Boeing
3370 Mira Loma Avenue
PO Box 3105
Anaheim, CA 92803
Date: Sat, 10 May 2003 14:09:10 -0700
03 00050 60 03051001
Mr. Rod Welch
rodwelch@pacbell.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496
..
Subject:
ETCon Environment
Footnotes and Biblography Replace Links
Dear Rod,
While the content of this post is of some interest, consider the use of
footnotes.
..
I don't like the footnotes that aren't links, but it does serve to get the
long URLs out of the way while still having them be readable to humans.
..
Suppose that both ideas were used:
The footnote reference were actually a link to the same URL as
contained in the footnote. Possibly with part of the entry being a link
to the footnote itself within the document.
..
The footnote was a citation containing the title, description,
author, etc., as well at the URL.
..
I am not to the point of committing to this yet, but it is reminiscent of
how SDS references work (except that there is no easy way to do internal
anchors.
..
Anyway, somewhere in the idea of separating the inline reference from the
citation is a workable set of notions that combines
More descriptive text in the citations, since there is room for them.
..
Citations have been used successfully for a long time. It seems that there
may be a good way to combine the idea with the immediacy of an inline
hyperlink.
Chris asked me offlist to if I could share some thoughts on what
elements made the ETCon just past so successful from a collaborative
element (in the external weblogging sphere, as well as within the
conference space (and all the things that cross over between the two in
our internetworked world...). What follows is an early take on that,
though there's probably much more to be said (and much more that
probably will be...). Feel free to take this apart, query for more
thoughts, etc.
.. I don't think there's a single element that made collaboration work so
richly at the ETCon just past. In essence, what made the takeup of
collaboration at ETCon was in part because the community was primed for
it by background, but also because the O'Reilly conference preparers
laid a very rich ground for it to take place in. But they didn't
provide any specific elements that could guarantee the rich
collaboration, they provided and encouraged many elements that each
contributed.
.. The baseline O'Reilly provided was connectity on the ground and in the
air
First of all, ETCon was well convered with 802.11b network access, in
all conference areas and in the gatheringplace as well. While
sponsored by a vendor (Apple, in this case), those without built-in or
toted 802.11 access could readily borrow cards for the period they were
at the conference. Along with the wireless coverage was ample power
strips for laptop use in the sessions, as well as outside the sessions
for between session recharges.
.. Secondly, social networking on the ground was encouraged - non-assigned
seating at the lunch tables, but with buffet style service encouraged
mingling. Name badges with the first name in large type helped as
well. An 'open pre-session, closed late after session' "rendezvous"
lounge further allowed participants to mingle and discuss the goings on
of the day face to face. I made connection with people I'd only read
through this, and met people I now read at the same time. I saw this
happen consistently. Hallway conversations were encouraged and open.
.. With these two baselines, the seeds for the rest of what made ETCon
work so well was planted - at least, those elements outside the
planning of interesting sessions; the connectivity in the air. I've
undoubtably missed some of the elements, but these were the ones I
encountered.
.. O'Reilly promoted the means for people to interact online, both in
advance and through daily updates presented at the conference.
Macromedia provided a "meet your colleague" online tool[1] (I signed
up, but did not make use of this), Intro2. My impression is that
people liked this, but were a bit baffled by it at the same time.
.. Ludicorp[2] provided a geographically oriented chatspace, ConFab,
allowing persons in the same room to discuss the goings on in that room
(or for participants to lurk in other sessions). This had some
technical issues (in an alpha launch, such are expected), but did
provide a nice soft space for discussion in a sideband to the other
conversations. More traffic seemed to happen on IRC, however.
.. Socialtext provided an online Wiki[3] for the conference, which had
some takeup as well. It provided a way for users to preserve references
in a shared repository for future reference. As well, the standard
Wiki conventions like introduction pages were promoted on the wiki, and
people listed their web addresses for future reference (or active
reference at the conference).
.. Being a largely technologic community, irc (#etcon on irc.freenode.net)
was widely used in the conference as a sidechannel to session
discussion. This worked, though during several sessions it served as
much as a method of criticizing as it did furthering the discussion.
These chats were logged [4] and URLs gathered [5]
.. In an effort to promote logging at the conference, O'Reilly set up
standalone trackbacks for each of the sessions, tracks, and conference
as a whole, and promoted them in advance[6]. Anecdotally, the part
that got the most use was the conference as a whole[7] - many
weblogging tools which support trackbacks still do it on a category
basis, or in a TrackbackDiscovery call to an existing post - so the
granular level wasn't quite the success one would have hoped. But it
was used at the high level, so probably warrants continuing.
.. One tool which I don't believe was anticipated in advance was the
shared authoring tool, Hydra[8]. This has gotten a lot of discussion
already, but it really did change the tenor of notetaking into a more
collaborative affair, with backfill and elucidation running behind
transcribers. This is presently Mac OS X only, though the protocol
could live on other settings with ease. A good writeup on Hydra use
was put together by Tom Coates [9]
..