What's better than BarCamp? Bra Camp. Seriously. Check it out.

I've been back for a day from the NetSquared Conference, and have had a little time to reflect on it. Several people have asked me what my take on it was. The short version is superb logistics and people, but so-so sessions, except for the excellent skill share. However, I am sure that the organizers will learn from this year and I will happily go again next year, if I get the chance (and can afford it if it isn't local). 

Basics first. Compumentor and their helpers did a superb job with the logistics. There was power at every table, and the wireless was better than at any of the many O'Reilly conferences that I have been to (it probably helped that the conference was held at the headquarters of one of the world's largest manufacturers of routers and wireless devices). The food wasn't gourmet, but it was reasonable, on site and on time. The conference hotel was nearby and was modestly priced (for Silicon Valley). Most people probably won't mention these things, but I have seen what happens when these things aren't true -- a lot of people spent half of this year's Emerging Technology Conference (ETECH 2006) in San Diego complaining for good reason about the wireless (bad), the space (very bad), and the prices (outrageous). The only logistical flaws for this conference were the pre-conference confusion and lack of transparency about registration, and the badges. Everybody's badge was labeled with their role, i.e. volunteer, sponsor, speaker, including one called "scholar", which looked to me like the "poor scholarship kid" label at a fancy private school. While some of this is common at business conferences, I wonder what purpose it served at a conference like this to visibly segregate people that way. Aside from those two issues, the Compumentor crew managed to pull everything together in time, and have my thanks and admiration for doing so. 

As always, one of the best parts of the conference was talking with the fellow attendees. I got to meet a number of people whom I had previously only known from their online writings, I got to catch up with a lot of people that I admire but only see once every six months or so at events like this, and I got to meet all kinds of interesting new people that I never would have had a chance to meet otherwise. I also learned about lots of compelling sites/organizations like MomsRising. So Compumentor definitely succeed in bringing an interesting and exiting group of people together for NetSquared. 

Notes on Gender and the social web

Fran Maier, CEO of eTrust

(came in late) Women need to do the deal.

Christine Herron, Omidyar Network

Technology conferences -- tend to be 10% women, If you aren't present at the conversation, aren't there in building the architecture. Example, gender isn't part of the whole online identity discussion. Social Networking

Catherine Geanuracos, MomsRising

Experience around online organizing and politics. Women are better at dialog, actually talking to each other, not at each other. MainstreamMoms. What would it mean to have women drive social networking portion of organizing tools, allow for lateral and bottoms up communication.

Marty Kearns - Green Media Toolshed

Price of calling anywhere in the world has gone down

Bowling Alone was wrong -- we have more social ties than we used to to have, it is coming out of sleep and TV. We know about creating individual and organization capacity for facilitating change. We don't know much about building networking capacity.

Networks matter. And now we can map them and see them, and we can use network theory.

The structure of Romantic and Sexual Relations at "Jefferson High School" (see http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/chains.htm)

Talks about The rise of the "Do Not Call Network", and how fast people signed up Pug lovers network biggest on Meetup. 23,280 memeber in 133 groups. The FUH2 site http://www.fuh2.com/, Mapping craters, Chevy Tahoe commercials

Patrick Ball starts session by asking why do we need PowerPoint instead of Open Source at this conference? No good answer.

Andrew Aitken

from alliance org, open source consulting to Fortune 500

Talks about the value of a commercial ecosystem

He fell in love with a movement, based on Eric Raymond's "the Cathedral and the Bazaar" http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/

Healthy commercial Open Source spurs innovation

More than 20 proprietary vendors have open sourced their code in the last month, SugarCRM andFunabol

Dan Gillmor

-- recovering journalist from the mass media
-- best reporting being done on Guanatanamo is being done by the ACLU -- mainstream media used to do
-- mass media is trying to co-opt, but can't suppress, because the barrier to entry is zero.

Democratized media that we can all participate in

• Production
• Distribution
• Access

We now have a Read and Write web

Everybody can be a media producer
Pentagon is now doing podcasts

Convergence of media

Journalism has been a lecture, is turning into a conversation.

Hi. My name is Tim Bishop. I've worked in emerging technology since early PC days, and I have long been interested in harnessing computer and communications technology's power to reduce barriers to dissemination of information and to facilitate advocacy and organizing.

I got re-involved in politics and organizing after the debacle of the 2000 election, and I started writing my first blog in 2001. In 2003 I started a non-profit blog/web site, SARS Watch Org, and recruited citizen journalists in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Singapore and Canada to document the spread of SARS, and its effects on ordinary citizens. In 2004, I worked on Advokit, an open-source grassroots web-based voter contact management system, and supported a variety of groups using it to get out the vote in the 2004 elections.

After the elections I started working at a leading provider of online constituent relationship management services to non-profits and advocacy organizations. By day, I try to find ways to partner with other service and software providers to deliver better services to our non-profit and advocacy clients, and at night and weekends I contribute to open source software projects, prepare to teach a class on blogging, and try to find time to blog. More about me at TimBishop.com