PodCamp and Beyond!

I had a great time at PodCamp NYC 2007. It’s nice to see an internet community come together in the flesh. One thing I know from having worked with people virtually for so long now, face-to-face meetings are invaluable.

And although I am still new to the community, I am beginning to recognize people by face and name — and I’m being recognized back. Which is a good feeling, much better than "link love," which only goes so far.

At the end of the conference, somewhat drunk with my friend Noel, who is also working on a NewAssignment.Net project, I began to look ahead. We tossed around ideas for a journalism unconference.

I’m hoping that in my spare time, with the helps of others, we could organize such a conference, which would be the physical manifestation of the pro-am model/community.It would truly be a coming of age for citizen journalists to organize a
conference and invite the main stream media to attend on their own
unstructured and constantly evolving turf.

Also on the horizon is my idea of the "open book." Tracing the philosophies of open source back through Western philosophical traditions. Although it has been on the back-burner for some time now, I have decided it is definitely a future goal. I will be helping Jeff Howe on his book about Crowdsourcing and I’m hoping at the end of it, I’ll be better equipped to write a book my own. If I could do this before 30, it will be a major victory in my life.

While a journalism unconference will probably come sooner than that, there is a strictly virtual conference directly ahead for me. Next week I’ll be a guest panelist at VibeWire.Net’s e-Festival of Ideas.

This is an electronic conference, almost the complete reversal of an unconference, where guest panelists/speakers commit themselves to answer questions in a forum for the week. Not only am I looking forward to answering questions from what I imagine will be mostly an Australian youth audience, but in seeing the drawbacks and advantages of a conference where nobody has to actually do any work to attend.