Penguin Day: Initial Reflection

<p>I got hom a little while ago from [lk:newyork.penguinday.org|Penguin Day] (I actually walked home from the post conference watering hole on 33rd and 3rd ([l:http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=E+33rd+St+%26+3rd+Ave,+New+York,+NY+10016&daddr=Grand+Street+and+FDR+DR,+NY,+NY&hl=en|about 2.5miles and 4 minutes according to google maps] now, since i wasn;t walking along the FDR, it was more than 2.5 miles and even if i were driving the drive, i know that that would take more than 4 minutes google… I am digressing here but it comes back to a convo at he bar where John relayed Mark' grlfriend's displeasure for google maps because it doesn;t have subways and is not designed for walking, only driving)</p> <p>OK, back on track here (sort of) on the walk home, ([l:http://www.civicactions.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Mark_Libkuman|Mark Libkuma] and [l:http://eric.openflows.org|Eric Goldagen] and I walked to St . Mark's and A together talking tech and never once discussing where we were headed) we had an interesting convesation that started on [lk:civicspacelabs.org|CivicSpace] and ranged all over the place. We talked about public WiFi, Stratellites, and [lk:civicmaps.org|CivicMapping] potholes and treet and sidewalk defects, we even suggested it could be done from a GPS enabled phone! (to much geeking) we also talked about Mark's work with SMS technology and the work of one of their associates on [lk:txtmob.com|txtMOB].</p> <p>It was a nice walk and a very cool conversation. I am sorry to say that I don;t thin we will see GPS enabled cell phone reporting potholes any time soon, but I think that we will likely see some more regular meetings of the FOSS tech crowd here in NYC to talk about specific projects and work.</p> <p>One of these projects that we discussed at length today was calendaring (i will blog about it separately) but to wet our appetite: there is a lot of cool work being done on web calendaring aps. Generally these are aps for group event calendars not personal calendars, and they have various intersting features. Read about it in the next blog post.</p> <p>So back to Penguin Day. As always, the best part about these conferences is gettin in a room with so many interesting people doing so many interestig things. The technology profession can be very isolating, so occasions to hang out with other like minded folk and talk about the interesting things we are doing are cherished. The major prblem with this though is that the "sessions" largely interfere with the ability to network broadly and get deep into what other folks are doing. This is my third tech conference in 6 weeks and I met so many interesting people at them and had so many great conversations between sessions or after the event, it is like speed networking between the sessions and the speed geeking.</p> <p> (an aside here, sometimes somethign happens with my compuer where it stops recognizing every key stroke. It some times corresponds to me being really tired, but I swear, i am hitting the right keys in the right order, the computer just isn't fast enough for me, so i apologize fo any typos, i am trying to catch them)</p> <p>I am coming up with a new paradigm for tech conferences (but that will be in another blog post)</p> <p>I particularly liked something that [l:http://www.aspirationtech.org/peopl|Gunner (Allen Gunn)] did: the spectrogram Ice Breaker. Put a piece of tape ont he floor to create a line from one end to the other than ask some "provocative" questions, and tell people to stand on the line from agree to disagree (at either end) and then explain why they were standing where they were. It was pretty cool.</p> <p>Ok so I think i am tapped out for this one. Please read the rest.</p>