splitbrain.org

electronic brain surgery since 2001

RoCoCo Camp Day 3

The camp is over now and I'm back at my hotel, but let's start where I stopped yesterday…


After finishing my blog entry I got some of the really delicious1) pizza and a beer. There was a DJ doing the music (some techno Kaddi would've really loved). I talked with a few people and one of them got me another beer for being a Wiki developer. That was really cool :-). Unfortunately I forgot many names of the people I talked to yesterday. Thats partly because I'm pretty bad at remembering names and secondly because we soon decided to change the place. We went to a bar a few blocks away where they served cocktails in big jars. I had two of them filled with Long Island Icetea2) when I got back to the hotel at about 1 o'clock in the morning.

There were many interesting things we talked about, even though the music was very loud there. Most interesting for sure, was a discussion with a French-Canadian about the separation movement of Quebec. It was kind of a weird talk as neither me nor Sunir could understand the reasons why the Quebecians should want to separate from Canada. Marc Laporte later said that this is somewhat the younger generation fighting wars of the older generation. Even though the cause for those wars have long been solved (like being forced to speak English).

When I arrived at the camp today, had my coffee and finished checking my emails, Eugene Kim asked me to do an interview about Wiki interoperability with him for the research he does. So he build up his recording equipment and we had a nice talk about my experience as a wiki user and as a developer.

Today was reserved for an Open Space technique called “convergence” where all people should group to summarize the previous open space sessions to find out what needs to be done and to define next action items. There were eight different groups which went to different places to have lunch together and do the talking.

I ended up in a group speaking about the planning of the next Recent Changes Camp which will probably will be held in San Francisco or the Bay Area. I hadn't really much to add to that discussion, but it was interesting to get some insight on planning such an event. I also ate a local specialty called “Poutine” which is basically french fries drowned in gravy and cheese. It tasted really good. Much better than it looked ;-).

When we came back from lunch I heard about another group with Sunir Shah and Tim Starling who talked about creating a wiki search engine. Sunir already registered wixee.com. I talked with him about it and it sound very interesting. It will be probably be powered by Nutch and will add some wiki specific data to search results. I offered my help and we will probably talk about it on the planned IRC chat in two weeks.

Well thats it for RoCoCo camp. I will probably do a review post in a few days to add things I forgot to say in my previous posts.

I want to say much thanks to the organizers of the event, especially to Evan for inviting me personally and to all the cool people I've met. Thanks for sharing your ideas, visions and knowledge with me. I had a great time at RoCoCo and hope I to be able to attend the WikiSym as well.

Unfortunately the weather got worse today and its currently raining. I hope it will be dry tomorrow, because I'd like to use the few hours before my flight for some geocaching and exploring the city.

Tags:
rococo, wiki, event
Similar posts:
1)
weird to write that word without dots
2)
thats what it is called in Germany – here it was something with beach and iced tea