Session Suggestions
From FooCamp09
What sessions do you want to offer, collaborate on, go to? Please put new entries at the top of the page. If you see something that interests you, leave a comment so that the organizer knows someone else cares, or contact the organizer directly.
Alex Chrisswould like to talk about Good vs. Evil in aggregate data - are we heading to the promised land or a bad bad place?
Victoria Stodden's interested in doing a session on transparency in scientific research: especially tools for sharing code and data (open licensing, provenance, tagging etc), to go beyond the publication of computational results. How do we know when computational science is right?
I want to learn how to weld metal, and sharpen a knife, and take apart an old cell phone use its screen and buttons for something new. "Boy's Life" come true! (Michael Edson)
Tom White wants to have a discussion about what can we do with all this data we are amassing, and how we can improve curation, storage, dissemination, and analysis of it.
Christopher Brown would like to facilitate a session on the history of Amazon's EC2 and scalable utility computing and the future of both. Hopefully Werner, Rich Wolski, Jesse Robbins and others will help out.
Christopher Brown would like to facilitate a session on Buddhist thought (the Bodhisattva path), Systems Theory, and sustainable growth in technology.
Michael Edson would like to facilitate a session about creating web platforms. We have a new Web Strategy at the Smithsonian Institution - - one that calls for the creation of a Smithsonian Commons - - and we need help!
Ira Flatow would like to talk about trusted sources of science and technology news in a world of junk news. The difficulties in finding sponsors, underwriters, funders who care about quality and are passionate about the problem. Creating partnerships with scientists and techies who need to be able to communicate with the public about what they do and why it's important.
Lisa Katayama and Joi Ito want to talk about Japanese obsessions. See Session about obsessions about Japanese obsessions on Crowdvine
Joi Ito's interested in participating and learning more about USG and open gov stuff from Beth Noveck, Andrew McLauglin, Susan Crawford and others.
Joi Ito's interested in doing a session about Creative Commons and free content licensing issues including legal issues, technical issues, funding issues, political issues, and other aspects. (Michael Edson wants to collaborate on this session. We're living these issues as we try to create a Smithsonian Commons) (Kyle Wiens is interested in this session)
Joi Ito's interested in participating in a session on human rights and technology and would love to see Ethan Zuckerman and others join too. ;-)
Joi Ito is interested in participating in a session about education and open educational resources/courseware, etc. Hopefully led by Connie Yowell from MacArthur Foundation.
Andrew McLaughlin wants to talk about the coming H1N1 onslaught, and how the various federal/state/local actors can (brace yourself: this is going to sound extremely uninteresting, but in fact would be a huge leap forward) use social media to (1) distribute authoritative information, both generally and to particular audiences, e.g., outbreak alerts, personal health tips, vaccination reminders, (2) counteract panic-fueling rumors and myths, especially among unwired communities, (3) gather useful real-time situational information and analytics, pulling signal from a noisy datascape, and (4) support local self-organization and -response. We're in the unusual position of knowing that a major public health challenge is headed our way in a few weeks; I'd love to surface more and better ideas for governmental uses of tech to address it.
Kevin Marks wants to thrash out where Activity Streams, PubSubHubbub, Portable Contacts, Podcasts, location info and story telling meet.
Brian Jepson wants to help you figure out how mobile phones will interact with the physical world in 2012.
Rick Prelinger wants to discuss how hyperlocal news can make the "smart community" smarter; how much authority hyperlocal news needs to give it an interested and engaged audience, and, along the way, how to fix all-news radio, which is pushing 50 and desperately in need of a kick in the pants.
Adrian Freed invites everyone to play his BigGuitar and Tablo instruments and explore the opportunities of the New Lutherie that is leading to the return of gesture, community and the interface to musical culture. Learn how your play personality (see Stuart Brown's book) defines how music fits in your life. Let's build instruments from e-textiles at the evening crafting session.
Adrian Freed wants to discuss frugalitarianism. How much you spend is a good proxy for your carbon footprint. Let's talk about the Reduce part of the three R's. If frugality catches on will the economy shrink and will we all be poorer? Share your tips: freecycling, cellphone plans for $9/month; pay 15% less at most retailers; drink filtered tap water instead of Fiji spring water; make a $200 guitar sound like a $5000 Gibson. How can we avoid uncompetitive convenience pricing from large chains and find cheap cost-plus pricing from the web?
Colin McCormick wants to talk about how people make energy-efficiency decisions (using public transit/weatherizing homes/buying low-embedded-energy products) and what changes to their access to information could help. Colin also wants to talk about Ed Felten's argument that government websites should minimize interfaces, and instead emphasize serving data for interpretation/mashup by third parties.
Cat Allman would like to learn about vertical wind turbines for home use. Anyone know anything about this or other home-scale wind power equipment? Relatedly, Bert Bates would like to learn more about fresnel mirrors and / or stirling engines for home / community use.
Peter Corbett would like to lead a session on citizen driven innovation and the promise of Open Cities.
Mok Oh would like to talk about "Creating a Virtual/Mirror World with Photography." From the Aspen Project, Microsoft Streetside, A9 Block View, Google Street View, to EveryScape, taking pictures of to represent our world online has been picking up speed. Why? Why now? How? Who? Many questions still to be answered. I'd like to start a brain-storming session on this, and present a framework on which we can constructively debate.
James Turner would also like to discuss the future of journalism with like-minded folks. What does news reporting look like in a world where all news is crowd-sourced? Who is going to spend their days combing through records at City Hall? Can we find a model that lets journalists earn a living without ending up with all the content gated?
Jane McGonigal wants to hash out what really makes something "gameful" -- I think it has to do with creating unnecessary obstacles, and not with things like "points", "competition" or "win conditions", for example -- so we can figure out better methodologies for "game-ifying" serious things. If I see one more real-world game application that is based on getting points for doing stuff, I am going to scream. Please come scream with me if you are interested in dissecting some recent real-world game applications and what seems to work and what doesn't. Bert Bates is interested
Matt Zimmerman is particularly interested in the desktop vs. the web, conversations on client-side social networking, rapid community feedback cycles, truly collaborative applications
AnnMarie Thomas would like to talk with others about PK-12 education, particularly about teacher training in engineering and mathematics. Bert Bates is interested
making a better conference - Steve Souders wants to talk about problems and solutions with today's tech conferences. (And books, too, for that matter.) Cat Allman would like to contribute to this session - "Steve - Let's talk!"
How to teach and learn. For my next book I've been reading tons of learning / teaching theory and tho some of it is junk, the good stuff has implications for school, work, conferences, everything. The above two session ideas both fit the theme, as conferences and PK-12 have some of the same legacy/economic problems. @berkun Bert Bates is interested
Ryan Falor is interested in collaborating on a talk about the future of smart grid and home area network technology and where things are headed with consumer rights versus utility control. Gavin Starks would like to add/join in with ideas about "energy identity" and the huge networked datasets that are coming to a carbon policy near you.
Star Simpson wants to talk about data rights, electronics literacy, and engineering activism
Chris Anderson wants to talk about the p2p web and how CouchDB replication enables users to take control of their applications and data.
Jesse Vincent wants to talk about maker/hacker EULA violations, but isn't really sure there's enough meat for a session there. Q from Lenore Edman: Makers violating EULAs or EULAs violating makers?
Jeff Carr is toying with ideas on how to establish trust ratings for tweets when Twitter is being utilized during an international conflict or crisis.
Greg Stein would like to talk about licensing (open/free?, dichotomy needed?, long-term, biz, etc), and about version control (centralized vs distributed; feature needs; etc) Q from Lenore Edman: Do you envision this topic being inclusive of hardware?
Jonathan Feinberg (of Wordle) is considering giving his "Unicode for Smarties" talk. Any interest?
James Turner would be happy to do the Quick and Dirty Guide to Producing Your Own Podcast.
Clay Johnson could be of service by providing an overview on the challenges new technology is having taking hold of Government. And also about cause organizing for developers.
Ge Wang would like present work on computer music: Smule, Stanford Laptop Orchestra, Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra, and social music. Gavin Starks will bring some of his cosmology-based music if anyone fancys a listen.
Something else James Turner wants to discuss: Is there really a viable business for free (as opposed to open source) software? If you give it away and make it up on support, isn't that a quick trip to the bottom as anyone in a low-labor-cost country could undercut you? Doesn't it lead by default to dual license models?
BJ Fogg --> What surprised my Stanford lab about peace: #1 Peace is uncool (who knew?) #2 Defining "peace" creates conflict, not clarity (but we found an unexpected solution). Perhaps I can share our new "Peace Dot" -- a movement for edu + orgs + industry.
Not content to leave good enough alone, James Turner is also interested in and can talk about his experiences with personal genomics.
Steve Ressler would like to discuss building niche knowledge networks through social aggregation, better filters, and online community building.
Chris DiBona would like to rerun his 2008 session "Let's edit each others wikipedia pages" which was really cool last year. We paired off and scribbled, scribbled, scribbled. And updated photos. Which I'd like. Joi Ito loves this idea.
Linus Upson would like to talk about Chrome and Chrome OS.
Tom Preston-Werner is insanely passionate about Git and wants to talk about how distributed version control is revolutionizing the way teams work together with their code. He'd also like to talk about using Erlang in unusual ways, and about discovering interesting solutions to hard scaling problems.
Zach Klein would like to discuss the future of physical communities, specifically how our burgeoning information society allows us to live in closer proximity to others like us.
Toby Boudreaux is curious about building economies around good will and activity that are more than classic loyalty programs. What can small blips like Foursquare teach us about building new currencies? I have no idea. I'm a freaking coder. But collectively, #foocamp can sort it out or convince me I'm nuts. This might align well with the discussion described above by Jane McGonigal. Combining what it means to be "gameful" with explorations of (new, novel) rewards systems might be fun.
Kyle Wiens just got back from a tour of e-waste dumps in Africa, and would like to discuss ways of eliminating our throwaway culture. How do we keep hardware working longer? What is the best way to encourage people to repair their iPod instead of buying a newer, shinier model?
