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Strategies for Successful Introvert (Un)Conference Attendees?

In late August, the organizers have yet to finalize a date, Vancouver will hold BarCamp-style conference titled, appropriately, BarCamp Vancouver. I've started a PubSub feed for the unconference, which I will attend. After BarCamp Toronto, while waiting for my fligh back home at the airport, I started writing out my thoughts about that unconference in particular and unconferences in general (keeping in mind that I have only attended the first day of one of them, of course). Joey explained the concept of BarCamp (really well, I might add), and he says that the confusion about the philosophy of "no spectators" applies “doubly so for events with programmers”, mentioning that 75% of them classify themselves as introverts. It's not clear, though, what he prescribes, so my article, still in heavy drafting mode, will attempt a prescription.

Traditional speaker-audience conferences do not challenge introverts to participate, because nobody, not even extroverts, is invited to participate. Most of them, however, are so far stabs at the dark, so I'm wondering, what tips do you have in order to become successful introvert conference and unconference attendees? I'm particularly interested in strategies for unconferences, since they challenge introverts to speak up and participate, something introverts have trouble doing in loud places with lots of strange people. Extroverts and introverts alike both have experiences worth sharing, so please don't exclude yourself if you fit one of either categories (or even those that fit in both columns A and B).

My Green Towel

Today I'll be taking around my green towel in remembrance of Douglas Adams who died in 2001. He was far and away my favourite writer of fiction (and still is), who had a deep understanding of science and comedy, using the former as the plot device for the latter. I've read his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series twice (the first book 3 times), as well as every book other than Last Chance to See. (Don't worry, it's on the list.) Milan has a nice tribute to the man, and you can listen to a sound clip about towels from the radio show. See also Darren and other froods who know where their towels are.

Too Big and Too Complicated?

Kris reflects on today's China Business Forum at the Wosk Centre: “This is the perfect way to spend the day before my first ever business trip to Beijing... I'm learning a lot and it's calming my nervousness about the trip. There sure does seem to be a lot of opportunities to companies looking to grow into new markets, but I'm looking forward to hearing people talk more about the social and environmental impacts of China's explosive growth and rise to power. ¶ Can the massive amount of wealth being generated by this boom be used to promote positive change in China and around the world? How will China keep the gap between rich and poor from widening? Will the ultimate cost of the environmental degradation that is taking place as part of this growth ultimately be its downfall?”

Some of the issues not addressed in the forum were environmental and social pressures China faces as it moves its huge rural population into urban centres. Alan Carrol came close, mentioning environmental remediation as a growth area for the Chinese economy twice in his presentations and, in a general sense (though only very briefly relating it to China) calling the world's water shortage a more urgent problem than global warming. (I wonder if some people think he's off message by calling it "global warming" and not "climate change".) The social pressures from daily demonstrations by factory and mine workers, the almost complete lack of political rights weren't on the minds of the participants, or were brushed off: one speaker said China is "too big and too complicated" for human rights, and another said "the chaos [in China] is quite wonderous". Granted this was a forum about doing business in China, not a forum about the country's problems and solutions, but few of the speakers even paid lip service to the problems.

A Blurry, Reflective Me

Kris, hopping on the bootleg wifi provided by yours truly, has already posted a couple of photos from the China Business Forum here at the Wosk Centre for Dialogue: one featuring a blurry, reflective me and another from the introductory remarks. Time passes and Kris posts more photos of me, paying rapt attention and "networking" with a couple of execs from James Hoggan & Associates. The seminar isn't as boring as sleepy-head would lead you to believe.

Wosk Morning

Wosk Centre for Dialogue

Writing this too-early-for-me in the morning at Simon Fraser's Wosk Centre for Dialogue, where I'm attending the China Business Forum as part of China Access 2008 Seminar about BC businesses in China. As Megan and Kris point out, Raincity Studios and Bryght made it in The Vancouver Sun yesterday (I work for Bryght, and as further disclosure, the article's author is a friend from university, though I didn't know she wrote it until reading the article). The Wosk Centre has plush chairs, wifi, and power, so it's a good thing I thought to bring my power adapter this morning. I'll try to take notes, photos and maybe even some blurry video.

Access

Robert Scales and my coworker Kris Krug (of Raincity Studios and Bryght respectively) are headed to China soon. Of course, as somewhat of an expert on China (see my 'china' tag, which gets syndicated over at Watching China), I'm jealous that they're going without me, but I'm excited for them as well. They, along with Raincity's Megan Cole have written a few announcements about the upcoming China Access event in Vancouver to kick off their trip: "Are You Taking Advantage of the China Trend", which was cross-posted to Raincity's weblog, asks whether BC businesses are ready to find opportunities in the Middle Kingdom, especially as China takes the spotlight during the 2008 Olympics; Kris has an announcement about the business forum on May 24th, which I'll be attending at the Wosk Centre for Dialogue. I'll be following along, living vicariously through Kris' photos tagged with 'china' on Flickr, not to mention Robert's. Yet another space to watch is Daily Vancouver's coverage of the Beijing Olympics.

Uncaffeinated

CN Tower As Seen from 215 Spadina

Drupal Camp Toronto is winding down, and tomorrow and Sunday comes BarCamp Toronto. David Crow has some interesting advice about attending a BarCamp, which helped me worry less about not having something to present about. We (my Bryght colleauges Boris, who already posted from the airport in Vancouver, Roland, who has posted some video leading up to the camp, and Mark from Raincity Studios) got in last night around midnight and I didn't get to sleep until somewhere around 3:30 AM. (That's not a complaint!) Today, as I mentioned at the Drupal Camp introductions, I felt "uncaffeinated". BarCamp should be better, as it starts later. I'll be attending the Sigur Rós concert at Massey Hall after the unconference, and Sunday is up in the air. I haven't taken a lot of photos at Drupal Camp, but the roof on 215 Spadina provided me with <a href=http://www.justagwailo.com/flickr/2006/05/12/5712">a nice view of CN Tower and downtown Toronto.

The Awful, Contradictory Advertising Network

In the spirit of 43 Thongs, I introduce The Dreck, the awful, contradictory advertising network. If I spent more time on it, it could have been funnier, but as is, it's a parody of The Deck, the exclusive, almost haughty ad network for high-traffic sites by designers. (My site is low-traffic, and I'm not a designer.) The sites in the network that I read regularly: Kottke.org, whose micropatron initiative I supported; Daring Fireball, which I am a paying member of; and Waxy.org. For sites that are included in an ad network that target design professionals, they don't feature a lot of writing about web design (maybe that's why it's “web and design” and not "web design"?). Both Andy Baio and John Gruber linked to or mentioned Jason Kottke's article about joining, and it seemed a little self-congratulatory (especially Jeffrey Zeldman's announcement), and therefore ripe for mockery. The sales material for The Deck says the following:

We're picky about the advertising we'll accept. We won't take an ad unless we have paid for and/or used the product or service. Sell us something relevant to our audience and we'll sell you an ad.

No word on whether what those in the ad network actually think of the product. And who is the "we"? Does that mean that everybody has to buy the product? I'd love to see, in the ads on each individual site, a link to a review by that site's author, with the disclosure that they're part of the network. But enough soapboxing: The Deck at this writing does not validate HTML 4.01. For the sole purpose of showing them up, my parody validates using modern XHTML 1.1.

You'll note the placement of a Google ad: I put that there because I thought it would be funny. (Do you agree?) Regardless of its comedic value, I will donate all revenue from that ad to the Vancouver Community Network, a non-profit Internet service provider that hosts websites and provides dial-up (among other services) for non-profits and low-income residents of the Lower Mainland. I'd hate to make money of this kind of thing.

The Assertion of a Right to Behave That Way Earned That Right

James G. Poulos: <q cite="http://pomoco.blogspot.com/2006/05/preliminary-notes-on-community.html>the requisite component of community was self-identification, and the requirement for a person who desired to personally express freely the identity of his community was that person's declaration of his membership in that community. To repeat for emphasis: the right to publicly behave the way one's community behaved was triggered by one's behaving that way in public. The assertion of a right to behave that way earned that right, because the standard of judgment for the existence of a community had become the declaration of community identity itself. Whereas Adam had come up with names for the animals as he saw them, communities came into being as they were named.

You can almost hear him running out of breath when he writes “[h]eterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual impulses combine with the authoritative weakness of marriage, the commonplace of contingent, semicommitted monogamous relationships, and the prevalence of socially-encouraged fantasies of entitlement and commercially-heightened jealous interest in new sexual experiences to make small-group socialization comparatively less enjoyable for people who seek community for other satisfactions” and the sentence-paragraph “[t]he role of psychology in destroying the civilized ritual of social distance at close quarters by democratizing art and sex, destroying discourse by democratizing history into personal narratives of identity narcissism, and destroying community by democratizing the will to power into the claiming of a right to whatever is desired is imperative to our theoretical understanding of community in culture.” It took me a couple of reads to wade through the presented i.e. the intersection of community and identity as well as sexual politics and psychology. I've been trying to figure out what it means to either build a community around something or how to bring together an already-existing community. Every group is now calling itself a community, but it gets worse: the concept of 'nation' and 'citizenship' is diluted when fans of a professional baseball team can call themselves that, not to mention have a sprawling Wikipedia page written about them. (That, says the guy who registered the bluejaysnation.com and canucksnation.com domains.)

My favourite quote about community still remains that of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett: “Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word 'community' were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.” This comes close to point #4 in James Poulos' piece, the idea that a 'majority community' is a contradiction in terms.

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