It was a beautiful morning, cycling along the canal in Utrecht, for the first IndieWebCamp. In the offices of shoppagina.nl about a dozen people found each other for a day of discussions, demo’s and other sessions on matters of independent web activities. As organisers Frank and I aimed to not just discuss the IndieWeb as such, but also how to tap into the more general growing awareness of what the silos mean for online discourse. To seek connection with other initiatives and movements of similar minded people.
Frank’s opening keynote
After Frank kicking off, and introducing the key concepts of IndieWeb, we did an introduction round of everyone there. Some familiar faces, from last year’s IndieWebCamp in Nürnberg, and from last night’s early bird dinner, but also new ones. Here’s a list with their (personal) websites.
Sebastiaan http://seblog.nl
Rosemary http://rosemaryorchard.com/
Jeremy https://jeremycherfas.net
Neil http://doubleloop.net/
Martijn https://vanderven.se/martijn/
Ewout http://www.onedaycompany.nl/
Björn https://burobjorn.nl
Harold http://www.storyconnect.nl/
Dylan http://dylanharris.org
Frank http://diggingthedigital.com
Djoerd https://djoerdhiemstra.com/
Ton https://www.zylstra.org/blog
Johan https://driaans.nl
Julia http://attentionfair.com
After intro’s we collectively created the schedule, the part of the program I facilitated.
The program, transcribed here with links to notes and videos
Halfway through the first session I attended, on the IndieWeb buidling blocks, an urgent family matter meant I had to leave, just as Frank and I were starting to prepare lunch.
Later in the afternoon I remotely followed the etherpad notes and the live stream of a few sessions. Things that stood out for me:
Federated Search
Djoerd Hiemstra talked us through federated search. Search currently isn’t on the radar of indieweb efforts, but if indieweb is about taking back control, search cannot be a blind spot. Search being your gateway to the web, means there’s a huge potential for manipulation. Federated search is a way of trying to work around that. Interestingly the tool Djoerd and his team at Twente University developed doesn’t try to build a new but different database to get to a different search tool. This I take as a good sign, the novel shouldn’t mimic what it is trying to replace or defeat.
Discovery
This was an interesting discussion about how to discover new people, new sources, that are worthwile to follow. And how those tactics translate to indieweb tools. Frank rightly suggested a distinction between discovery, how to find others, and discoverability, how to be findable yourself. For me this session comes close to the topic I had suggested for the schedule, people centered navigation and personal information strategies. As I had to leave that session didn’t happen. I will need to go through the notes once more, to see what I can take from this.
Readers
Sebastiaan took us all through the interplay of microsub servers (that fetch feeds), readers (which are normally connected to the feed fetcher, but not in the IndieWeb), and how webmention and micropub enable directly responding and sharing from your reader interface. This is the core bit I need to match more closely with my own information strategies. One element is that IndieWeb discussions assume sharing is always about online sharing. But I never only think of it that way. Processing information means putting it in a variety of channels, some might be online, but others might be e-mails to clients or peers. It may mean bookmarked on my blog, or added to a curated bookmark collection, or stored with a note in my notes collection.
Day 2: building stuff
The second day, tomorrow, is about taking little steps to build things. I will again follow the proceedings remotely as far a possible. But the notes of the sessions about reading, and discovery are good angles for me to start. I’d like to try to scope out my specs for reading, processing and writing/sharing in more detail. And hopefully do a small thing to run a reader locally to tinker.
Björn Wijers demoing, with Dylan, Neil and Julia in the photo looking on
Most of yesterday’s participants returned today to get under the hood of their websites and build something. I didn’t attend in person, but participated remotely in the opening session this morning, and the demo’s this afternoon. The demo session has just concluded and some cool things were created, or at least started. Here are a few:
Frank Meeuwsen worked on an OPML importer for Aperture, a microsub server. This way it is possible to import the feeds from your existing RSS reader into your microsub server. Very useful to aid migrating to a new way of reading online content.
Jeremy Cherfas worked on displaying his gps tracks on his site, using Compass
Rosemary Orchard, extending on that, created the option of sharing her geo location on her site for a specified number of minutes.
Neil Mather installed a separate WordPress install to experiment with ActivityPub, and succeeded in sending messages from WordPress to Mastodon, and receive back replies.
Björn Wijers wrote a tool that grabs book descriptions from GoodReads for him to post to his blog when he finishes a book.
Martijn van der Ven picked up on Djoerd Hiemstra’s session yesterday on federated search, and created a search tool that searches within the weblogs of IndieWeb community members.
That concludes the first IndieWebCamp in Utrecht, with a shout-out to all who contributed.
Na een evenement is het altijd leuk om nog even na te genieten, terug te lezen wat er is gebeurd en wat je mogelijk zelf hebt gemist. Daarom ben ik zo blij met de drie blogposts van Ton. Als mede-organisator van IndieWebCamp Utrecht moest hij helaas om privé omstandigheden al na de eerste ochtend afhaken. Maar dat heeft hem niet weerhouden om uitgebreid te schrijven over de introducties van alle aanwezigen, zijn eigen plannen voor de hackday op dag 2 en hoe hij op afstand de demo’s van de hackday heeft ervaren.
We zullen een deze dagen de video’s beschikbaar stellen via de wiki. Als er meer posts komen zal ik die zo snel mogelijk hier toevoegen.
Nu is het wachten op de volgende IndieWebCamp in Nederland. Waar en wanneer zal deze plaatsvinden?
Doorgeplaatst op:
HTML graffity tag, image by Markus Tacker, license CC-BY-ND
In developing for the web HTML is the very frontest of the front-end, and if you’re a front-end person, you do need to know your HTML. It helps keeping things simple and allows people like me to hit ‘view source’ and figure out how something is done, so I can use it on my own site. I started out writing HTML decades ago in simple text editors like notepad. I still write on my blog in text mode exclusively, never in visual or wysiwyg mode, and add a lot of my html in postings by hand (sometimes aided by keyboard shortcuts that make things easier and avoid repetition)
HTML is the web. And it is useful and powerful in its own right. Without embellishments through scripts etc.
It is in part why I like the IndieWeb, as it seeks to use HTML itself to make webpages machine readable, and to add things that take the best of the social media silos, without all the ajax stuff for instance. So that it works, because it is made of the web, on the web, for the web.
When organising the IndieWebCamp Utrecht last month I realised how little connection I still have to coders and developers for the web in my network. Many people I approached with an invitation to participate told me ‘I don’t develop much for the web really.’, they’re more into all kinds of frameworks and work on things like algorithms, machine learning and data analysis. Cool stuff I heartily agree, but ultimately it mostly ends up being shown in a browser. In HTML. So in a way it is disappointing to encounter a certain disdain here and there for HTML.
For me, I need to dive more deeply in the various ways HTML is currently used to add machine readability to web pages.