community

MeeGo Conference 2011 Wrap-Up

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As one of the organizers for the conference, I might be a little biased, but I had an absolutely fantastic time at the second MeeGo Conference held May 21 – 25 in San Francisco. Like with many conferences, it was the people who made it such a great experience for me. Interesting conversations with new and old friends combined with fun activities and sessions full of geeky material made for a fantastic experience. Despite getting almost no sleep thanks to some very late nights of werewolf and discussions in the hacker lounge, it was worth it!

Here are a few of my personal highlights

Siege Weapon Building with Live Action Angry Birds was a great community activity to help people get to know each other. We broke out into about 15 groups of 3 people each, and half of the teams built catapults for the birds and the other half built levels for the pigs. We then paired the catapults with the levels and let people launch the birds at the pigs with judging for best catapult, best level and an additional award for style. The video from Netbook News did a great job of capturing it all into a short, fun summary.

Hacker Lounge and Werewolf

I loved the hacker lounge this year, even more than the one in Dublin. By having the hacker lounge in the same location as the conference and the hotel, people were able to kick back and relax in a fun environment all hours of the day and night. It was a great place to have interesting conversations or play games with people late into the night. We had ping pong, foosball, air hockey, wii, and my favorite community building game, werewolf.

I hung out with old friends, made new ones, and had a great time in the hacker lounge. If I could change one thing about the hacker lounge, I would get rid of the air hockey and television, which were a little too noisy for the space.

Sessions and Collaboration

I presented in 2 sessions: The State of the MeeGo Community with special guest Randall Arnold (aka texrat) and co-presented in Dave Neary’s MeeGo Community Dashboard talk. As someone helping to organize the event, I didn’t get to attend as many sessions as I would have liked, but I did get to a couple. I particularly enjoyed Carsten’s Transparency, inclusion and meritocracy in MeeGo: Theory and practice and an ad hoc session we had over lunch to talk about details behind the community apps. The conversations and collaboration in the hallways, over meals and in the hacker lounge were a big part of the event for me.

A few things I would like to improve next time:

  • Keynotes – enough has been said about the keynote, so I won’t elaborate here other than to say I agree with much of what others have said.
  • Better integration of the warm-up activities. Despite working very closely with the warm-up organizing team, these still felt too disconnected somehow, and people were extremely confused about attending the warm-up before registration was open and badges handed out.

Overall, I was really happy with the conference, and I appreciate everyone who took the time to hang out, chat, attend my sessions, play werewolf and much more. Thank you.

Photo credits: MeeGo Conference Banner by Thomas Perl, Werewolf in the Hacker Lounge from Reggie Suplido and Maemo/MeeGo Folks in SF by Thomas Perl.

Note: This is a blog post about my personal experiences at the MeeGo Conference. We’ll some kind of official wrap-up on the MeeGo blog next week after people recover from the conference.

elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of weeks.

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

MeeGo.com*

What Dawn Eats*

*Disclaimers:

What Dawn Eats

Launching What Dawn Eats

I’ve been completely neglecting this blog over the past couple of months, and for those of you who’ve been wondering what I’ve been doing, I’ve been working on a new side project. What Dawn Eats: Vegan Food That Isn’t Weird is a blog right now, but it will also be a cookbook in a month or two! The idea behind the cookbook was to get all of my recipes into a format where I could share them in one bundle, mostly for friends and family. I’ve been keeping track of my recipes for my entire adult life and have been keeping them in electronic format with the goal of eventually creating some kind of cookbook. I decided over the Christmas holidays this year that I had enough recipes to finally tackle this project, and I’ve been working on it pretty steadily since then.

I decided to start by launching the What Dawn Eats blog where I will post a few recipes a week from the cookbook to give you a feel for the types of recipes that you will find when I publish the book. I’m currently in the final editing and formatting phase, so I hope to have the cookbook available for purchase in June or July. It will be available as a print book and PDF download to start, and I will probably convert it to the kindle format eventually. If you want some other format, just let me know. Since I’m self-publishing the book, I can be pretty flexible about formats or other requests.

In typical geek fashion, you can watch for new recipes in a variety of ways:

Expect to see more recipes posted over the next couple of months along with an update containing more details when you can start ordering the cookbook on What Dawn Eats.

elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of weeks.

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

MeeGo.com*

What Dawn Eats*

*Disclaimers:

elsewhere

Blogging Elsewhere

Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of weeks.

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

MeeGo.com*

*Disclaimers:

  • GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily: I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
  • MeeGo: I am a full-time employee at Intel and contributing to MeeGo is part of my job.
portland

Portland MeeGo Network Meetup March 21

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The next Portland MeeGo Network Meetup will be on Monday, March 21 at 6:30pm at Kells. I know this isn’t a lot of advance notice, but to make it up to you, we have a great topic lined up for Monday. We’ll be talking about MeeGo In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems for cars, buses, airplanes, etc. with rich Internet and multimedia experiences to consumers while traveling. Tracey Erway will be telling us more about MeeGo, and Chris Norman will have a demo unit that we can view. If you want to learn more about mobile technologies for various vehicles, this will be a great topic, or you can just come hang out and talk about MeeGo.

It would be great if you could RSVP on Plancast to let us know how many snacks we should have available.

Agenda

  • 6:30 – 7:00: Hang out and talk to other people interested in MeeGo.
  • 7:00 – 8:00: MeeGo In-Vehicle Infotainment with Tracey Erway and Chris Norman

Logistics

  • Date: March 21.
  • Time: 6:30pm – 8:30pm
  • Location: Kells Irish Pub at 112 SW 2nd Ave.

Sign up on the Portland MeeGo Network Google Group to get email notifications of future meetups.

rss

Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information at SXSW

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My SXSW session this year, Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information, is at the coveted 9:30 am session time on the final day of SXSW, so I thought that it might be a good idea to outline the presentation here in the hopes that I can entice a few people  to drag themselves out of bed early to attend.

Presentation

You can listen to the audio of my presentation.

SXSW Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information

Description

Information overload is less about having too much information and more about not having the right tools and techniques to filter and process information to find the pieces that are most relevant for you. This presentation will focus on showing you a variety of tips and techniques to get you started down the path of looking at RSS feeds in a completely different light. The default RSS feeds generated by your favorite blog or website are just a starting point waiting to be hacked and manipulated to serve your needs. Most people read RSS feeds, but few people take the time to go one step further to hack on those RSS feeds to find only the most interesting posts. I combine tools like Yahoo Pipes, BackTweets, PostRank and more with some simple API calls to be able to find what I need while automatically discarding the rest. You start with one or more RSS feeds and then feed those results into other services to gather more information that can be used to further filter or process the results. This process is easier than it sounds once you learn a few simple tools and techniques, and no “real” programming experience is required to get started. This session will show you some tips and tricks to get you started down the path of hacking your RSS feeds.

A few specific topics

Logistics

  • Tuesday March 15 at 9:30AM
  • Venue: Austin Convention Center Ballroom C
  • Tag: #hackingRSS

UPDATED to add embedded slides on 3/15/2011 and add audio link on 3/23/2011.

Community Manager Tips

Community Manager Tip: Be There for Your Community

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Communities occasionally go through tough times, and it’s important as the community manager to be there and support your community as much as possible. For example, last Friday there was an announcement scheduled at 2am my time with a webcast that promised to have at least some impact on the community that I manage. Rather than sleeping until my normal wake up time of 6am, I pulled my butt out of bed to watch the webcast with the rest of the community and sit on IRC to support people and answer questions where possible. I thought it was important to be there for people in this case.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

  • None of us can be awake 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but we should be there during tough times.
  • Don’t be afraid to shift your work day to accommodate key community activities.
  • Pay attention to your community and anticipate times when they might need you more than other times.
  • Answer questions and be honest when you just don’t know the answers yet.

Recommended Reading

Part of a series of community manager tips blog posts.

Illustration by elkokoparrilla used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Open source, Linux kernel research, online communities and other stuff I'm interested in posting.