TagCamp Redux

Just back from TagCamp, which was a good experience - the people, the content and how it came about - everyone just jumped in and got behind it and made it happen. What an great group of people.

People who haven’t attended ask “what are these meet-ups like?” I’ve heard people speculate that they are parties (If you mistake the “bar” in barcamp as a reference to drinking, it’s probably not for you), geekfests, business conferences (ugh!), simply another manifestation of Bubble 2.0, etc.

At TagCamp we had a peak of about 140 people. More than half of those, by show of hands, came from out of town, which was really cool, given that the event wasn’t technically more than a wiki until the first person arrived Friday. What faith.

There were technical sessions throughout the event - by individuals who prepared to share thoughts, proposals, findings, etc. For example Nitin Borwankar presented Tag Schemas and Danah Boyd presented “socio-cultural aspects of tagging”. These were informal - i.e. if you had something to say, you just added you name and title of your presentation to the wiki - yet thoughtful. Sometimes you had standing room only, other times there were 8 or 10 people in an intimate discussion over some technical detail of an approach to tagging.

What was just as valuable was the mixing and exchange going on in the common areas. There’s no substitute for face to face interaction to get to know people and connect. It was great to hang out with thoughtful people, whose blogs you’ve enjoyed reading, but hadn’t gotten to know in person. Some people got together and actually coded up stuff - like some cool improvements to the Tagcamp.org website itself. People took notes, blogged, and hung out. The last person didn’t go to sleep until after 4 am Friday, and most were back at it just after 9 am Saturday.

TagCamp ran pretty spontaneously. There was some pre-production, thanks to Susie Wyshak who really did have to do quite a bit of logistics to make it happen, and Rohit Khare who provided physical space. But the rest ran itself: the agenda, the publicity, t-shirts, schedule, speakers, equipment, clean-up, was all done by volunteers. One of the coolest moments was when Red Bull themselves showed up with ice cold Red Bull for us - on them. I guess they know how much Red Bull is consumed by folks like us.

People have already made plans to continue to work on a number of projects together. We’ve agreed to post info online, so anyone interested in jumping in is welcome.

So why have things like TagCamp?
Okay, so I don’t speak for everyone, just making a few observations, and perhaps some speculation.

1. The subject area is interesting. With foocamp and barcamp it’s open source, collaboration, new technology, new ideas, etc. In the case of TagCamp, there’s clearly something happening with tags. At first Chris Messina and I worried that tags were to specific to hold an event only about them. We thought if even 20 or 30 people got together it would be fun and there’d be something interesting to learn. However, it was proved to us that there was much more enthusiasm for the idea than we’d anticipated. Tags are an interesting way to represent information, that is democratic, personal, spontaneous and requires minimal structure. And numerous applications are emerging. So people want to explore the subject, sometimes for actual projects they are working on, sometimes just out of curiosity.

2. There’s a positive sense of openess in the community. People are genuinely willing to share and exchange not just ideas, but code and models. Perhaps there’s a selfish motivation for some, but I tend to think it’s more of a cultural phenomenom. We collectively see the benefits of sharing, most of us benefit from things that have been shared with us, and we don’t mind - in fact, enjoy - sharing back. Heck, nearly all our projects, whether as businesses or research projects or pet projects, rely heavily on open source software, and many of us have open-sourced some or all of our own work.

3. Some of the costs of doing business have come way down. Hiring good people hasn’t gotten less expensive. But the software and the gear and the bandwidth are significantly less expensive than in the past. That means that talent is the key resource, and that a few talented people can do an awful lot with a little - which just feeds point two above.

4. Techies just keep innovating. Many people have weighed in on “What Web 2.0 is”. I think I’ll leave that subject for others, or perhaps a longer post another time, but I will say this. Between 2000 and 2004, the financial markets (e.g. sources of venture capital, revenue, and options for liquidity) were extremely limited, and therefore it was tougher to start things. As conditions improved, especially for consumer Internet services, things started to emerge, and it gradually began to be called “Web 2.0″. But I think the innovation was always moving forward, because techies just like building things. Sometimes the markets favor them and they have more resources and rewards for building things - but they’d build things anyway. The pace just changes, because the synergy of lots of people having the resources to build things stimulates further creation, and more risk taking - leaving a job to start something, for example - if there is some anticipated reward.

5. Sharing is not just the subject matter, but also the method. A lot of the projects themselves are about sharing and are community generated. Social networks, blogging, podcasting, wikis, tagging, etc. And the tools we use are themselves collaborative - blogs, wikis, Flickr, open source. So it makes sense that a lot of people who are actively involved in these kinds of projects would respond to a collaborative approach to meeting and working together. It would be kind of strange if a bunch of people who were building, say a social network service, by day, wouldn’t be open to meet and collaborate with others.

6. A need to coordinate. If a bunch of people are working on things that have to connect to one another there needs to be some agreement. This can come in the form of industry standards, market domination, or ad hoc collaboration, depending on the forces at play. Most of us who are not in the position to assert standards by virtue of dominant market position (nor particularly like it when others do), or don’t have enough time or patience for the usual standards-body approach, favor getting something small and simple started and having those who have the most to gain or lose take an active voice. It’s also far easier to get something simple going. Some examples are RSS, microformats, opml, etc.

Bottom line: TagCamp was fun, and I got to make some new friends and increased my respect for others. I plan to continuing to work with others on some tag projects, and hope nothing spoils the really cool attitude people have right now, so we can keep having things like tagcamp. Thanks everyone for making it so much fun!

Cheers,
Michael

Tags: tagcamp, tags, web2.0

30 October 2005 | observations, events | Comments