Three Thoughts on Woolfcamp

Cyn and I spent Saturday at Woolfcamp, a barcamp-style event, instigated by Grace Davis and Liz Henry.

The Value of Jam/Camp Events

Badger mentioned some A-list geek telling her that the original jam/camp organizing thing was now obviously “diluted past recognition”. Now it’s worthless. To which I say 愚か! Consider:

You: Boss, can you send me to O’Reilly’s Technical Extravaganza, Scott Baio will deliver the keynote on JSON!
Boss: That’ll cost our entire training budget and I need to send the new hire to HTTP over clay tablet training!

versus

You: Boss, can I take off Friday afternoon for QuailCamp?
Boss: Yes, let’s get the team down there, take some tshirts with you, and I’ll ask our director if we can help cover pizza.

Everybody Plays

I had a nice chat with Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells over wine in Grace’s kitchen (Gods, conversations in the kitchen, can you do that at TED?)

Chris decided to route around the high price and limited invitation list of Web 2.0 and assembled the first of the BrainJams.

Chris’ process at these events is to quickly sort people and questions:

  • Five minute cross-functional mashups: marketers and programmers, designers and managers, users and QA, etc.
  • Everyone writes down three words to describe themselves.
  • Everyone writes down what they want to learn.

The event facilitators use that to build out the rest of the day.

Communications Breakdown

The one problem I had at WoolfCamp, and it was my problem. How to evangelize tools and techniques that require a technical stretch to non-technical people. Life on the command line; writing XSLT to smash, filter, and repurpose; writing valid and well-formed markup are second nature to me, but this is a layer of overhead that a new blogger doesn’t want or need to worry about, unless they become a pedantic curmudgeon like me.

Niall Kennedy’s thinking about this problem too.

I want to thank Grace for inviting us all into her living room, and everyone for the great energy they put into the event.

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This entry was written by Bill Humphries and posted on February 20, 2006 at 12:30 am and filed under writing. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the Atom feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.
  • http://liz-henry.blogspot.com Liz Henry

    We totally should have done the quick index-card mashup for Woolfcamp! Next time we’ll come up with some quick useful exercises like that. And I will tap Chris for ideas on that level – that one sounds so perfect.

    About the evangelizing: quickstart things are necessary, cookbook style. With some kind of intro that’s short, that says, you have to be comfortable not understanding half of this; you have to experiment before understanding what will happen or what all the words mean, and that’s okay to do.

    so, like “10 nifty command line recipes to play with” and it has to fit on one or two pages.

    I love the Perl Cookbooks.

    Or like, 5 unix command line things to try. and totally make wget one of them. i learned how to mess with unix from a really bad book that just listed all the commands with very short-version man page entries. And so i’d just type the command and read the man page, and poke around. (thank you, temp job.) Think how much easier it would have been with a cookbook! Learning and gaining confidence by trying a simple thing that works, and then varying its parameters.

  • heather w

    how important do you think it is that there was (or at least seems to have been, from my lurker’s perspective) a good chunk of pre-existing network in place among the folks who came together at WoolfCamp? I’d like to think something like it could happen in Portland, but not knowing any (feminist) bloggers here makes the prospect of creating it seem rather daunting. (I don’t doubt they exist here; I just don’t know them.)

  • Bill Humphries

    Having some network in place, or at least a few sets of overlapping nodes helped, but this was the first time many of us met (IRL or online.)

  • Kristie Wells

    I actually liked the fact that I walked in through the front door knowing only two people – the one I came with (Chris) and the amazing Grace D. I had no idea what to expect, but I walked out with some lovely new friends who I hope to spend a lot more time with – connecting, sharing, debating, supporting. This WoolfCamp crowd was diverse with regards to backgrounds and levels of techie sense – though mostly women with a heavy feminist feel. However, I do not think that is required to make a successful event. Just get people together who are passionate about getting together, learning *stuff*, and taking the steps needed to make the world a better place. Sounds simple. And it is.

  • http://www.lucysspleen.blogs.com Em

    Heather- I walked in the door to WoolfCamp knowing only one person only a little, having met her briefly a week earlier after emailing my request to attend the event. The advantage of meeting for a blog camp is that you can learn about the other participants in advance by reading their BLOGS! The atmosphere at WoolfCamp was warm and welcoming, but also space-giving and low-pressure. The level of diversity and the fact that many or most of the attendees had never met before contributed to the breath of the discussion- we were able to actually talk about the subjects of workshops we laid out, in a philosophical way and without getting overly hung up on personal anecdotes or, “remember the time I wrote about ___?” clique-ishness between mini societies of mutual devotion. I would STRONGLY RECOMMEND attending (or hosting!) this kind of meeting in your area; if you don’t gather a large enough group for a “camp,” folks can always meet on a smaller scale for a couple hours of discussion over coffee or dinner. I think you’ll find it very stimulating- last weekend was the best brain-workout I’ve gotten since college!

    p.s. Hi Bill! You were wonderful!

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