tuna melt

(I know, I'm supposed to be at that thing right now, but I need to brain dump before I go out and meet another group of people.)

Recent Changes Camp. I stopped in this afternoon, and I'm really glad I did. There's an exchange of ideas that happens at conferences like this one that's energizing in ways you just don't get from reading blogs and del.icio.us.

First I resisted the temptation to pick up Arlo's name tag. I'd just watched The Yes Men the night before, so it was very tempting to wear another name for a while. However, Arlo has enough personality and is known by enough people there that someone would have noticed. I ended up picking up a blank tag and putting my own name on it.

I stumbled in to a Glass Plate Game with Dunbar, which is a kind of conversation-driven game. But I can't tell you too much about that, because I quickly interrupted it to go to lunch.

After lunch, I had a short conversation in which someone asked me "Could you use OpenID with wireless access points?", which was an interesting question.

Then was some talk with folks who want a way to find not-so-standard specifications. There are specifications out there that define various protocols and file formats that aren't a part of any W3C or IETF document list. Where do you go to find them? How do you find out about new ones? "Freshmeat for specifications" was my description of it. Not the most exciting application in the world, but potentially useful. After all, the protocols we're building on at work (OpenID and YADIS) fall into this category. See PicaWiki.

I also met Kaliya there, which was nice, as I read her blog at work. It's always nice to be able to put a face and a voice with what you read.

Having exhausted that subject, that group went on to talk briefly about getting designers and artists more involved in Open Source projects, then I turned my back for a few moments to talk with some people about XRI and XDI and then they were recommending someone read Snow Crash and then I glanced away for a moment and then they were deep in a philosophical discussion about the nature of experience. I'm not really sure what happened there.

Next session we talked about web annotation systems. Lion had this idea he calls "phrase annotation", which has different properties than the traditional page annotation server, and involves subscribing to content from favored annotation providers which appears at relevant times. Someone took some notes at the session, I'd like to flesh out this idea a little more, I think has some significant cool potential.

Finally, I happened upon Brandon talking about Consensus Polling. He's got a process for building consensus in situations where you have an open-ended timeframe. I was told at lunch that I would appreciate this project, so I'm glad I got to hear him talk about it. Again, things that deserve a lot more consideration than I'm giving in this hurried post. See ByThePeople.net. Brandon is local to the Portland area here, but parts of his system mesh in many ways with a service just launched by some folks out east called Standpoint.

Alright. Brain dumped. Time to go out again before people wonder where I got lost.