THATCamp 2009

Another THATCamp [1] has come and gone and it was, again, a lot of fun. I've grown used to the dynamics of an unconference in the past five years or so because that's the kind of event I attend most of the time, now. JCDL 2009 [2] was the first academic conference I'd attended in years, and though I enjoyed it as well and met a lot of interesting people and learned some useful stuff, it was missing the energy the mix of people at a good unconference can generate. And, though I feel like a self-important prig as I write this, I hated that though I'd made the effort to attend, there was no chance for me to get up and show off some stuff I'd worked on in front of the group. I use software that lets a user to become a committer; I value friendships that let a student become a teacher; I attend conferences that let an attendee become a presenter. Take out that dynamic and it's nowhere near as compelling.

Because it features this principle, as any good unconference does, the best part of THATCamp is the people. Both years I've met so many fascinating people and learned about so much amazing work that it's taken the whole week following for my brain to settle back down and follow up on all the threads left dangling on sunday afternoon like so many thesis topics. There's talk of franchised THATCamps to be staged in Austin and London among other places, and that's exciting. There's a #thatcamp channel on freenode that threatens to become a regular hangout. I've got about 50 more people I'm following on twitter all of whom already fill my screen with fascinating stuff to read and look at all day and some of them are even following me, too. What more could you ask for?

Well, there are a few things. I think there are a few tweaks to the formula that could improve the event a bit. I offer these only in the hopes of making THATCamp even better, not to complain or kill anybody's leftover buzz.

1. Shorter sessions. This year the sessions were 1:15 long; for intense topics that engage everybody in the room that's what you need to give everybody a chance to go deep. But for open-ended discussions where there's as much airing of concerns about how "this needs to happen" and "we have to do that", 1:15 is about 25 minutes too long. It might have just been the sessions I chose this year, but it seemed like I was in more of the latter type sessions than the former, and that was a bit of a let down. Also, there were as many as five or six sessions running concurrently in several slots on the first day, any three or four of which I would've liked to sit in on. Tightening the schedule could allow for more time blocks and cut down on the number of simultaneous tracks.
2. More hacking. When you go from having Bill Turkel [3] teaching people how to fire code into an Arduino [4] and the Omeka [5] developers teaching how to write plugins and even me doing a simple tutorial on how to make little colorful balls dance around on screen with Processing [6] one year to basically none of that the next year, it's a bit of a drop off to somebody like me who likes to learn by doing, especially in realtime at a moment when I'm jazzed up by all the amazing people and ideas in the air.

   We talked about this a bit in #thatcamp on IRC last night - maybe if the sessions were a bit shorter and there were fewer concurrent tracks, one of the extra rooms could be a "hackin' room" or some such. Sorta like the chillout room at a rave with plenty of water and comfy couches where people can take a breather but, er, well, the exact opposite of that.

   It might just be that I'm a little bit disappointed in myself for not prepping a hackier topic myself. I put a lot of time into hacks just for THATCamp last year and it was great fun pulling them off. I'd like to think that it was fun for the people in the room with me, too, and either way I learned a lot from the experience and I hope that was mutual. This year I was burned out on conference travel and work and didn't have the extra cycles to put something fun and new together, and I'm sorry I didn't. If I get to go again, I promise to do whatever I can to bring the hackin' back in!

3. Let us do our own scheduling. This is probably the biggest one. At the Foo Camp I went to the intro evening session ended with everybody mingling around big schedule boards where times, topics, and rooms get worked out among the attendees in realtime. It's messy and takes a while but it ends with drinks and everybody's just happy to be bumping into all the other fascinating people around them anyway so it serves as a nice icebreaker, too. At THATCamp, CHNM staff instead comb through ideas posted in advance to the blog and group and sort and lump and split topics into sessions with titles that don't necessarily match what the idea-posters had in mind. I wanted to talk about improving web sites with linked data [7] but where do I go to talk about that in this schedule [8]? "Standards"? "Publishing"? "Software Development"? "Libraries and Web 2.0"? (that's where I went, and did a bit of the talk, but I'm not sure my topic was what everybody else there had in mind, and I know I wasn't alone in this mode of confusion).

   By cutting out this dynamic let-the-people-do-it-themselves step you minimize opportunities for catchy titles to draw people in, for people to negotiate whether or not they should merge their own topics, and for people to simply get to know each other and decide which other people they want to be sure to hear from and hang out with right off the bat. And imho you maximize confusion about which sessions to go to and where you can find the people you want to hear from.

   I'd advocate for filling out a big whiteboard with a schedule with people putting the names of their talks and their names with it and leaving a good 60-90 minutes to work it all out. On a real board or on paper (vs. online), so we'd have to occupy the same physical space. With drinks nearby.

   I know Jeremy put a ton of work into scheduling because I caught him in the act when I arrived late so I know it was no trivial feat. I just think opening it up would be easier on @clioweb and @digitalhumanist and better for the rest of us too.

4. Three word intros. Another nice thing they did at Foo was *very* brief intros of everybody in the room: your name, your affiliation, and *just* three words about who you are or what you're into. Mine would be: "Dan Chudnov, Library of Congress, One Big Library". It's a chance to put names to faces, it's another friendly icebreaker, and it's a chance for all of us 140-charsmiths to be clever.
5. The schedule. Maybe it might help to have an evening meeting the night before for the welcoming session, the scheduling, and maybe one or two lead talks to kick things off. Then everybody can go get dinner or drinks and talk and think about what's coming the next morning and maybe work on their slides or demos or whatever overnight. You'd know when your slot is the next day, and which sessions you want to be sure to get to.

I don't want to be all "they do it better at Foo Camp" but these last few points really do reflect things that Foo Camp does a little better that I think THATCamp could adopt to make it just that much better.

And not to repeat myself, but I offer all this up with the hope of leading folks to think about various ways to make a great event even greater. I ain't complaining - the organizers do a great job making a lot of people with diverse backgrounds comfortable in a terrific space with plenty of coffee and wifi and surprisingly good food and nicely designed t-shirts and as long as they'll have me, I'll keep applying to attend again. It's just that I'm a bit of a hacker at heart and I'm always thinking about little optimizations, so take this as nothing more than that.

I hope to see y'all again next year, or even sooner - and next time you're in DC please stop by LC to say hi if you like.