BarCamp Vienna

After a flight that killed my ears (I have a terrible cold, and cabin pressure doesn't help), Elmine and I ended up at BarCamp Vienna. It turned out someone had already put my name up on the roster to do a session. That's why at the end of the afternoon I found myself presenting, without hearing much. I felt unfit, and talked way too fast I guess.

Basically I told the same story Boris Mann and I did a session about at last weeks BarCamp Brussels. And at the end asked for thoughts, ideas and pointers that might help create social software tools that are better at using human relationships for navigation, aggregation and views/slices.

Two things were put forward at the end (people were tired at the end of the day, and I really did talk too fast) before discussion died down.
Sebastian Fiedler put forward that 3D environments might be a way of presenting information/networks in a different way. This might be a route to break out of the more usual notions on how to present information(patterns).
I don't see much of that at this point, but that doesn't mean much. What I do see is how e.g. in Second Life attempts are made to connect SL to the information landscape of the internet, similar to how at the same time efforts are made to connect the information landscape to the physical landscape more. A set of parallel processes that might cross-fertilize.

Another participant mentioned a Linux tool called Dashboard, that by its description sounded a bit like 43people.com, a way to build portfolios around individuals. That is interesting as a first step, but I would like to be able to do the same for groups and communities. In a metafor I used in Barbara Kieslingers blog, and which I mentioned today as well: I do not need to know which trees are in a forest to know if the forest is on fire. Only when I really want to know which specific trees are burning, do I need to zoom in. Communities are my forests in that regard, and I only need a notion of what is important to a community at some point.

Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at September 30, 2006 05:04 PM)