It's been a busy few weeks. A week in Portland for code4libcon 2008. A jaunt up to Baltimore for the OAI-ORE meeting. Most of a week in Chicago (er, well, O'Hare, mostly) for PyCon 2008. Ordinarily I'd write up blurbs about the two 'cons at least as substantial as the one I wrote for the ORE meeting but I'm still pretty tired from it all and my absorption rate has slowed.

Some quick hits, then:

• We managed to not screw up code4libcon yet again. Undeniably it was better in many ways than before: more people, a better gender balance, lots of new voices, more preconferences and an unpreconference that didn't suck, a fun time in a great city, lots of connections made, faces put to names, and by-now-old friends caught up with. We still have to deal with the "yeah well what about next year" decision-making problem, which is bordering on intractable.
• March 12, 2008 marked the 15-year anniversary of the beginning of my year-long treatment for bone cancer. I've long meant to write more about that year, and it feels like now might be a good time to do that. Those of you who know me know most of the story, but I think it's probably worth telling in full. The short of it is that I shouldn't really be here now, quite simply, but here I am, and in the intervening years I've fallen in love and married, met many amazing people (scientists, musicians, clergypeople, scholars, lots of great neighbors and other friends, hackers, and more than my fair share of sexy librarians), travelled to several interesting corners of the world, buried too many people and fortunately seen many more people than that arrive into this crazy world and grow up quite a lot, hung out quite a lot at some of the world's greatest institutions of higher learning and knowledge preservation, started more than my fair share of weblogs, celebrated my teams' hockey, football, and basketball championships, seen my name and my ugly mug in print repeatedly including being indexed in MEDLINE, taught a roomful of 14-year-olds the basics of a language spoken halfway around the world, racked up quite a lot of debt but somehow paid most of it off already, and found a way to make a surprisingly good and rewarding living doing something I honestly love that somehow helps many people more than it hurts them.
• PyCon 2008 was a great event. The Python community is struggling with its size (over 1K people this year!) and the event needs tweaking to stay true to its roots as a community- and volunteer-run event. But on the other hand, for an event with so many people, I got to meet pretty much everybody I'd hoped to, I saw more great talks than crappy ones, and I lucked into many neat connections with different folks I hope to be able to work with or who knew somebody I knew or with whom we could just find lots of fun things to talk about over a beer and a pizza or a laptop and a text editor (and sometimes all four!). And though it'll be difficult because the two events are so close to each other, I think that in the next year I want to devote some time to helping out with planning and running at least some small piece of PyCon and probably do accordingly less of that for code4libcon. My perfectionist streak has less chance to assert itself in a roomful of 1000 people who were there before me and don't know me than it does in a roomful of 200 people where I know most everybody, and they're both pretty important to me professionally and personally.
• I'm reading a terrible book by David Baldacci. Yeah, that one. I would tell you not to bother, because it really is awful, but for some twisted reason I can't stop. Can anyone explain that?
• At both PyCon and code4libcon I was able to give lightning
  talks to several hundred people where I showed off the project I've spent the most time on at my new job, the World Digital Library. After several months of down time on that project I'm hoping we might get started on it again soon, mainly because the response to it that I've heard has been overwhelmingly positive. How many people get paid to work on something that is essentially a way to help people all over the world learn more about each other, and has a genuine chance of succeeding?
• Related to that, and now that I know more about the coming python-3.0 release, I think I need to figure out how to handle Unicode Normalization in py3k, and come up with a solution myself soon if the obvious options don't make immediate sense. [Update (3/20): I'm an idiot. Of course this is already easy.]
• My new year's resolution for 2008 is to teach 1000 people how to program. I think I know how that needs to go now, and I'll get started soon. Stay tuned!
• It's really time for me to finally lose that extra weight. It never matters more than during travel. I don't travel so much anymore, but when I do (and I might not again until next year), these extra pounds I'm trucking about just beat me up. Feh!

...listening to Art Ensemble of Chicago and Thao Nguyen.

...oohing and aahing over Processing and NodeBox (see the colors and graph libraries, currently linked from the home page! really go see them, i mean it!)

...hanging out with some of the coolest people you'll ever meet.

...intending to read much more by Wendell Berry.

...jonesing for Stumptown Roasters and Murky capitol hill.

If you were thinking of sending in a proposal for code4libcon 2008, now's the time! The proposal deadine is this Friday.

C'mon, now, you can't argue with a 75 word limit in a CFP. Get to it!

I don't remember if anybody said this or not, but just in case not: code4libcon needs a hospitality suite. If you don't know what that means, ask any of our Canadian colleagues who've hosted Access about how to do this correctly.

In no particular order.

It seems to have been a success. We handled a 75% increase in attendance without any major hiccups. Lots of new folks seemed energized by it; many more nicks now have faces; nobody was disappointed overall, at least according to the comments we received both in real-time and on paper.

Somebody will always complain about the food. This time is was the long lines and lack of veggie/kosher options. I'm in the second group, to be sure, but then again, something always goes wrong with the food for somebody, and it's not entirely under our control. It is the way of conferences. We can continue to be as careful as we can be in coming years but somebody will still be upset somehow.

It's funny how we just assumed we'll keep doing this indefinitely. See you at code4lib 2024!

When, at the end, I encouraged everybody who'd been up to the podium at least once to stand up, it seemed like half the audience stood up. I'm not sure if this is possible (has anybody run the numbers?) but it sure seemed to be the case. *That's* success.

Both jaf and rsinger had good (great) reasons to miss this year, but as was pointed out by royt, we all missed their (your - you read this, right? :) energy and spirit.

It again was a clearly male-dominated program but I don't think you can argue that we didn't make great progress on the gender balance front. There were *many* more women present, and many more up at the mic at some point than last year. The ratio is still off-kilter w/r/to typical librarianship, but that's not a fair comparison anyway. I suspect we had a better attendee/speaker gender ratio than 90% of tech conferences, and that says something. I'm convinced we made major progress this year, and unless somebody says differently it sure didn't seem to me that any of the female participants felt the same wave of frustration we heard about after last year. When you get great talks from people like Karen S., Joan S., ejlynema, bess, librarywebchic, and Winona S. (say, what is it with the non-#code4libbers in that list and the S. names... if bess (S.) can hop on the channel and pick a nick so can you :) you're doing pretty well.

I think it's possible that the wires crossed between the planning list and bradl and the other PINES folks w/r/to the group social functions (in that we didn't have any planned at all). bradl et al. also had the disadvantage of both not having attended code4lib 2006 and never having been to Access. The two mainstays of Access we've tried harded to mimic are the single-track program and the group social functions in the evenings. Having a shared space to eat and drink and schmooze is critical to fostering community, and afaict it's why so many people enjoy attending again and again. I heard several comments from newbies and old hat types alike that not having these meant that (a) it was harder to make sure you got to talk with all the people you wanted to talk with, (b) it was harder to make sure all the new people got a chance to meet others in a friendly social space, and (c) it was really hard to make manageable dinner plans (wherein it's not a choice between you by yourself or you and 31 others). I don't really blame anybody for this - we are all responsible for making the conference what we want it to be, and this year we learned that we need to have group social functions in the evening, so we all need to take responsibility for making sure it happens in the future.

I really enjoyed being on-channel but I forgot how exhausting and distracting it is. I'd like to say I'll be in there more again but I doubt it will happen.

Another note on the PINES folks - again, not trying to point a finger, but instead to point something out. When bradl et al. signed on to host this year, they were just another group of code4libbers working on a bigger project than most. But when the conference came around, they were vendors. From my viewpoint, this changed the tone of things just a bit, even if it wasn't intentional, or overt, or even really a tangible problem in any particular way (and let me be clear that it wasn't - afaict bradl et al. did a fine job and save for the food and the wireless, both of which weren't problems any of us caused, the facilities were great and most everything just worked). I think that for future c4lcs we should consider whether it makes sense to have those with primary responsibility for hosting arrangements be vendors - or, rather, whether we should make a point of being sure they're not vendors. Imho, for code4libcon to stay true to its roots, it needs to be about people, and libraries, and code, in that order. After all, it's in the name - the code is for libraries. And libraries are for people. And the conference is for us. There are plenty of other conferences optimized for doing business - code4lib should be about us, and libraries, and code, and everything else should be architected away from the core of how the program is put together.

I'm not sure what to do about this, because it might just be a function of the big increase in attendance (even though we set a firm cut-off and turned people away). But, it definitely felt like the ratio of people-who-are-helping-to-run-the-thing to total attendees went way down this year. Maybe it was just that royt did *so* much - keeping things on schedule, handling housekeeping, making sure the speakers were where they need to be, etc., that it seemed like the rest of us had less to do, which meant that a lot of people had nothing to do, and so a lot of people did nothing. Then again, royt probably had to do too much, and there were too many of us hanging back. Imho a good sign of a healthy c4lc should be that the front two rows are filled with people alternatingly jumping up to handle various parts of the program along the way. We had that at some moments this time, but not at others. Then again, that might also be a function of space - last year's room was one single section of seats, and this year was more curvy with three distinct sections, so a good 2/3 of the room were just really far from the podium.

I think there's probably some new kind of program we can put in place that effectively forces newcomers and old-timers into a social setting very early in the conference. If we have another c4lc this big or bigger (even with a single track we could scale up to 200-300 max, probably) we need to be more proactive about making sure new folks knew who was who, who they should ask, how to get on the channel if they want, how the different program blocks will work.

Hmm... what about lightning (flash?) intros? We could have a block at the start of the show where all the new people have to go up front and say who they are, where they're from, and if they have any burning questions they'd like to see answered, or what they're looking forward to. And then we could follow on with something where all the people who'd been to the previous two or more events (only two so far) have to track all the questions and be sure to meet several of the new folks by a certain time. Something good about that could be that the program itself has enough slack in it (with lightning and breakout sessions) that answering key questions could be worked right into the program itself in realtime. Maybe that would be gimmicky, but I bet we could come up with something that would be fun, friendly, and not juvenille, without making anyone uncomfortable, but making it a more immediately collegial place for everyone from the very first moment of the conference. If nothing else, it would be an efficient way to make sure people met the right people if they share common interests. Just a thought.

Another thought - Portland... mmm... beer.

The weather in GA (save for the killer tornadoes that missed us) was truly lovely. How do people concentrate on their studies when it's 68F in February?

I honestly have no idea whether my talk really clicked with anybody. Sometimes I wonder if I've spun an idea around so long in my own head that it's too many clicks removed from what anyone else can envision. But there were a lot of good ideas that came up during the "rethinking OpenURL" breakout session - I'll post about that soon.

I wish I'd known that somebody from Mellon was at the "finding funding" session. Ralph (and others) raised the point that breakout sessions probably need to be planned out some in advance. They were last year, but not this year, and I think Ralph et al. are right - we should do that in advance again next time.

My badge listed my affiliation as "Daniel Chudnov - Miskatonic University". But somehow there was never a full roster printout with full affiliation and job title. If there had been, I would have been listed as "Daniel Chudnov - Miskatonic University Digital Library - Taser Specialist". It's a good thing, because it's not that funny. But it would have been funny to see the look on a face or two when they saw that.

It might be interesting to manage code4libcon itself under trac - with task tickets for "ensure manageable food lines" and "check for reliable, unfiltered, heavy-duty wireless" and "assign three timers and a shepherd for the lightning talks" and so on.

I hope a lot of the new attendees realized how participatory the whole event was, and choose to join the planning list if they hadn't already, and the code4lib-list and hop onto #code4lib once in a while. The relationships I have through code4lib and Access are *the* most important working relationships I've ever had, and have made every single aspect of my working life as a librarian better somehow, and I count many participants as truly good friends. It's easy to grow frustrated with the bureaucracy and sameness of your workplace, but when you find people who do what you do, upon whom you can depend when you need help and whom you also can share your own knowledge with, and whom you very much enjoy spending time with as often as possible, your career can take on a whole new dimension. Jobs change, projects come and go, institutions give us raises and wear us out, and we rant and rave on blogs, but having people you can connect directly with on a regular basis and really focus on why it is we're all working on this stuff and how we go about it makes all of it easier and more enjoyable.

Overall I think we're going to have to think very hard about year three and beyond. Do we want to grow more? Do we want to optimize for a high technical level, newbie friendliness, training opportunities, or drunkenness? Do we need a program committee? Do we need an organization to own the finances? I don't know what the answers are going to be, and it might be rough getting workable consensus around some of them.

But our little baby done grown up, and we need to brace ourselves for the onset of maturity, just like any hot new software project. Good thing a few of us know a few things about how to do that. :)