Dave
Winer posts a lot of insightful ideas about the future of
conferences. My instincts are that a hybrid of approaches are what
is required - a combination of common experiences (keynotes),
structured communications (sessions), and
adhocracy.
The closest I have seen come to this was the ApacheCon, which had a
parallel hackathon running during most of the sessions. What the
hackathon had was 802.11, power strips, tables, chairs, and a few
whiteboards. In my experience, power strips are the most overlooked
accessory by conference organizers.
I know many West Coasters that are just hitting their stride at
midnight, so if you want to truly even the playing field, make the
keynotes all happen at 7 a.m.. Las Vegas is also a great
location in that nobody lives there, and everybody can get there
easily.
I'm not a fan of speakers during eating. Eating is a
wonderful opportunity to talk to the person next to you.
Rooms with PC's or Mac's are so last century, these days most
people bring their own internet access devices.
Jon Udell: For me, C# was easier in one way and harder in another. It was easier because Visual Studio .NET made consumption of the WSDL APIs frictionless. I'm curious as to why this isn't true for, say, Python. There are existing libraries that purport to do this. Is the issue awareness, license, deployment, functionality?
If there are issues, and interest expressed by Groove developers and/or users in collaboration on flattening them, then I would be willing to contribute.
Mark Baker: Figure out what are the identifiable objects in
your system, give them all URIs, and make sure they answer GET
requests. Much of REST will flow naturally from that.
That is a good first step. The
next step is to agree on common representations.
Sometimes consensus can be reached on these representations, and
that is goodness. Otherwise, extensibility and/or discovery
mechanisms may be helpful in providing the right amount of
coupling.
Chris
Sells: Of Eggs and Omelets. What is most notable
about this to me is that I first saw the e-mails that he is
referencing when I went looking for them after
seeing the reference on his weblog.
The reason is simple: my corporate email address is getting so
overrun with spam that I instituted a rather aggressive filter a
few weeks back: everything that did not originate from within the
firewall is filed into a folder. (Note: that doesn't mean a
forged SMTP address either, it means that the particular e-mail
never saw a gateway ever).
I scan this folder periodically, but as this folder has such a
low signal to noise ratio, I often miss things. Meanwhile, my
aggregated news feeds have a much higher signal to noise ratio
for me.
You want to catch my interest? Say it on a weblog.
Update: Steven
Noels has the right idea.
Steven
Noels: Nicola now as a weblog.
I've subscribed, even though his RSS doesn't
validate.