DocTrain West 2008 - How was the unconference?

In a word - energizing! I had completed my two shared talks - the Wiki roundtripping talk at 2 in the afternoon, with the next talk being at 3:30 when I moderated the Meet the bloggers panel. I had been on my feet for nearly all of both talks, and I was tiring mentally as well as physically. But the informal freestyle nature of the unconference was just what I needed to finish up my day.

Here’s how it “went down.” After the Meet the bloggers panel, Lisa Dyer and I started writing the “presentation” titles from the wiki page onto a white board and placed it outside the unconference room about an hour before the 6:30 start. I talked to people who came up and had questions about it, and also lamented the fact that we were at the same time as the Vancouver STC meeting, which was going to be held in the room next door to ours. Last week I sent their president an email apologizing for the scheduling, saying that they would have been such a fun group to unconference with! So, note to self, if I ever do an unconference again, try to match up with the locals’ schedule.

We had about fifteen people to start with people coming and going. We had problems with the overhead projector, but pulled it together finally on Lisa’s laptop. She demonstrated her DITA to Confluence wiki build process, and said that she’s ready to get it bundled up as an Enterprise Wiki plug-in if there’s enough outside interest. She needs to get resources for the final steps of getting it ready but it sounds like she’ll be able to do that. Lisa has had DITA in production for four years and the DITA-to-wiki workflow in place for over a year now. That plug-in should be valuable as a tool for making structured authoring work for wiki output.

I presented the wiki-based documentation used for the XO laptop simplified user guide, showing both the wiki.laptop.org one-page version as well as the flossmanuals.net wiki version that also has a PDF output. I wanted to demonstrate the Sugar operating system using my Dell laptop in emulation, but I couldn’t get my laptop to display on the overhead projector. The same thing happened at the earlier afternoon wiki presentation, darn it, but fortunately Stewart Mader set us up on his Macbook for that preso. Yay Mac. I also spoke with a localization expert who may have ideas for tapping into the translator communities that would like to work on documentation translations for the OLPC. That is an exciting outcome.

Stewart Mader did a neat mini-workshop-type session where he asked us all to share our daily tasks when working on documentation, and then we each brainstormed about the bottlenecks for each task. For example, I often read what are essentially threaded discussions in our bug tracking tool to try to determine what’s changed and whether the change affects documentation. A bottleneck is often the time it takes to read through the threads. We talked a little bit about how wikis are a better collection for information sometimes than threaded discussions - not that a wiki is the fix in my particular case, but it was good to recognize a threaded pattern and know its limitations.

Tom Johnson did two quick demonstrations of Woopra, a blog statistics tool that helps you communicate with your blog’s readers while they’re viewing your blog. Someone from New Dehli, India, was viewing his site while we were unconferencing! But he or she didn’t respond to Tom’s initial Instant-Message-like talk request. Next he showed us the marvelously simple and easy to use screencasting software, Jing. This bright little sun icon appears over your desktop and you just plug in your microphone if you want to record sound, click the little sun, drag the cursor to define the area of the screen you want to record, and you’re screencasting! Very handy, very free tool (so far.)

Alan Porter had something come up so that he couldn’t present his publishing-doesn’t-have-to-be-last scenario, and I originally thought I’d fill in with some stupid RSS tricks, but we decided we didn’t need to fill in the time and the beer-thirty hour was approaching. So, for posterity’s sake, here are the RSS tricks I know:

• Get updates from podcasts and video sites.
• Get the “buzz” on blogosphere via RSS – aggregation of information is crucial for this
• Notifications on classified ads for specific search words (craigslist has this, and I’ve often used to to seek Thomas the Tank Engine goodies)
• Track group conversations via RSS instead of email (such as Yahoo Groups, which offers RSS feeds for conversations)
• Do package tracking (nifty! especially for ebay resellers she says this is a useful tool)
• Receive product newsletters (again, RSS as an email alternative)
• Job listings aggregation using keyword searches and a location limiter (indeed.com)
• Use on calendars to get notification for birthdays, anniversaries, etc.
• Subscribe to RSS feeds from higher education institutes to get notification for course information
• Get RSS results of searches for competitive intelligence and other specialized information, such as subscribing to a feed that searches for Anne Gentle or Ann Gentle (and I should probably add Anne Gentile, ha ha!)

As our finale, Scott Nesbitt and Aaron Davis presented about Open Source Software’s uses for creating documentation deliverables and it was an engaging little back-and-forth dialog between the two of them, much in the style of their entirely enjoyable podcasts on DMN Communications!

Subscribe to the comments for this post

Amazing conversations and meeting amazing people at SXSW Interactive

South by Southwest Interactive is a big web design/blogging conference in downtown Austin. There are thousands of people here for it in 2008. It’s crazy busy.

The latest excitement was in a friend’s panel where people tried to stage an uprising on both Twitter and in the meebo room at meebo.com/sxsw, set up specifically for this talk. Tom Parish has a great picture and is quoted in this Wired blog story. The very next day, the Zuckerburg interview had a similar uprising on a much grander scale. Jeff Jarvis has the best analyses I’ve read so far about it, and Scoble’s view from the Twitter gallery is also a good read.

I’m of two minds about the things that have happened here this week - on one hand, I think the conference is only as high quality as its presenters. If all the attendees think they’re smarter than and better than the panelists, then why bother coming at all when you can view the video online or listen to the podcast later? I guess that hypothetical question is answered with - we come because we can interact with the panelists.

I even witnessed a panelist admit that he “wasn’t paying attention” to another panelist’s answer to a question during their panel. It came across as immature, arrogant, and unprofessional to me. Much like the sweater-tossing antics I observed based on the meebo room conversation in the social media metrics talk, I internally rolled my eyes and thought, how many people are just trying to get attention, drawing it away from the panelists disrespectfully? Is this online behavior and real-life behavior only as mature as the junior high lunch room?

On the other hand, if all the panelists preach about user-centered content, then when the choir stages an uprising, the preacher should be able to adjust his message to fit the audience. Right? I really admired Tom’s quick thinking. I was admiring the way that Tom handled the panel, ensuring that the podcast recording turns out well also, by having each speaker introduce themselves so that listeners later can identify voices while listening.

But enough about the conflicts and struggles going on between panelists, interviewers, and SXSWi attendees. This year, my interaction with other attendees has been the most exciting and fun for me.

Before and after the social media metrics talk, I befriended two guys from Washington, DC, and Summer from Austin who were all sitting around me.

I ended up giving a ride up Sixth Street to David, one of the guys from DC, and he and I had the nicest conversation on the way to BarCamp. I had asked about the conversations that occur on wikis and how interesting it was that the WoWiki panelist George Pribel said they never want to answer how to or troubleshooting questions on their wiki, that they only wanted articles and discussion around strategy. I said that as a tech writer, I was looking for the best use of wikis for content, but since we usually live nearest to and offer the most value to the customer support department, our wikis would be shaped more towards howto and troubleshooting information. However, best practices and strategy wikis might be more easily shaped for conversational articles, so, which was the better approach? His answer was spot on and an excellent example that will stick with me. He said, it’s just like the real world conversations you have in a crowd. If you and I are talking about movies, and someone comes up and starts talking about their favorite restaurant, we would politely inform them that we’re talking about movies, and could you take your food conversation elsewhere, maybe to the person sitting next to me? It’s a matter of staying on topic. With wiki design, I would conclude, you might want to prepare for two audiences (and two types of conversations), just like Lisa Dyer has done at Lombardi Software.

After attending David’s talk, WhiteHouse 2.0 at Barcamp, I learned that he’s former White House Internet and Communications Director David Almacy! He started RSS feeds and podcasts on iTunes and Tivo for the president’s white house. He wrote a Barney Cam script that got posted on Youtube and had over 25,000 views that season. As it turns out, he has two daughters nearly exactly the same age as my two sons. Our youngest kids were born within three days of each other. He was so nice and professional, a knowledgeable expert who is also willing to share his experiences. Prior to the social media metrics talk, I babbled about how I was a blogger for Ynema and Tom on talk.bmc. Little did I know of my fellow attendees level of experience with social media, but I was so pleased that David didn’t try to prove just how much more knowledgeable (and famous) he is than I. Instead he just answered my questions and truly listened to me.

I’m still amazed at the serendipitous meetings and conversations. Yes, the attendees make the conference interesting, and the panelists are bravely facing those attendees.

Subscribe to the comments for this post

Stories from SXSWi 2008 - BarCamp Austin III (BarCampAustin3)

Steve Carl already wrote up his notes from BarCamp Austin and I enjoyed his viewpoint very much. This was only my second BarCamp experience, and this year, I decided to take the plunge and actually volunteer to present. Whurley was very encouraging despite my inexperienced questions. “What’s a badge that you wear vs. a badge for your blog?” for example. There are graphics for each, as it turns out. The graphics are completely awesome, and the t-shirts were great, arriving despite an actual train derailment preventing the first shipment from arriving on time.

For those not familiar with the BarCamp format, it’s an unconference where you show up in the morning and put your session into one of the time slots on a white board or on a post-it note. The wiki also had sign-up schedules but the hand-written timeslots at the event win over the wiki page.

The week before BarCamp, I went to the wiki’s Sessions page, clicked the Edit button, and wrote up a short description of a session called Hug the XO. I basically wanted to see if others could bring their XO laptops and I could show them the tricks I’ve learned recently, plus run the Sugar emulation on my Dell laptop.

Getting to Idea City

(photo by Chad Hanna from theotherpaper on flickr)

The morning of BarCamp, getting to BarCamp turned out to be more difficult than I had planned. I got downtown by 9:00, but couldn’t find the Silver Dillo to ride over to 6th and Lamar to GSD&M’s Idea City. So, I took a few touristy photos of Ester’s Follies and the row of SegCity’s Segways, turned around and went back to the Austin Convention Center. I attended a 10:00 SXSW Interactive session, Creating Findable Rich Media Content, and then went back to Sixth street seeking the ‘Dillo. I walked about five blocks until I was past Congress Avenue when I saw a Silver Dillo sign and a person waiting at the sign, then turned and looked up the street to see the trolley coming our way. I double-checked with the woman waiting to make sure there wasn’t a charge since I was silly enough to have not gotten cash out, and sure enough, it’s a free ride. I boarded the Dillo and was on my way.

Getting into BarCamp

Idea City itself is an incredible workplace, full of creative vibes and a wonderful open design with full windows in front. Steve Carl greeted me, I registered with a cool registration application that Twittered my arrival to @barcampaustin (very cool), I had my picture taken for the flickr photo stream, and Steve and I proceeded to the schedule board to see where I could fit in my pres. I really felt more like doing a demo than a full-fledged presentation, so I was happy to see that the demo room had a free half-hour slot at noon. I drew little XO icons on a post-it, titled it “Hug the XO” and headed upstairs to figure out the room layout. On the way up, I saw my old BMC buddy Cote, and ran into Decibel, a good friend of my husband’s, and also met Snax finally, having friends of friends of hers.

Hugging the XO

In the demo room, I hooked up my laptop and ran the Sugar emulation image downloaded from the RedHat Site by using QEMU. In emulation the Activities run pretty quickly, and it’s very easy to display on a large screen. There’s discussions surrounding a projection display for the XO itself, but it’s easiest to emulate for me.

I showed Turtle Art which is really exciting to programmers. People expressed an interest in showing the XOs at Codemash because there’s a grassroots Kidsmash that happens in parallel, so I’ll definitely be following up with Josh on that idea.

I also learned some neat tricks to get deeper into the XO. One way to view the files on the flash memory without using a command line is to launch the Browse Activity and type file:///home/olpc/ as the URL. Now that is a handy shortcut.

I also learned that you can transfer files to and from the XO by using scp from the Terminal Activity by reading the XO setup user guide at OLPC Austria. First, get the IP address by typing iwconfig at the prompt. Then, you can use these instructions:

To upload the file test.py from a pc to the xo (into /home/olpc), use: scp FILE_NAME USER@IP:TO_DIRECTORY

scp test.py olpc@192.168.0.2:/home/olpc

To download the file /home/olpc/xo_test.py from the xo to a local pc, simply reverse the arguments:

scp olpc@192.168.0.2:/home/olpc/xo_test.py ./

We finally got the Acoustic Tape Measure Activity working correctly, and I’ve updated the instructions on Floss Manuals appropriately. Test your task instructions, I always say! Fortunately, this was a fun one to test. We had to have the laptops beep at each other at least 4-5 times before the measurements came into a reasonable range, starting out at nearly 200 meters, and eventually settling on just over 3 meters. Success! The noise they make to each other almost sounds like they’re spitting at each other. Kids will love this activity with a pair of laptops.

People really enjoyed the Speak Activity and we laughed to discover you could give it multiple eyes.

I think we had at least a dozen people stop by the demo room, and after the demo session was over, we set up two of them near the lunch pickup line. Steve was nice enough to “babysit” the XOs while I went back to some afternoon SXSWi sessions, and he said he thinks at least 100 people got to see and try out the XOs for themselves. We downloaded Flipsticks, played some Tam Tam Jam, showed off the Browse Activity, surfing to any URL we needed to, and generally had a great time. We met other XO owners and I told them about the XO-Austin users group, and told everyone they could meet us at Las Manitas on Sunday for an XO meetup. I’ll write another story about my lunch meeting with SJ Klein from OLPC, Robert Nagle, the XO-Houston user’s group organizer, and Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Institute (OSI). We had a great time together.

Summing it up

This experience was such a great opportunity for me to talk to people about things I believe in (kids, technology, and education) while having fun being a technical writer. I was intimidated initially because I’m not a programmer, and so I wondered if I’d be questioned for even volunteering to present, but I realized that no matter how technical I was, I would be less technical than someone in the room and more technical than someone else in the room. So, the correct action to take is to share the knowledge you have and listen to others to learn more about the topics that interest you.

My only regret from BarCamp is not staying longer for Dawn Foster’s talk about Community Management. I had asked my husband to meet me at the Convention Center with my two sons so we could go to Screenburn together, but after seeing how intimidated my four-year-old would have been by the shoot-em-up video games there, I cancelled on them and wished I had stayed at BarCamp longer. I’ll just have to settle for reading Dawn’s notes about her BarCamp experience instead.

Subscribe to the comments for this post

Taking the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop to the preschool classroom

What can you teach with the XO laptop? I’m still pondering that question for US-based classrooms. I’m reading the news from Birmingham Alabama and the blog entries from Dallas-Fort Worth Texas school systems with interest. Apparently you can buy a certain minimum of XO laptops if your school district or other group wants to incorporate them into their learning activities. Sign up at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Laptop_requests. With some grassroots fundraising efforts, a large-scale purchase of XO laptops seems attainable, perhaps even for Austin ISD.

Last week’s post with a picture of my four-year-old using the XO at our dining room table generated a response that a picture shows it all. I’d say that these pictures capture even more of the spirit of the OLPC project, showing a preschool teacher and two students have a blast with them, taking pictures of themselves, each other, and even taking pictures of the others’ XO.

I’ll also attest to the durability and sturdiness of these laptops. My son was walking quite quickly in the classroom with it (okay, maybe even running, but it’s not like he runs with scissors!) and tripped and fell with it. He was unhurt, these kids bounce back unbelievably from falls, and I was equally impressed with the complete durability that the XO displayed even when it probably took a bounce on the carpeted classroom floor.

So, what am I teaching with the XO?

My first session with the kids focused mostly on TamTamMini and Turtle Art, both auditory and visually appealing. These are four-year-olds, so they’re a little young for the target age for these laptops. The target age is about 6-12 years old. But, they figured out the touchpad quickly (and some, like my son, want the touchpad to allow for a mouseclick event when tapped like my Dell laptop responds, but not so with the XO touchpad.)

The kids also crowd around the screen and want to touch everything, which is fine, until I want to do the Turtle Art demonstration which involves clicking Project, and then clicking the icon for Samples and then waiting and then opening a sample file. But they were rewarded for their hands-off stand-off with bubbles and rainbow colors.

In Turtle Art, I thought I’d always have to open the Blocks menu and drag the “clean “puzzle piece out, then click it to get the full starting effect. However, I just discovered that many of the samples have the clean block out already, it’s just hidden behind the menu. I finally figured out to click the hide, erase, or stop buttons to have the turtle stop mid-way through his task. The kids liked the Turtle Art demonstration as well and asked for more. I must admit, I didn’t feel like I was teaching them anything, but these are four-year-olds. With repetition and some more ideas we could build several learning opportunities around that Activity, I believe. I just got a great PDF file showing how to make the turtle draw letters, and I intend to use this demonstration for my next visit.

The next session I attempted to get the Acoustic Tape Measure Activity to work, but it failed miserably. I think it’s because I didn’t go to the Group view and Invite the other XO to the Activity. We’ll try again another day, after I’ve done some more testing.

I also introduced the Record Activity and this was a huge hit for photos. I didn’t show them how to record audio or video, thinking I’d save that for another day. The pictures it takes are 640 x 480, and quite nice with natural lighting. See examples at the XO Photos group on flickr. In a future update of the XO, EXIF data will be available on the photos taken with the XO, and Flickr can then identify the source of the photo as an XO. I’ll have to upload some of the photos the kids took.

One kid even took a picture of his behind with it, reaching way back to push the O button on the game keypad (a nice shortcut way to take pictures with the Record Activity so that you don’t have to use the touchpad and X button click!) His teacher and I laughed so hard at his ingenuity and problem-solving - just to get a picture of his bottom.

Who else has taken their XO into a classroom setting, and what are you learning and teaching with the XO? I’d love to hear more, and I’ll be at SXSW Interactive and BarCamp Austin as well so please do say hi if you see me there.

Subscribe to the comments for this post

SXSW Interactive 2006 takeaways

This year’s Interactive conference was interesting to say the least, because I was too sick to attend two day’s worth of sessions. So, I’ve been listening to the podcasts of the sessions I really wanted to go to but missed. The fine folks at SXSWi have also made videos available online for sessions misssed.

The Dooce/Kottke keynote had me laughing aloud while I listened. From Jason asking Heather if she had seen her Wikipedia entry, noting that it said at the bottom “both Heather and husband remain unemployed” to Heather commenting that a subscription model for blogging for money gives people the sense the they are owed something, and when Jason went on a 2 week vacation during the year, Heather said “Bastard took my money and went to Asia with it” both of them cracked me up constantly. Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry has been changed to say “They currently remain self-employed.” My guess is that someone changed it during the session. At South By SouthWest Interactive most audience members are multitasking with an open laptop and IMing their friends or liveblogging during the sessions.

One of the reasons this was such a great session was the complete opposite nature of the two speakers — female/male, extrovert/introvert, personal blogger/personality purposely removed blogger, Heather’s married with a two-year-old daughter, Jason’s getting married in two weeks, Heather lives in Salt Lake City and is a self-proclaimed “house wife,” Jason’s living in New York City. Their blog styles are completely different and it’s likely their audiences are different but with a lot of overlap (they’re arguably the two most popular bloggers out there today). Certainly the audiences they have in their heads are different, according to the session. Jason says his are the “bored at work network” and Heather thinks hers are mostly women either with kids or trying to have kids.

In my mind, the main reason they were chosen as opposites for this keynote is because both “went pro” in the past year, blogging for a living. Heather chose ads as her method of payment, and Jason chose a subscription model (1500 “micropatrons” paid him an average of $30 each). I’d describe this keynote as a great match up, great format (they asked each other questions while sitting opposite each other in overstuffed armchairs), great questions for each other (the audience questions were pretty dull and uninspired) and a great idea, whoever thought of it. I was more entertained than educated by this session which was fine with me. I have no current intentions of blogging for a living. (Yes, I don’t consider this arrangement of corporate blogging to be blogging for a living, there are definitely other tasks I do for BMC that are my “living”.)

Read this Real SXSW post to get a funny insider look at what goes on at SXSWi, which involves random encounters that lead to many more connections and podcasting in the streets.

I also attended BarCamp Austin at lunchtime on Saturday and met some interesting people, Alex Muse from Dallas was one, and I had a nice short chat with Michael Cote, formerly at BMC but now analyzing and blogging for RedMonk. BarCamp is an informal meetup where you chose sessions to present and then could listen to presentations all day, given by fellow barcampers.

Subscribe to the comments for this post