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tags:
w3c
w3ctp
citizenspace
citizenagency
break
beach
surf
water
ocean
sand
socal
walking
relax- vlog
- vlogpost
- video
- NaVloPoMo
Getting up at 5am for a marathon W3C Technical Plenary Day was quite a bit of work, and certainly had all the timezone shifting effects of jet lag even though my clocks didn't change.
More on the events of the day later, but for now, suffice it to say that the W3C Technical Plenary Day went very well, and had me once again regretting that I couldn't be there in person. Thanks once again to Citizen Agency for donating the use of Citizen Space to remotely participate. Their bandwidth was sufficient to both receive a live audio stream of the meeting, and answer a Skype call from Tim Berners-Lee himself in order to participate on a panel (I think I was a floating head on his computer next to him, those actually at the meeting will have to confirm what it was like).
Long day over, here is a bit of an audiovisual break. Pretend that you are at the beach, taking a walk in the Southern California surf.
- License: This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 license.
- Taken on 2007-04-14
- Location: Newport Beach, California
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SF remote participation in W3C Tech Plenary
- created
- 11/7 1:56 AM
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San Francisco Bay Area W3C fans: join us today at Citizen Space for remote participation in the W3C Tech Plenary Day.
Despite the fact that I was unable to make it to the W3C meetings this week in person, I wanted to very much participate remotely however I could, and if possible even do so by remote audio/video link for the panel I was invited to speak on.
Rather than remotely participate by myself, I figured that if I could find a suitable location, I might be able to organize remote participation for at least a few more interested folks who were also unable to make the trip to Cambridge in person.
Thanks to Citizen Agency's generous donation of space for a whole day, I've organized a last minute group W3C Tech Plenary day remote participation session for tomorrow (er, later today).
We'll have wifi, power, whiteboards, a projector, tables, chairs and will be able to interact with those onsite via IRC at a minimum, and possible by video feed.
Bring your laptop(s), your power supplies, and your thoughts on the below agenda.
Details:
When: 5:45am - 3:45pm (East Coast schedules are quite painful for those of us on the West Coast. Yes I know that's less than four hours from now.) Where: Citizen Space, 425 Second St., #300, San Francisco, California 94107 What: W3C Tech Plenary Remote Participation Why: For the good of open standards and the Web. Who: myself and anyone else who wants to help collaborate with W3C efforts to "lead the Web to its full potential". Check the official W3C Technical Plenary Day schedule for a listing of sessions and speakers. Remember to subtract 3 hours from the time slots to convert to Pacific time. Here is a brief summary in PST:
5:45am-6am Session 1: Welcome by Steve Bratt 6am-7am Session 2: View from the Outside: Real World Perspectives on the W3C panel moderated by Molly E. Holzschlag 7am-7:30am break 7:30am-8:30am Session 3: Future Formats: HTML5 and XHTML2 moderated by Al Gilman 8:30am-9am Session 4: Lightning Talks moderated by Rotan Hanrahan 9am-10:30am Lunch (AKA second breakfast for us) 10:30am-11:30am Session 5: Openness of W3C Working Groups moderated by Daniel Glazman 11:30am-12:15pm Session 6: URI-Based Extensibility: Benefits, Deviations, Lessons-Learned moderated by David Orchard (this is the panel that I was invited to speak to represent microformats and will be attempting to participate via audio/video link) 12:15pm-12:45pm break (perhaps get food to go from South Park) 12:45pm-1:15pm Session 7: Lightning Talks moderated by Rotan Hanrahan 1:15pm-2:15pm Session 8: Making Video a First-Class Citizen of the Web moderated by Philippe Le Hegaret 2:15pm-3pm Session 9: Discussion with the Director, Tim Berners-Lee moderated by T.V. Raman 3pm-3:15pm Wrap-Up and Adjourn 3:15pm-3:45pm buffer (inserted because from experience these things run late) Please RSVP on the Upcoming page.
Add yourself, your notes, links to your related blog posts to the W3C Technical Plenary Day wiki page on the microformats wiki.
I'll be bringing chocolate covered espresso beans to help anyone stay awake who dares to get up that early. See you in a few hours.
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Canceled trip to W3C Tech Plenary
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- 11/6 11:48 PM
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I had planned originally to attend the W3C Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee Meetings Week this week, including meeting with the CSS working group, and a day with the HTML working group as well, in addition to participating on a panel during the Technical Plenary Day itself. Unfortunately for a number of reasons I had to cancel my attendance. In approximate order of significance (though each were perhaps sufficient on their own).
- injury. My sprained ankle is still not 100% healed, and though I've been able to jog short distances, and climb/boulder carefully and slowly, I still have to spend several hours each day sitting or lying down with my foot elevated. I know how I do conferences, that is non-stop from early morning until late night (sometimes only sleeping an hour or two), on my feet. I would almost certainly make my ankle a lot worse by attending.
- time. Everything is slower when you are injured, plus I simply got overloaded with things that had to be done. Not to mention even critical emails are going unresponded. I simply did/do not have the time spend on travel overhead to the East Coast this week. If airports, planes, trains, and automobiles all had wifi + power (some of them have some), it might have been manageable.
- cost. As an independent without a corporate sponsor, I'm having to be more and more economically conservative with my non-personal travel. In particular if/when I'm invited to speak or participate on a panel at a conference, with rare exception I'm asking for travel and conference hotel stay to be covered. In this case I failed to take the inititative to request that W3C cover my travel and hotel as an invited expert to participate on a panel, though I'm not sure it would have made a difference as I've never heard of invited experts being sponsored as such. Regardless, I should have at least asked a while ago.
When I look at all the above however, I can't help but conclude that in each instance I'm responsible. That night I fell and badly sprained my ankle, I pushed myself too hard when I went bouldering after an exhausting day at the Graphing Social Patterns conference for which I had gotten up at 6am after only 4 hours of sleep, mere days after returning from Spain. I allowed too many tasks to build-up and/or committed to too many things in early November. And I failed to both properly evaluate the full extent and impact of the costs of attending W3C meetings in Cambridge for a week, and request sponsorship accordingly.
As such, I must offer my regrets and sincere apologies to my fellow colleagues and W3C community members for missing the W3C Plenary / All Group Meetings Week for the first time ever (I've made it to all previous such events). I'm sorry I am unable to meet with you in person. I wish you all a very productive week.
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