Non Forbes

Making volunteer grunt-work and unconferences sustainable

Submitted by brad on Mon, 2010-02-15 19:08

This weekend I spoke at BIL, a conference that was created to play off of the famous and expensive TED conference. BIL began as an un-conference, which is to say an ad-hoc conference created on short notice where the attendees are the speakers. Such conferences tend to be free or near-free. The movement begain with Tim O'Reilly's FOO Camp. FOO camp is for Tim's friends, and he has far more friend that can come. One year, he was explaining how he rotated among people and so some of those who were not invited that particular year (including myself) had a "BAR" camp which was a tremendous success, and created a trend.

The first two BILs were a lot of fun and worked pretty well. They had a variety of sub-par speakers, as these "anybody who wants to can talk" conferences often have, but there was always tons of hall conversation or sessions in other rooms to make up for that. And a modest number of TED speakers came over and gave their TED talks for free at BIL, and various regular TED attendees came as well.

This year's BIL did not live up to the earlier standard, and the hard-working and generous organizers are fully aware of that, so this is not an attempt to criticise them, but rather to look at the problem. Many things went wrong, including a last minute need to move the conference from a Saturday and Sunday(with only Saturday morning overlap with TED) to Friday and Saturday morning, which had total overlap with TED and minimal weekend time. This change was forced because no venue could be found (cheaply enough, at least) which would offer Saturday afternoon and Sunday. However, it was a ruinous change -- attendance on the workday Friday was way down, and even lower on Saturday, and no TED speakers came though a few attendees showed up, mostly near the end in the 2 hours after TED that BIL went on. The "outdoor" post-sessions were of limited success as a conference, but OK socially (I did not attend the planned Sunday events.)

Topic: 
Observations

Off to BIL and TED

Submitted by brad on Thu, 2010-02-11 11:18

Tomorrow, I will be speaking on pre-Robocar technology at BIL an unconference that parallels the famous and expensive TED conference. This is in Long Beach, CA. Unconferences are fun, cheap and often as good as expensive conferences. I will also be attending a reception at TED tonight for Singularity University, which I lecture at, so I may see you if you're at TED as well.

Last night's EFF bash was a great success. Thanks to Adam Savage and all the others who made it go so well.

Topic: 
Announcements
Robocars

10 year term as EFF chairman winds down, EFF 20th anniversary tonight

Submitted by brad on Tue, 2010-02-09 22:27

In early 2000, after a tumultuous period in the EFF's history, and the staff down to just a handful, I was elected chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I had been on the board for just a few years, but had been close to the organization since it was founded, including participating with it as a plaintiff in the landmark supreme court case which struck down the Communications Decency Act in 1996.

Topic: 
Free Speech
Announcements
Privacy

A road-trip travel agent

Submitted by brad on Fri, 2010-02-05 10:47

I'll have many more observations about my recent trip to DLD, Davos and the Alps soon, but one thing I've decided I do want to find (or train) is a travel agent/helper who can assist well with unscheduled travel (ie. a road or railpass trip.)

With unscheduled travel, you don't know in the morning where you will end up that night. You only figure it out later in the day. Sometimes you just drive until it starts getting late and then you pick where you will end the night. It's hard (or expensive) to do this in high season but in low season you can always find a room, and I and many others like that sort of freedom.

So when you do pick where you want to end up you have a few options:

  1. You can have a guidebook or database (such as AAA in the USA) and phone around places until you get something you like
  2. You can hunt around for web access (better if you have a data plan on your phone) and use sites like TripAdvisor and the various booking search engines (like Kayak/Sidestep) to find a decent hotel at a good price.
  3. You can just drive into town and look for Vacancy/Zimmer Frei signs and go in and ask the price.
  4. You can find somebody to do this for you.

There are problems with all these approaches. Method 3 (especially using tripadivsor) helps you avoid turkey hotels and find the better values. However, the databases cover only a fraction of the hotels, and the online reservations systems also cover only a small fraction of hotels in an area. There will be better values out there. On the other hand, many hotels offer a better price through the internet than if you call them, or will charge even more if you just walk in.

Topic: 
Air Travel
Tags: 
tourism

Will search engines focus on the negative?

Submitted by brad on Tue, 2010-01-26 05:28

I'm at DLD in Munich, and going to Davos tomorrow. While at DLD I made a brief mention during a panel on identity and tracking of my concept of the privacy dangers of the AIs of the future, which are able to extract things from recorded data (like faces) that we can't do today.

I mentioned a new idea, however, which is a search engine which focuses on the negative, because though advanced algorithms it can tell the difference between positive and negative content.

Topic: 
Internet

The net needs a free way to combine video and slides for showing talks

Submitted by brad on Thu, 2010-01-21 16:28

These days it is getting very common to make videos of presentations, and even to do live streams of them. And most of these presentations have slides in Powerpoint or Keynote or whatever. But this always sucks, because the camera operator -- if there is one -- never moves between the speaker and the slide the way I want. You can't please everybody of course.

Topic: 
Media
Internet

In the future, everyone famous will get service 15 minutes faster

Submitted by brad on Fri, 2010-01-15 17:50

There's a phenomenon we're seeing more and more often. A company screws over a customer, but this customer now has a means to reach a large audience through the internet, and as a result it becomes a PR disaster for the company. The most famous case recently was United Breaks Guitars where Nova Scotia musician David Carroll had his luggage mistreated and didn't get good service, so he wrote a funny song and music video about it.

Topic: 
Futurism
Internet

Foresight Institute Conference this weekend, Homebrew Robots and Germany

Submitted by brad on Tue, 2010-01-12 12:40

This weekend is the Foresight Institute conference on molecular nanotechnology and AI. I am on the board of Foresight Institute and will be speaking on the latest developments in robocars at the conference, along with a raft of great speakers. If you are interested in futurist issues around AI, nanotech and other accelerating technologies, this is the longest running conference in the field and the place to be.

Topic: 
Announcements
Robocars

DNA scans for everybody who did a failed drug trial

Submitted by brad on Mon, 2010-01-11 19:31

The pharma industry is littered with cases of drugs that showed good promise, but proved to be too dangerous when they got into human trials. Dangerous side effects will cancel development for most drugs. In some cases, such as Vioxx and Fen-Phen the dangerous effects were discovered later, and the drugs pulled from the market.

Topic: 
Random Ideas
Health

Midwifing the Canadian Flag

Submitted by brad on Sun, 2010-01-10 15:01

I was contacted this week by the daughter of Don Watt, a well known Canadian graphic designer responsible for the branding and logos at many large companies including Loblaws and WalMart. Watt had just died at the end of December, and she was looking for more information from me about her father's account of how he had secretly been the designer of the modern Canadian Flag. She contacted me, because in his story, my father, Charles Templeton, had been the go-between for Watt and the government leaders who picked the flag.

Topic: 
Random Ideas

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