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BarCampPortland 2007 – Visual Communication of Information

Information Visualization

Types of information to display
- Calendars
- time lines
- presentation
- geographical mapping
- mapping social networks
-

The japanese are famous for coming to a presentation with one slide with lots
of stuff on it. And spend the hour explaning it.

Teds Talks - Gap Minder - www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92

Visual thesaurus - Making it dynamic

Animate a series of snapshots over time.

the context of information is important.

Shopping by color - http://etsy.com

measuring the health of the community as a fish tank:
Clarity of the water
number of bubbles
which fish

arthur brock fishtank

think Geek usb bunny ? nabaztag: the wifi enabled "ambient" bunny

http://www.nabaztag.com

Way finding

Book: "Way Finding"

Presentation of Dashboards

Fishtank is a form of dashboards

Different metaphors
- using colors as a measurment
- mapping network into Doom
- mapping network into sounds of the country (birds + water )
-

read more poetry

The icons on the OLPC laptop are incomprehensible. the bike warnings by the streetcar tracks are uneqivocal...

http://Visualcomplexity.com

http://infothetics.com

http://mapmind.org

people in general do not make leaps to understanding things - jean

Discussions about cross-cultural icons.

What is the thing that makes meaning? What is the picture that makes people
see the meaning of the image.

dialogue mapping
compendium is the tool for diagramming the oure of a conversation

Visual Search engine

http://www.kartoo.com

http://www.quintura.com

http://cnet.com - each article has a sidebar with contextual links

http://www.theyrule.net - interactive network visualization of the connections between the boards of directors of major corporations

http://press.jrc.it

http://www.visualthesaurus.com

James Burke - Connections
Tell a story to align the relationships between the facts.

yahoo vs google as presentation metaphores.

Tools

GraphViz - http://www.graphviz.org
compendium - http://www.compendiuminstitute.org

Resources

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92

Visual Thinking by Robert Horne

http://www.edwardtufte.com

From the pibb session:

*
I have a moonedit of InformationVisualization going

Saturday, May 12, 2007 5:22:30 PM
www.ian.dees.namehttp://www.ian.dees.name/

*
Visualize... or search?
*
Everyone's bringing their own take on visualization:
*
...some with social networking tag clouds...
*
...some with literal, geographic maps....
*
...some with novel "search by color" (http://www.etsy.com)
*
Folks mentioned Hans Rosling's data visualization video. "Worth the 20 minutes" seems to be the verdict.

Saturday, May 12, 2007 5:24:12 PM
semaphoriahttp://semaphoria.myopenid.com/

*
visualization of information - visualcomplexity.com; etsy.com, mapmind.org

Saturday, May 12, 2007 5:24:22 PM
www.ian.dees.namehttp://www.ian.dees.name/

*
Someone's finally mentioned Tufte.

Saturday, May 12, 2007 5:24:48 PM
cygnushttp://cygnus.myopenid.com/

*
/me idly wonders if Brian Ellin is watching this thread. he'd be interested.

Saturday, May 12, 2007 5:25:10 PM
www.ian.dees.namehttp://www.ian.dees.name/

*
Fish tank to vlsualize health care

Saturday, May 12, 2007 5:26:11 PM
semaphoriahttp://semaphoria.myopenid.com/

*
infosthetics.com
*
wayfinding!

Saturday, May 12, 2007 5:27:49 PM
www.ian.dees.namehttp://www.ian.dees.name/

*
Someone mentioned the "USB bunny;" I think they meant the Nabaztag (http://www.nabaztag.com/).
*
Oops -- the auto-formatter sucked in the punctuation -- should be http://www.nabaztag.com
*
Nature sounds as server background noise
*
"Doom" interface as network diagram. Demons == daemons?!? When you kill a process, you _really_ kill a process!
*
"Reducing the cognitive blow"

Saturday, May 12, 2007 5:34:05 PM
www.ian.dees.namehttp://www.ian.dees.name/

*
Pictograms are more cross-cultural than icons

Saturday, May 12, 2007 5:36:32 PM
www.ian.dees.namehttp://www.ian.dees.name/

*
"People in general do not make leaps in understanding things." --Jean

Notes by John Sechrest and Nathan Young

BarCampPortland 2007 – Redundancy and Load Balancing

Problems:
----------------------
Performance
redundancy

Technology:
----------------------

MemCacheD

CARP
- ucarp
- fires virtual ip up/down
- takes a couple seconds
- dead simple

Heartbeat
- does not always fail over properly

pf/pfsync

mod_proxy
- looking at adding support for mod_perl for scripting

perlbal

Alteon

cfengine

SQL:
pgcluster

mysqlcluster
- cannot add and remove nodes at runtime
- only 254 nodes (clients or data sources) - hard limit

Anycast:
-

Misc:
-----------------------

BarCampPortland 2007 – Open Hardware Design

People doing Open Hardware:
-------------------------------
Google Summer of Code
GPLA

Options:
-------------------------------
FPGA
- Slow, but parallel, and cheap
ASICs
- 10 Million press cost, but that is for 1 Billion transitors
- Can buy a small peice of press
-

Misc Notes:
-------------------------------
PSU has a lot of open hardware available from their Rocket division.
- Open GPS modules
- 80211 rocket telemetry - cylidrical patch microwave patch antennas
- show up at an aerospace meeting

PDXBOT

conditions

BarCampPortland 2007 – Network Weavers Network

Session Leader: Steve Habib-Rose

neighbornetworking.com

Neighbor Nets, the concept of weaving networks between neighbors at a local level.

Incampus.com

Gracious Space

Network weaving
-----

Social Network analysis - What is more successful, resiliant, more powerful.
Mapping networks - taking a snapshot of the health of a social network.
How do we distribute systems in a way to make it thrive.
Weaving is being more intentional in doing that process.

A Group connected to the Emerging Futures network thought that they might
be able to learn from each other, and how to be better how to do it.

Community of people who like to build communities.

Directory
Discussion list
NetworkWeaver is the the Tag

NetworkWeaversGuild - profession of Network Weaving
certification
Reputation system
health care

Emerging futures network is a group that want to grow the field of social change
Using NetworkWeaving as a way to drive the conversation.
Field Maintenance Authority

Supporting some of the allied efforts like:
OGuild - http://www.oguild.com
Targeted Currencies network
Omidyar network for $15,000

Currencies are anything that incentivize a flow.
Monetary currencies are a subset.

Flow has movement.

Functions/metrics based on numbers often are used as repuation, but they don't
have very much meaning.

Quality relationships can support relationships between two different people who
don't know each other.

Steps:
------
Identity
Reputation
Expertise

The big advance of Linked-In is that they guard the permission to connect closely.

Local Organizing and the Panetary Brain

How do you communicate knowlege among people?

Resources
----------

http://www.oguild.org

http://www.emergingfutures.org

http://www.omidyar.net/home

http://www.networkweaving.com

http://www.bambora.com

http://www.aboutus.org/Category:networkWeaver:AreaOfFocus

http://www.wiserearth.org/user/habib

Regular meetings
Vega
20th and
2nd and 3rd thursday of the month

http://www.neighbornetworking.com

http://www.networkweavers.net

who is here
------------
Steve Neighorn
Todd kenefsky
john Sechrest
Geoffry Burling

Barry Amison (sp)
Ben Kaplan - Oregonian
Brad Upchurch - 3d Design, video production
Steve Habib-Rose
Jean Russell

Notes by John Sechrest

BarCampPortland 2007 – Intro To Haskell

Session Leader: Bart Massey

Bart Massey
Donnie Berkholz
John Sechrest
tim Bauman
Tim Savard
Jesse Hallett
Haven Hash
Iseff
Maurice Dodik
Jek
Phil Tomson
Sam Keen

What is haskell? And why should I care?

Bart thinks that Haskell is the next big thing.

Why? isn't C++ enough for anything?

Haskell is a functional programming language.

We build pieces that are so modular, so that mix and match is trivial.

What do you give up?
-Global Variables...
- Variables all together....

What is the difference between a name for a value vs a variable?
Variable is the mapping from a name to a location.
There is no location in haskell

In trade, you get modularity.

GHCI -

interactive , incrementally compiled language

It does static type checking.

no type declarations. The program guesses the type.

Open source community has adopted Haskell.

Haskell programming can be harder , because the lack of variables.
Indentation does matter
No brackets
Not end markers
it is case senstive
it does lazy evaluation
you can do type annotation

emacs count.hs

main = do
printCount 10
where

printCount 1 = putStrLn 1
PrintCount n = do
putStrLn (show n)
printCount ( n - 1 )

gch count.hs

[1,2,3] A list - First class objects
head [1,2,3]
tail [1,2,3]
let count x = x: ( count (x + 1) )

let y = count (1)

head y => 1
take 3 y => [1,2,3]

tail y => infinite list

Is there a way to track what code is run.
there is a profiler

Haskell is 15 years old.

How does haskell performance work
Ocamel ?
C?

As a matter of practice 2-200 Times slower than C.

Language shootout

Darcs is a source code control in haskell

WASH - Web in haskell

web apps in haskell

you get concurrency for free

tile :: Int -> Int -> [a] -> [[a]]
Currying

Tile _ _ [] = []

tile n o s =
let cur = take n s
rest = drop ( n - o ) s in
cur : ( tile n o rest)

peak s = ( maximum . map abs . map avg . tile 3 2 ) s

. means composition

Guarded patterns
Lambda calculus
Y combinator -> The function that expresses recursion as a foundation.

If you know ML , it does help.

A program you want to write quickly
pretty sure it is right the first time
get reasonable performance
Access to an active programming community

Resources
-----------

http://www.haskell.org

http://www.haskell.org/tutorial

svcs.cs.pdx.edu/git/ppg.git
truelevel.git

http://svcs.cs.pdx.edu/darcs/minichess

http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki

Notes By John Sechrest

BarCampPortland 2007 – Business 101 For Geeks

Session Leader: Carl Johnson

Who is here:

Marissa Anderson
John Sechrest
Keith Loffstrom
David Simmons
Mike Wills
Donnie Burkhold
Hans Friedrich
Lavonne Reimer
Todd Kenefsky
Carl Johnson
Ethan Selfridge
Mubashir Cheena
Andy Grover

How did you hear about things you needed to know:
* Personal experience
*
*
*

How many people do data driven decision making?
* How many use "usage data"? Yes
* Take it based on user groups
* User surveys need to be personal, clear on purpose of survey/contact

What are some big concerns in growing a business?
* Product improvement
* Payroll
* Building community among customers

Writing a business plan
* How formal is the process?
* Exploring the difference between staying small and doing "big stuff"

How do you learn what you need to learn to start a business?
* Get feedback about name, branding
* What is the audience going to be?
* Have a longer-term direction early on in the process -- this is a chicken/egg problem
* Geeks envision deep technical skills as a business attractor, but innovation is not necessarily foremost in the market. "The devil you know" has some value
* Difference between lifestyle business and a market-oriented business -- scalability; lifestyle business is tied up in the employee(s)

How to change from a lifestyle consulting business to a less personal business model?
* Lifestyle business -- revenue is based on the skills of the person(s)
* Lifestyle is more flexible, finger on the pulse of the industry
* Sticking to one thing can go obsolete in a few years

Habits for a large business do not scale to a small business!
* need to know every day how much cash you have, and don't waste it!
* set up a regular pattern of money management

Corvallis Business arc:
* Local SAO Pubtalk conversations
* Entrepreneur Forum - tech brainstorm
* SWOT Business Facilitation -
* Angel Investors Network
* Business Enterprise Center
* Local business clusters (E-tailing, Relocalization, High Tech, ... )

Business choices:
* Lifestyle vs "real business"

Where are the War Stories about things told
* CEO Roundtable
*

Can it be done virtually?

I would love to see a database of business plans.

Where can I find a good business plan?

Resources:
* http://www.filinginoregon.com
* http://www.oregonhightech.com/drupal/node/22 Researchers guide to commercialization

Notes by Marissa Anderson and John Sechrest

api

BarCampPortland 2007 – Building Your Business with Drupal

Drupal Portland Group
---------------------

groups.drupal.org/portland

Drupal sites
------------
* http://www.drupaled.org
* http://www.drupal.org
* http://www.sao.corvallis.or.us
* http://www.lug.corvallis.or.us
* http://www.blackpast.org
* http://www.theportlander.com
* http://www.lime.com
* http://www.kpsu.org
* http://www.benkaplan.org
* http://www.plugfinder.com

Drupal modules
----------------
* ubercart.org
* CCK+views
* User Node

Drupal Issues:
--------------
* Easy to set up
* Harder to maintain.

Notes by John Sechrest

BarCamp Portland 2007: Reflection

So there's this thing called BarCamp - (haven't heard of it? you have to check it out). This past weekend was the first BarCamp in Portland, and it went off amazingly well.

Though initial expectations were that it would be a good even if 100 people managed to show up, by Saturday morning there were over 250 people registered on the BarCampPortland wiki. Big thanks and props go out to the vendors, especially Jive, JanRain (and their Pibb platform), and CubeSpace, all of which put a lot of effort and time into the event - and can't forget Microsoft, for that wonderful dinner from the Nicholas they provided.

There were a lot of good sessions, and a lot of very interesting people at BarCamp, and I can't wait for another one!

Nathan Young introduced me to MoonEdit (and later, we discovered Gabby, though I have not had time to use it), and I set up a server Friday night. Saturday, Nathan, myself, John Sechrest, and others used it to take notes during the sessions, and after BarCamp was over, I was able to use the files on the server to put together all the notes. You can find the notes either in seperate blog posts here, or on the BarCampPortland page.

Session I attended:

• Enhancing User Experience
• Dig into Coding for the Browser
• IA Slam
• Open HArdware Design
• Redundency & Load Balancing Web Applications
• Hack Share

I'll see you all at the next BarCampPortland!