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So, I was hoping to post my entire BarCamp Vancouver experience here sooner, but I just haven’t had the time. Here’s a belatedly brief trip through the sessions I attended:

Session 1: Sutori (John Ounpuu)

Sutori (from the Japanese translation of the English word ’story’ — get it? su-to-ri? clever!) is a new social networking site built for folks to share & rate their experience as customers. “It’s like Digg for consumerists.” The goal is twofold, I think: to build community around one of our most common experiences (buying things), and to (hopefully) aggregate enough public opinion that the site becomes a force for changing the way companies behave.

I was struck by the similarity between this and the new site I’ve been working on lately, ChangeEverything.ca. The sites have different enough mandates, but they’re very similar in that they’re both aimed at building community around fostering public awareness & action. It’ll be interesting to follow Sutori as it grows.

Session 2: (Dis)Content Management (Gordon Withers)

I spend most of my work time playing with content management systems (CMS), mostly Wordpress & Drupal, though I play around with a few others from time to time, too. For me, two of the main points from this session were like gold:

1. Content Management is 80% people, 20% software. Most people, for some reason, expect a CMS to run itself. It’s useful to remember, though, that any CMS is just an organizational system — it’s a tool, and tools require people to use them.
2. Workflow doesn’t work. Almost all clients want to implement a clear workflow system in their CMS, but it pretty much never works. The reason it doesn’t work? Companies almost never abide by a clear workflow process themselves. Workflow systems have to emulate a real-world structure, or they’ll never work. And so, they never work.

The big idea that I learned from this session is that content management systems are not project management systems (though many wish that they were). The software will not manage your project or your organization for you. At best, a CMS will provide you with a system to convey information, and that’s it. A useful thing to remember.

Session 3: Adhack: a DIY advertising community (James Sherrett)

The Adhack project is, in some ways, very similar to Sutori. Both projects are working to build community and create change through sharing consumer experience. In both projects users share anecdotes about their (dis)satisfaction with companies, products & campaigns. Adhack takes the concept a step further, though. Adhack proposes to take the most compelling stories/videos/songs/etc. submitted to their site & sell the ideas to the companies involved, for either promotional or market research purposes. Any revenue would be split between the site & the person who created the content.

It’s an interesting extension of the citizen journalism movement: citizen advertising. And while I don’t think you’ll catch me Adhacking for Big-Cola any time soon, you might catch me uploading a song to try and spread the word about my local food co-op. As with Sutori, I’m very interested to see where this goes.

Session 4: Tech Activism (Kate Milberry)

Kate Milberry gave us a nice, brief historical tour of the web-as-activist-tool as an introduction to her research project on “Geeks and global justice“. It was pretty neat. I was happy to catch the inclusion of groups like Indymedia and the EZLN, but it was interesting to note (and I can’t say if this was intentional or not, since I got to the session a little late) that there weren’t really any examples of tech activist movements outside North America. Still, Kate’s presentation was really nice (she obviously knows her stuff!), and it inspired some really interesting conversation in the room (which was packed). Yay!

Session 5: Constructing Creativity ( Aaron Wheeler )

Definitely the strangest session I attended all day, Aaron (who is a very friendly guy) spent most of his half-hour instructing us on the benefits of creating and sending postcards to friends, family, strangers, yourself, etc. He’s a really good postcard-maker.

His point (I think) was this: most of us tech-professionals spend our whole day being creative, but because we’re at a keyboard our creativity gets dismissed or misunderstood by the world-at-large. But really, there’s lots and lots of ways to be creative. We all accept craft projects (like postcards) as being creative or artistic or whatever, but a lot of folks don’t see coding or blogging as fully-qualified creative acts. Why not??

At least, I think that was the point. Maybe he really just wants to get more postcards. Who knows?

Session 6: Simple Brain Optimization (Evan Robinson)

I stumbled upon this session by accident, led just by the title. I had no idea what to expect. What I got was really neat — Evan gave us a brief introduction to three principles that help to keep people smart and productive. Here’s a little rundown:

1. Flow: Flow is the state that we sometimes achieve where everything but the work that’s set in front of us just sort of evaporates. We forget about time & become totally immersed in our activity. When we’re in a state of flow we get a lot of good work done. His strategic hints for achieving flow: avoid distractions in your work environment. He says it takes, on average, 20 minutes in the right setting, free from distraction, to get into a state of flow.
2. Focus: Citing some pretty interesting statistics about human productivity, Evan made the case that the human brain just isn’t very good at multi-tasking. We’re much more productive & intelligent when we can focus on one task at a time. He encouraged us to try to compartmentalize the tasks in our day, separating ‘email time’ from ‘research time’ etc.
3. Sleep: Getting a proper rest, as it turns out, is a key to cognitive function (D’oh!). Our cognitive performance after a loss of 2 hours sleep per day over the course of a week is, apparently, exactly equivalent to our cognitive performance after staying up for 3 days. Yikes! The difference: after 3 days straight, we know we’re dumb whereas after a week, we think we’re as smart as we ever were. Pretty startling revelations. I’ve been trying to sleep better ever since.

Session 7: Ruby on Rails from the Rear (Jeremy Hubert & Aaron Wheeler)

Ruby is one of the two hippest programming languages out there right now (and the other’s not even a language, really). Aaron & Jeremy gave us a pretty good demo of why it’s getting so much good press. It’s simple, and it’s really human-readable — heck, it’s almost poetic. Check out these examples. It’s really very nice. I hope, one day when I have more time, to explore ruby.

Session 8: Project Opus (David Gratton)

Project Opus is the first really interesting example (that I’ve seen) of an online community organized around indie music. Artsists can easily upload their music & maintain a low-threshold web-space, while users can create & share playlists (both on and off-site), browse other users’ collections, and do all that other real fun social networky stuff.

The really neat part about Project Opus is that the network is built around the songs. Like, you know how on Flickr you can see when one of your contacts adds pictures? This doesn’t work like that. Instead, on PO you’re notified when one of your songs has been shared or when someone has added one of the songs from your playlist to their playlist. Then you can follow the song to the person who added it, and you can see their playlist, and you can get a sense of who they are & whether you have similar tastes, etc. Then you can hook up further through the normal friends-ish stuff. Neat, huh?

PLUS, artists are notified whenever their song is shared or whenever an off-site widget is spawned that has their song in it, so they can keep track of how many people are listening to their songs. It’s all incredibly cool. I expect that I’ll write about it more here as I explore it further.

Session 9: Hacking the MotherCorp (Tod Maffin)

I was pretty exhausted by the time I caught this session, but it was neat nonetheless. Tod Maffin, who blogs for the cbc, led a compelling discussion about the role of the nation’s public broadcaster in contemporary society. As usual with this topic, opinions were varied & the conversation got emotional at times. As is also typical, no real agreement was reached, except that we all love the CBC in our own way.

Well, that’s it — that’s a cursory tour of my BarCamp experience. I didn’t even come close to doing it justice, but maybe it was interesting anyway. I had lots of fun, and I can’t wait to do it all again next year (maybe I’ll even present something!)