MinneBar and the Organization of Conventions

I would love to attend MinneBar but sadly I've had a conflict both this year and last year. But one of the things that interests me is that at least for me, the nature of how we try to do programming at the science fiction convention CONvergence is not that far off of the BarCamp philosophy.

Obviously, unlike a BarCamp there is a membership fee for CONvergence -- and if you haven't registered, now is the time to do so -- but that's because we aren't sponsored by organizations and companies in the same way either. We're renting the space, buying the food, flying in and putting up the guests of honor. We're also fund-raising for our non profit -- sending authors and scientists to schools, supporting our community in both the narrow and larger sense.

An event like a BarCamp is mainly scheduled collaboratively online by the participants -- it's user-driven and built by the people attending it. That's different from some other conferences where the event may be packaged by some corporate sponsor and you have people in the audience and the people on stage.

And as I look at this, I see that we have a similar sort of programming philosophy at CONvergence in a lot of ways, and did before the BarCamp phenomena really started -- we certainly encourage our membership to present and participate in programming. It's not identical -- we have a little bit more centralization and formal scheduling -- but I certainly find this sort of method a good way to do it for the more informal type of events like this.

Even as we bring in outside professionals and expect our programming to be organized ahead of the event -- so we can make it accessible and organized -- we certainly try to have it so our program in proposed and filled out by people that volunteer for events.

This is certainly a bit different from how some other sf events might do it -- while we do dig up panelists, and invite people to sit particular events -- the expectation is that most of the event is participant-driven.

One of the complaints I hear from time to time is that "CONvergence doesn't have moderators" -- and certainly I don't think the programming department should always be dictating who the moderators actually are -- but I would certainly encourage any panel to have a moderator. But that's really something that can be decided on a panel-by-panel level, and shouldn't (and with several hundred panels, realistically can't) be addressed by a programming head in many cases. That's the sort of thing that can --and to some extent, really should -- really be driven by the participants.

I suppose there is always some degree of overlap between technology and SF Conventions -- but I think sometimes it's not even as overt as Penguincon does it...

I'm a Marvel...and I'm a DC

I thought Iron Man was fantastic -- and I'm looking forward to and have very high expectations for The Dark Knight -- so I love this little YouTube clip:

CONvergence Programming - Grid Lock!

I may not be the programming head -- but the programming head will be reporting to me starting next year as part of the events division, and as I'd previously been a head, it's important for me to promote the schedule.

The schedule has started to solidify now, and to quote the current programming head:

And please, please, please - if you are attending the convention and see some panels you would like to be on - follow the email instructions at the top of the webpage and let me know. Usually we have a limit of six people per panel, so if you see a panel that already has six people on it, then it's full - pick some that have 0-4 people instead, you can really help the programming dept. out!

Likewise, some panels are just for guests of honor or are gameshow style panels that have certain panelists who are running the event (again, should be pretty clear which these are from the panel description).

We recommend a limit of eight panels per person to avoid burnout (but if you can handle more and I have personal knowledge of that - then we can make exceptions).

So, if you are attending the con, please sign up for some (more) panels and pass the message along!

It's going to be an exciting year -- and I'm really excited to see the schedule come together.

CONvergence: Best of the Twin Cities

I'm astonished that CONvergence was chosen by City Pages as Best of the Twin Cities. Not because we were picked -- but that the category was even created this year.

It is a great compliment to the hundreds of people that have been involved in putting the event on, especially since the publicity was not searched for.

True, they had a typo and changed Marv Wolfman's gender (to Mary) -- but otherwise it was a very nice description and something I'm happy to point to.

Hopefully we'll see this sort of stuff really come out in the fall

When it's the general election.....because I think this election can really have a lot of this sort of content really cut through the traditional media sources and political commercials...and yes, make it fun as well as serious.

The Universal Calendar

One of the things that is a bit of a hassle is that you really would like one calendar to cover a number of your bases. You want to make sure that your calendar has your availability for work, and you can access it at home, or on your blackberry, or wherever.

And thankfully, I've finally got what I think might be a solution. With Google's mobile solution, you can sync your calendar with your BlackBerry. This is a good place to start.

One of the more complicated sides, then, is getting it synchronized with your iCal if you are a Mac user. I'm not synchronizing my BlackBerry with my Mac in a plugged in fashion -- but by using a tool like BusySync, I can sync it up with the Google calendar -- which will then sync with the BlackBerry.

Bingo, calendar unification has been achieved.

I'm still trying out BusySync -- it's not free, but if it works, I'll definitely go ahead and get it.

Harsh ABC Debate Coverage...

I think the reviews of ABC's debate on Wednesday have gotten pretty harsh...

Funny!

Well, at least now we know that a Cat with a Theremin is funny...I would imagine almost any other animal would be as well...

Keeping in Sync

In general, the iTunes/iPod ecosystem works pretty well. By now I've had my music collection ripped and downloaded across a couple of different operating systems and computers over the last decade or so. And I'm able to keep the basics of the file formats in synch between my laptop and desktop Mac pretty well by using the rsync UNIX command.

But there are some things that make me very nervous. By now I've kept pretty good handle on my ratings and last play dates -- and I use both of those fairly actively when I set up the playlists to synchronize with an iPod, so I keep a mix of songs on my iPod based on how frequently songs are played and when they were last played.

And that's something that is a bit more of a challenge to keep synchronized across iTunes libraries used by different users across multiple machines. You'd like to be able to keep track of what the last playtime, date, and number of plays no matter what computer you've used. And if you have a library of songs, you really would like to minimize the amount of work you need to do to add songs to the various libraries.

I'm not sure I have a perfect system. rsync certainly helps things a great deal keeping the files in sync -- but it's a little less straight forward to keep the metadata synchronized across libraries.