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Web2Expo: I believe a small rant is required

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Yesterday I attended Web 2.0 Expo SF, an O’Reilly conference at the Moscone Center. In fact I was mostly there to chair a panel on Troll Whispering with three prominent women in the field of Web 2.0 community management: Christy Canida from Instructables, Teresa Nielsen Hayden from Boing Boing, and Amy Muller from Get Satisfaction.

The four of us arranged to meet downstairs in the foyer beforehand.

“I’m easy to spot,” I told them. “I’ve got bright red hair.”

“I’ll be wearing a fuzzy orange and leopard print coat,” said Christy.

“I’ve got a cane,” said Teresa.

“I’m the one with the baby,” said Amy.

I spotted Amy easily; she was, indeed, the one with the baby. Her daughter, Tesla, is 4 months old, and Amy’s been juggling her work as Chief Community Officer at Get Satisfaction with childcare. Her husband, Thor, is supportive and helps look after the kid when necessary; he’s the CEO of Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction, by the way, is one of the most clued in Web 2.0 companies around, and a bit of an O’Reilly favourite. They even help O’Reilly with their customer support.

Anyway, it’s a good thing Thor was there yesterday to mind the baby. It turns out that babes in arms are not permitted on the expo floor or in the conference area of Web2Expo. “Sorry ma’am, we can’t allow anyone under eighteen years of age,” is what the security guard told Amy.

Back in the first dotcom boom (and probably still today), company founders and executives were sometimes under 18. I’ve heard stories about them having to get special exemptions to attend or speak at conferences. So I guess I’m not surprised to hear that Web2Expo is an 18+ event. But I can’t find anything on the website that says so. Perhaps it’s in some kind of T&C that I didn’t read, but I don’t think so.

So, Amy Muller, co-founder and Chief Community Officer of a company that really gets the spirit of Web 2.0, and an invited speaker at the conference, had to ask her husband, co-founder and CEO of the company, to hold the baby and hang out down in the lobby while she attended her panel.

Could they have got a sitter instead? Probably, though I imagine it’s hard to find someone to look after a baby that little. And why should they have to? The baby’s well behaved, and so are the parents; they know that if the baby’s making a fuss, they need to take her outside til she chills out. That’s what Amy did at SXSW, including during her panels. And that would’ve been absolutely fine in an informal round-table session like the Troll Whispering one. I for one would’ve welcomed the little critter, and I’m not actually that into babies. (Does it show?)

Christy, our co-panelist, went and kicked some ass and found out what was what. O’Reilly people directed her to Moscone customer service, who told her that it was an insurance thing. Really? Really? Does the presence of a baby in a conference centre raise the premiums that much? Does this also apply to hotels, sporting venues, and airports? They’re all private property, technically, and can exclude whoever the hell they like, but in my experience they don’t tend to exclude babies or their mothers. They’d get hell for it if they did.

I’d love to see technical conferences providing childcare. Chances of that are slim, I realise, but in the meantime it’d be nice to see a little helpfulness and sympathy around the issues that women attending such a conference might face. Would it have killed them to put something on the website saying, “Sorry, Moscone insist that they won’t allow children in the venue, but here are some links to reputable nearby childcare providers.”

I was going to write some kind of sanctimonious conclusion, but I couldn’t get it to come out right. Luckily the Yarn Harlot just posted something that more or less expresses my feelings on the matter (except that I like babies a whole lot less than she does).

There might even be an unhappy kid who was predicted to do well and doesn’t, and instead uses the time to finely hone their impression of demon spawn, and those kids are going to be a pain in the arse….Just like some other people we are all going to meet in our day (I am keeping a list) that are a pain in the arse that we don’t have the right to get rid of either.

Yeah. If given a choice between a crying kid who can be taken outside and out of the way, let alone a well behaved kid, and that bearded guy in the second row who’s always interrupting speakers to ask tangential, rambling questions (which, in fact, are actually statements), I know who I’d rather have at my tech conference.

Tags fixed

The tags on this blog have been broken for a really long time. I’ve just fixed them. Thanks and sorry to all those people who told me about it.

What I’ve been up to lately

It’s been ages since I posted, and that’s kind of bad. I just wanted to draw your attention to some work-related stuff that’s pretty cool.

• Freebase, where I work, have just released full data dumps. This is important stuff, people! Freebase has long been licensed under Creative Commons (CC-BY, specifically) but although there’s been an API to get data out, there’s still been a risk that if Freebase goes away, the data will be lost. This helps alleviate that risk.
• Any of you who have Freebase accounts will probably have got an email on Monday announcing various new things. If you missed it, then you missed my screencasting debut. Three and a half minutes of yours truly’s Australian accent. My roomie, the Librarian Avenger, says I sound “all professional and shit”. Check it out.
• I should probably just point you to the Freebase blog. If you’re reading Infotropism for technical content, you’ll see what I’m up to over there. Go subscribe.

I’ve also got some conferences coming up. I’ve been asked to help moderate a panel on Troll Whispering at Web2Open here in SF. I’m particularly excited about that one because I get to meet Teresa Nielsen-Hayden of Making Light and elsewhere. And then at OSCON I’ll be joining long-time partner in crime Schwern and a bunch of others to present a panel-style tutorial on People for Geeks, a look at the various ways geeks interact and fail to interact as human beings. I suppose I should crosspost those to Geek Etiquette in fact.

Settling in

Well, I’m here in San Francisco and starting to settle in nicely. Lots of social stuff going on, fun work that doesn’t feel like work, and I found a place to live really quickly and easily.

This photo’s by the lovely yarnivore who took it last weekend at a Rock Band extravaganza where we (I say “we”, though I didn’t do much of it) played right through the full 58-song set list. It took about eight hours.

But the real reason I’m posting today is to assist anyone stalking me. I assume you’re already following my photos on Flickr but you might also like to check out my work blog where I’m, well, posting about work things: Freebase, open data, mashups, that sort of stuff. And if you’re going to be around these parts on Feb 6th, be sure to swing by the Freebase user group meeting for pizza, beer, and of course lots of technical presentations.

Here comes another one, just like the other one

Labor Senator Stephen Conroy’s new Internet censorship policy:

Federal Labor will improve existing government programs in this area by:

Providing a mandatory ‘clean feed’ internet service for all homes, schools and public computers that are used by Australian children, so that ISPs will filter out content identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). The ACMA ‘blacklist’ will also be made more comprehensive to ensure that children are protected from harmful and inappropriate online material.

(emphasis mine)

The difference between this load of steaming horse shit and the rather similar load that got dumped on us in 1999 is that this time the mainstream media actually know what’s going on:

• The Australian
• Sydney Morning Herald
• Courier Mail

When a Queensland newspaper’s headline reads “Nanny Rudd censors the internet”, you know the times are a-changin’. So, I have some hope that this idiotic proposal will either get ditched entirely, watered down to pointlessness (as 1999’s was), or worked around to a significant degree. I won’t be here for it, but good luck with that.

California, here I come

I seem to be constitutionally incapble of avoiding that subject line. Sigh. I apologise.

In any case, it’s official. I’m moving to California in less than two weeks’ time.

I put off mentioning it here in some sort of fit of superstition. I didn’t want to jinx it. But back in November I received a job offer from Metaweb, Inc to become the Community Director for Freebase. I accepted, and the visa paperwork began. Yesterday my visa was approved, and now the tickets are booked. I fly out on January 15th.

The job is based in San Francisco in the SOMA district, and I’ll initially be staying with friends in the Mission til I find a share house to move into. Plus I’ll get to travel to conferences, so I’m hoping to get to see a bit of the US and the world.

Right now I’m in the throes of packing everything I own into boxes and saying goodbye to people in Australia. Life is crazy but good.

In which I join Ravelry

Ravelry is a new social networking site for knitters, currently in beta. Most of my readers are probably going “huh?” at this point, and the rest, I hope, are going “ooh!” See, up front it sounds like a kind of dumb idea to have a squillion social networks for all your different interests, and why wouldn’t you just (for instance) join a knitting group on Facebook or Livejournal? Well, here’s why:

Ravelry lets you:

• list your projects, both in progress and completed
• integrate with Flickr to show pictures of your work
• record patterns and yarns used
• search other people’s projects
• plus, of course, the (by now) expected groups, forums, geographical user search, and so forth

What does this get you? Well, it means you can say “Hey, I have this pile of 12 ply alpaca in my stash, wonder what I can do with it?” and see suggestions for projects, read people’s tips for working with that yarn, or offer to swap it for some lace-weight silk/bamboo if you decide you really don’t want to use the alpaca after all.

Here’s a screenshot from the “Patterns” page. Click the thumbnail to enlarge. The pic above is one of the ones I uploaded to Flickr to illustrate my own projects.

Ravelry is slick as all get-out, with fantastic UI, cross-site integration (including the afore-mentioned Flickr), and a pretty solid userbase at this early stage. I’m deeply impressed and will look forward to using it plenty in future.

In short: knitters, sign up for a beta account; non-knitters, take note, because this is how it should be done.

Test Driven Development tutorial

I’m at OSDC in Brisbane this week. Yesterday I presented my half-day tutorial on Test Driven Development, and promised I would put the slides online. Here they are.

| View | Upload your own

I’ve also uploaded my slides from Packaging Perl Modules: From CPAN to Your Project. If anyone else has slides from OSDC, I highly recommend slideshare.net for making the available. Tag them with “osdc2007″ and they’ll be easily findable by other attendees (and those who just wish they were here).

Vanuatu and OpenStreetmap

Meet Hervé Soksok, Vanuatu’s first GPS-toting, creative-commons-licensing community cartographer.

I ran into Hervé at Wan Smolbag’s computer centre a few weeks ago and we swapped email addresses. He’s been attending daily computer classes there, where he spends an hour each day learning basic computer skills and — I suspect — finds the time for a bit of self-directed study. He’s a smart guy, with excellent English, but he can’t afford the commercial computer training available in town, nor the courses at the university, and he’s otherwise unemployed.

Meanwhile, Vanuatu has no street maps. Sure, there’s a dinky little thing in the tourist guide, but it shows little of use to locals. Google Maps and Yahoo Maps have nothing beyond the shapes of the islands.

When Kurt at Metaweb heard me talking about trying to find a handheld GPS to map Port Vila, he said he’d ask round his gadget-toting friends. In the end, he donated his own handset, a Garmin eTrex. Now Hervé’s going to be using this to walk the streets of Vila, noting important places (schools, churches, nakamals) and uploading the results to OpenStreetmap.

OpenStreetmap is the wiki version of Google Maps. It accepts GPS tracks recorded anywhere in the world, and provides an online editing system to tweak and annotate them. With luck, in a little while, you’ll be able to see Vila’s streets there.

Vanuatu’s new technical library

A giant thank you to all the geeks who donated books to Vanuatu. Here’s a photo of the results:

I carried these back to Vanuatu in my checked luggage: one box (ex copying paper) taped to within an inch of its life and holding 20kg, and another 5kg or so in my backpack. The Perl Foundation kindly wrote a letter that helped me get the lot through .vu customs without having to pay any duty.

VITUS are now figuring out exactly how to manage the technical library. It looks like they’ll be handed over to the Port Vila public library, who already have a borrowing system set up, and they’re talking about having a special shelf for them to give them a bit of prominence.

Oddly, one of the problems here is that libraries have too many books… but the wrong kind. I was at the new Agricultural College in Santo last week, and saw boxes and boxes of donated books, mostly old hardcover historical romances discarded by libraries in other countries. Now anyone that knows me knows that I like a good historical romance, but really, they’re not what you want for an agricultural college. So I’d like to thank everyone for making such an effort to find appropriate books for the technical library. If yours isn’t in the picture above, it’s most likely due to baggage weight limits or because I had to choose between multiple books on the one subject.