Things have been busy lately.
I went to my first WisCon over the Memorial Day weekend, and had a blast. WisCon is a feminist science fiction convention, and I had some great conversations there with friends from online and off, and we’ve continued them since, mostly on Dreamwidth. What a great environment, and a great opportuniy. I’m so glad to be on the same continent, and able to get to things like this.
Of course, I caught the con crud that was going round, and am only just getting to the end of the coughing. This makes four for four, or 100%, when it comes to me, conferences, and illness this year.
The next long weekend is the 4th of July, and yesterday I booked an Amtrak ticket to Portland and back, in a “sleeperette”. I love train travel, staring out the window, knitting, reading, and being rocked to sleep on a bunk bed. (Only the rocking of a boat is better.) I’ll be in Portland for ONE! NIGHT! ONLY! and hopefully able to catch up with some of my geek friends before turning around and coming back again.
In late July, I’ll be presenting at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in San Jose. I’ll be joining Jason Douglas and Yoz Grahame to for our session, Forking Encouraged: Folk Programming, Open Source, and Social Software Development which is partly based on Yoz’s Folk Logic talk that I blogged a while back, and partly about Acre, Freebase’s app development platform.
I’ll also be keynoting on the subject of Women in Open Source. This was just lined up this week, and I’m both terrified and excited. 15 minutes is an odd length for a talk on that subject, but hopefully I’ll make it work. You can bet I’ll be posting more on this as the event nears.
I’m looking for a roommate for OSCON (tempted to put a blink tag around that; think yourself lucky I didn’t.) San Jose’s pretty close to San Francisco, and theoretically it’s commutable, so work quite understandably doesn’t want to shell out for a hotel room. That said, it’s 1.5 hours getting there during commuter hours in the morning, and about 2 hours getting home at night, which is not much fun. Would love to team up with another woman who’s going and share a hotel room. Anyone? Anyone?
Finally, I’m hoping to make it to Wikimania in Buenos Aires in August (thus fulfilling my “visit a new country” resolution for 2009). The community track looks like it’ll be both interesting and useful, as do some of the papers in the academic track. I’m a little sorry I didn’t get my act together earlier to propose a session on Freebase’s community and how it’s interestingly different/differently interesting, and how Freebase and Wikipedia’s communities could potentially cross-pollinate. Ah well, perhaps next year.