Made out of people

Day I: Huge Charts, Overfull Rooms

I was invited (by proxy) to FOOCamp this year. This makes me an (indirect) Friend Of (Tim) O'Reilly, publisher of books that people put on their wishlist based purely on the series¹. He gets together a bunch of people together in a room, and has them talk about stuff that interests them.

Word has gotten around, and apparently crowd control wasn't where it might otherwise have been. And so the place is pretty filled to (and, really, past) the brim.

In theory, we decide what we do with a large collaborative message board. We all stand up, and announce ourtopics, and a schedule evolves: "Sure, I'll show up at that." "Hey, can you merge these sessions?" "Ok, if not enough people want to talk about THIS, let's try THAT."

There's a technical name for this sort of meeting -- my "organzational development':http://resourcesforchange.com mother -- has mentioned it a few times, but I'm blanking at the moment.

Unfortunately, it needs fairly careful control--and the meetingm with so many people, didn't get fairly careful control. In theory, then, the board was negotiated and evolved. In practice, it was staked out, claimed, and then -- defaced? edited, anyway. But no group consensus ever attempted to figure out what will work.

I'm curious how the sessions will go--will there be a convergence of topics? Will we run about between empty sessions, trying to decide where to show up?

(more below the fold...)

¹ Um, not Harry Potter. Or Harlequin. They're cute little techie books with technicolor spines and animals on the front.

Anyway, there's some cool people out here--lots of fifteen-minutes-of-famous hackers, a number of Very Clever People, and some folks who ordinarily get paid a great deal to Think Aloud. I'll try to drop names only when the names, you know, say something relevant.

(I'm here largely as the Voice of Marc Smith, who is caught up with other travel right now.)

Last night, the chief engineer of GMail (and the Google Toolbar, and involved in Froogle) kicked us off with an impromptu midnight session and a long thinky discussion of what this GMail thing is about and how it's done. We also got a chance to talk about some of the people-aware features that I'd argued for before. About half of them are on the list, while the other half are things that he doesn't particularly plan to get to. But I'll try to blog about that separately in a little bit.

(While I'm not blogging this with quite the same enthusiasm as Scoble will -- well, once he catches up on blogging -- I'm going to try to take some notes in this vaguely public forum.)