GEOpdx

22 · 10

Ed Parsons on the Where 2.0 Online Conference

Here’s an interesting idea, the first Where 2.0 Online Conference organised by O’Reilly – a online mini where 2.0 with a focus on LBS and AR developments on the iPhone.

This could be the future of conferences, after all for many the trek to the West Coast is both time consuming and expensive and something you can maybe justify once a year, but a year is a long time in the industry at the moment so there is also the potential for more frequent events.

If you can’t bring the people to a conference, bring the conference to the people…

For us in Europe the time difference could be a problem, but there again we can always sit back with a nice glass of wine or hot chocolate depending upon preference and watch in our pyjamas !

Written and submitted from the Googleplex, California (37.421N, 122.087W)

via edparsons.com

Update: I fail at reading. Changed the title to accuratly reflect That Ed was commenting on a conference that was already planned. Sorry for any confusion and Sorry to Ed Parsons for mucking his words up.

Googles Ed Parsons raises some great points about the utility of streaming conferences. Many were able to virtually attend WhereCamp5280 2009 through a twitter hashtag and Dave Bouwman's GeoGeekTv video stream. The recent O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference was officially streamed and had a roaring twitter following th at turned it into a premier place to make announcements.

It would be interesting to explore the idea for many conferences. Ed outlines how LBS and AR on the iPhone could be split in to a mini offering. Following Ed's logic, one could organize conference video and possibly hashtags into different segments or tracks. That would allow virtual attendees to pick and choose what they follow live. If you still want to catch a presentation from another track you could watch it later on YouTube.

If presenters are given a way to monitor social streams like twitter they could respond to remote viewers directly or after the presentation. The social stream is probably just as important as live video for staging an online event in tandem with an offline one.

Ed's Ideas and those posed here are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other benefits and probably some drawbacks to holding online conferences. Please feel free to add your ideas in the comments.

14 · 10

How I Became a Connector

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One day I was sitting in my living room and my wife said "you should check out Facebook"

...and I did. And I found it to be deeply interesting. I immediately tried to find people in my local professional community (mostly government and GIS folks). I couldn't really get connected to those people through facebook and I was a bit dissatisfied.

So my wife came in and said, "Now you should check out Twitter."

...and I did that too. Except I said, "what the hell is this good for!" and went back to facebook for 2 months.

I was wasting time in the office one day and decided to check out a twitter web site called monitter.com. I searched for GIS and discovered a conference that was being live tweeted. I got involved in the confernce from my desk and figured out that twitter had a value.

In fact, twitter is "Fucking Awsome!" (swearing for emphasis and authenticity.)

So I dove into twitter and discovered real Social Media for the first time. It was fun for about a week until I realized that I had more to say. Some of my twitter friends (more like people I followed at this point) had blogs.

I said, "I know, I'll start a blog."

So the big question was "what the hell is this blog going to be about?"

After a very short period of thinking about it (5 mins) I decided I would blog about how my professional community could leverage social media to collaborate and connect. This sounds altruistic but wasn't. I really couldn't think of anything else. I'm more of a linear thinker than a creative type.

So here I am, Months later. Strangely the idea grew on me and I am, in fact, pretty stoked about the effort. Reaching out to people through my blog, twitter, and many other sites has helped me to find some great relationships. Somewhere along the road I also realized that engaging my family, coworkers, and local community was more important than I originally thought as well. I do more of that now too.

So my final truth is "always listen to your wife."

Community Conferences Facebook GIS Social Media

4 · 10

WhereCampPDX: Hacking Foursquare to Create Super-Mayors

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Saturday nights WhereCampPDX 2009 hackathon focused on a couple of projects this year. Michael Wiesman, Kate Chapman, James Fee, and Reid Beels worked with the foursquare api to create "super-mayors" for those that had the most checkins for a particular neighborhood. Other projects included updates to the famous calagator and reving up packmanhattan for sundays geolocation games. In the clip below Kate, James, Micheal, and Reid have fun with their project.

API Conferences Foursquare Programming WhereCampPDX

4 · 10

Photo Blog: A Day at WhereCampPDX

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WhereCampPDX 2009 was held at Metro Regional Center this year (my hood) from October 2nd-4th. Besides great food and sharp attitudes we had zombie survival strategies and strange maps. This wherecamp was done in grand Portland style. The event was held the weekend after the City of Portland passed a resolution opening city data up to the public.

WhereCampPDX Banner With Sponsors