beCamp 2008

As tired as I was by the time I got home Saturday night, I am very happy that I made it to beCamp this year. Close to 100 people attended over the 2 days, about half of whom hadn't attended last year. It was great to see so many new faces!

There was a spirited discussion of "Web 3.0" where there was a lot of discussion about advertising. Never having been in the commercial sector, this is something that pretty much never occurs to me. Some folks looked at me as if I were crazy when I suggested that Web 3.0 was about personalization and localization services for users, not about advertising. There was a brief exchange about privacy issues, especially around the topic of providing personal information in exchange for personalized and localized services. I'm not sure that anyone would trade a lot of their personal info in exchange for a free coffee coupon, but others in the room were certain of this.

Josh Malone from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory led a great discussion on large-scale storage needs. There are certain similarities between their needs and the Library of Congress's needs vis-a-vis transfer of files and creation of deliverables for users, but their data is observational and is never updated, while our metadata and media files may be updated. They are considering some systems that I know another institution is using and I need to get folks in touch with each other. I also need to learn a lot more about our storage infrastructure at LC.

Baron Schwartz led a great session on mySQL optimization. He's just joined Percona as a mySQL consultant. Buy his upcoming book! I also realized after the fact that the reason I recognized his name was that, as an undergrad, he worked with my UVA colleague Perry Roland on the Museum Encoding Initiative.

There was a roundtable on data visualization where I heard about a number of tools that I wasn't familiar with, especially two PHP graphing libraries -- jpGraph and sparkline. For anyone on twine, I have a Search and Information Visualization twine started.

Erik Hatcher led a Lucene optimization discussion. Bess asked lots of questions in preparation for getting Blacklight into production!

Steve Stedman gave an informal demo of the Expression Engine content management system. Very interesting, especially its capabilities in resizing graphics on-the-fly.

Those are the sessions I made it to -- check out the wiki for the other discussions on the schedule, and links to slideshare for available presentations. Ruby and Ramaze, High Availability Linux, Adobe Air, Google App engine ...

beCamp this weekend

Even though I moved away from Charlottesville last week, I'll be back this weekend -- for beCamp! We'll likely miss part or all of Friday night, but nothing could keep us away on Saturday.

http://barcamp.org/beCamp2008.

When

• Friday, May 2nd, 5:00PM-9:00PM
• Saturday, May 3rd, 9:00AM-5:00PM

Where

• Charlottesville Business Innovation Council (on the Downtown Mall)
  
• 501 East Main Street, Charlottesville, Virginia 22902

hiatus from blogging while moving

Today is my last day at the UVA Library. I will very much miss my colleagues, the projects I had the opportunity to work on, and Charlottesville.

I keep telling people that I'll only be 2 1/2 hours away. I think I'll be on speed dial for a while. We move on or about the 21st, and I start my new position at the Library of Congress on the 28th. I plan to be at beCamp the first weekend in May (probably Saturday only), so I'm not making a very clean transition. And I still need to sell the house.

Folks who don't have other methods of contacting me can contact me here if they need to while I'm transitioning. I won't have time to blog, though, because we are way behind on packing...

beCamp

I spent Friday night and all day Saturday at the Charlottesville beCamp:

http://www.barcamp.org/beCamp

The recap hasn't been populated yet, but will eventually be fleshed out:

http://www.barcamp.org/beCamp2007Recap

I got to know a lot of folks that I should have already met in the last five years, including some folks that I see walk by my office almost every day without knowing who they were. I also met a lot of folks from the greater community that's not the University. I had a great time even though I'm not a hard-core coder type. My fears of appearing an outsider and having nothing to contribute besides going on ice-buying runs were unfounded.

The planning was a bit chaotic at times -- next time we need to make sure that only the event is free form, not the implementation. Companies stepped up to the plate to be sponsors, and lots of folks pitched in on the setup and cleanup and making sure that the trains ran on time (you know who you are!). There will be another beCamp!

Erik Hatcher gave an overview of Blacklight, including some of the developing BlacklightDL work. I took part in some great discussions:

• How we understand what to build (on setting and iterating through specifications during development)
• Reputation on the Net (building it and protecting it)
• Agile methods (Scrum in particular)
• How to Screen Scrape (I was curious what non-Library folks use screen-scraping for -- mostly feeds and filtering)

The Agile methods discussion was one I was particularly looking forward to, because the Library is working with OpenSource Connections on BlacklightDL and they employ Scrum procedures. Eric Pugh from OSC led the discussion, and I got more insight into the process that I am currently part of. I very much need to look into this as a potential mode for our development operations.

The reputation on the Net discussion was a livelier one than I expected, given that it was opposite a session of various REST APIs. One man had had his identity spoofed in a blog and hate messages associated with his name, some were really concerned about privacy, some wondered if messages they posted while in college would ever age off the Net, and others were concerned about how to develop their reputation online, and how to identify their varied work and handles over time as all being one person. It's personal name disambiguation! Bess and I remembered a paper we saw at JDCL in 2006. There was also some discussion about Spock. I pointed out just how much is already available from public records, as I found when I searched my own name in peoplefinders.com. It's interesting how little we think about what can be easily discovered about ourselves.