I just got back from a weekend at Baa Camp (aka KiwiFoo), it's been great time! If you are interested in more then my personal notes, Kim Hill showed up and did a three hour show with some of the attendes (the web site says that audio archives of the show are only available for four weeks).
The Technological Singularity
- This was a long lasting and wide ranging discussion on singularies, mostly focusing around the idea of a technological singularity.
- To me the idea of a technological singularity is that machines become able to create machines better then people can, with the key point being that humanity stops being a bottleneck.
- There was a lot discussion about if we had lived through singularities previously (eg. the agricultural or industrial revolutions).
OpenID
- The government of Estonia has decided to provide OpenID creditials to all of it's residents. Sounds very interesting, but it does make me wonder about the security concerns around OpenID, especially around the known phishing issues.
- I'd never heard of i-names before and I'm not quite sure I get the point, it seems to be just another implementation of a name services ... and I already have my own domain to solve that. I'm not sure what value getting an i-name would provide?
- One security concern which had never occured to me is that if the domain you use for your OpenID URI expires ... anyone can be you. So if I ever let shand.net lapse, then whoever registers it next can be me to any site which I've logged into.
- I had a few really interesting conversations with Marek Kuziel about the stuff he's doing, including writing his own Django based OpenID software and trying to OpenID enable New Zealand.
Zef and Lulu
Zef and Lulu gave a great talk about how to use visual tools to communication with groups. It was mostly tangential to my needs but it was very interesting to see how they approach a group to get them involved in the design process. I particularly liked their "uber charts" which they use for plotting what a group thinks about something currently and what they think the eventual goal should be.
Open Data, Open Government
- When data sets are made publicly available interesting things happen. For example a company in Germany has apparently combinded average weather, roof area and angle and gis data to figure out which sites it makes sense to put solar panels on. Things like this can't happen until the data is available.
- There are sovernity issues with data, for example government departments using overseas web services for storing / managing data (eg. Basecamp) are being told to bring their data back to New Zealand so it can be protected by New Zealand law.
Wiki & Publishing
- Adam Hyde has been working on great project called "FLOSS Manuals".
- The manuals are largely being written by artists who are use the various pieces of software as part of their artistic work.
- One advantage of this is that artists are often trainers or run workshops so have excellent communication skills.
- Their web site is based on TWIki and they are in the process of releasing the various plugins they've created to make the process work.
- There are some other similar tools for using wikis as publishing tools. A plugin for PmWiki called Wiki Publisher and a Media Wiki project called Wiki Educator.
OpenID and Privacy
- People are interested in using OpenID as an authentication method for "high value" transations (eg. logging into your bank). The qustion posed was what would have to happen to make that feasible.
- There was a lot of confusion about authentication vs. authorisation ...
- To me it seems that in order to make high value transactions feasible via OpenID you would have to vest some entity with the authority to vouch for people (eg. the goverment or Verisign). This almost completely removes what I love about OpenID, which is that it gives me the ability to control my own data.
- If you don't vest a third party with the authority to vouch for OpenID's then you're back to the web of trust which is never going to fly with the banks. Even if it did fly it would necessitate a publicly queriable social graph which has all sorts of scary privacy concerns (eg. insurance companies not giving you health insurance because one of your friends died of a heroin overdose).
Crafts
- There is a great NZ oriented online craft market called Felt.
- Ponoko is a fascinating company.
- There was a reasonable amount of discussion about wiki's, I did a quick informal survey and almost everybody in the room had used a wiki at work.
Next Year
I didn't give a talk this year, by the time I got my thoughts together all the slots were used up! Next year though I have a couple ideas ...
- Give a talk on infrastructure management (puppet etc)
- Give talk on wikis, their successes and their challenges
- Talk on wireless mesh networking?
- Share your favourite piece of obscure software