The Where 2.0 conference was last week in Burlingame, CA in sunny Northern California where they were apparently having a heat wave. The heat, while not quit “right” for the area, was a highly enjoyable experience having come from (and returned to) the chilly, rainy East Coast.
The conference this year was a more enjoyable experience mostly because I went with the goal of just trying to talk to and learn from the people that I met rather than freak out about not being a crack programmer/hacker.
While hackers and geowankers are the people who pushed mapping for the masses (I’m not overly fond of the word neogeography) into the public eye over the past few years they are not the only ones who care about location and information. However, they are the ones who can make things work. Since I get frustrated with my limitations wrt programming the decision to just talk to people about why they were at the conference and to exchange thoughts with people was a good move.
I spent a lot of time talking to a very diverse guy named Thomas (website) about web stuff (he’s done a lot of web design), geo stuff, travel, family, and writing. It was good to have someone to bounce thoughts about the conference off of as compared to last year where I didn’t feel comfortable talking to many people. There was a wider range of participants this year: academics looking to expand their curricula, hackers, journalists, employees of the big guys, and people like me who are wondering where they can fit in now. It was interesting however to hear non hacker/programmers referred to as “tourists” on the back channel. Maybe that concept stems from how this conference developed and who was around when it first started four years ago. I wasn’t - I just found it last year.
And the back channel (IRC), now that was in interesting find. I was talking to a guy at lunch on the first day who said that he used IRC when he was programming. I had to ask what IRC was. Turns out I apparently had just forgotten about it because it wasn’t something that I had to use anymore after grad school. It’s sort of a Chat or IM service for groups and a lot of programmers still use it when they are fiddling with stuff in the middle of the night - because it’s not the middle of the night everywhere in the world and someone will be awake to help them out. Anyway, on the second day I decided to see if there was a channel for the conference and low and behold there was. And with a few minutes of experimentation and a quick trial download of mIRC I was on my way (I’ve since discovered Mibbit which will work for me at work). Wow, can those guys/gals? be catty! Brady stepped in at one point to rein them in but over all the commentary was pretty cool . Something that they (the conference peeps) might consider next year is streaming the IRC channel on stage - I got this idea from the woman I sat next to on the return flight to NYC. She said that is what they do at USC where she teaches and it allows for commenting/questioning but is almost self-policed in terms of cattiness. People tend to watch what they say when the anonymity is partially removed. While I liked the conversation alongside the presentations (it provided some valid commentary) - in this particular case it felt a little elitist.
After the conference I headed to sunny Oakland (which is often sunny anyway but was HOT this time) to spend some quality time with friends and not think so much about geography except to enjoy my current location.
