2011/Sessions

Looking for Session Notes? They are right here!
We'll schedule the sessions on the day of the camp! See 2011/Schedule for an overall outline of the timeslots.

Feel free to brainstorm ideas of sessions you'd like to talk about, or you'd like someone else to talk about.

= Notes = Etherpad instance available at http://etherpad.opensourcebridge.org for collaborative notetaking. To create a custom named pad, go to http://etherpad.opensourcebridge.org/YOUR_GREAT_PAD_NAME (and then tell others in the sesssion what url you picked).

Once you're done, be sure to copy your notes back to the wiki page for the session!

= Have = Add your session ideas for things you want to talk / lead a discussion about. Be sure to add your name.

Publish Then Syndicate And Replicate
Presented by: Tantek. What are the best techniques for syndicating out from your indiewebsite to various social silos? E.g. setting up Atom+PuSH (mostly) works for syndicating into Buzz. Twitter requires calling their API. How about others? What's the best (most standard, most reliable, most realtime) way to syndicate into Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, etc.

That Old-Timey Plaintext Religion: Store your data in readable formats
Presented by: Tab Atkins. High-performance, high-traffic sites need complex, highly-tuned binary data storage techniques. One of the benefits of owning your data, though, is that your personal traffic tends to stay fairly low, which means you can optimize for other benefits. An important one is Data Readability, or ensuring that in the case of disaster your data can be read/recovered by a human or a simple script with minimal or no knowledge of the data-storage scheme. I've produced a small, easy-to-use JSON datastore in PHP that I'm currently using for all of my own site's data-storage needs. I'd like to run a session talking about the benefits of using well-understood plaintext formats for as much as possible, what the limits are, what the drawbacks are, and how to work around them.

Using Bittorrent to Federate Systems
Presented by: Brian Ledger. Let's look at the possibility of using Bittorrent technology to connect distributed systems without relying on central data stores. One possibility might be to use a bittorrent-like system to act as a repository of meta data for collections of items, such as tagging bookmarks.

Demographic Markup Language
Presented by: Amber Case. "On Hulu I've set my gender to Male and birthdate to 1973 in order to get advertising that I actually like. This is because I like ads for technology and ads with funny jokes in them. I’ve begun to do this on many other websites so I can get ads that aren’t as obnoxious. The issue is that my interests don’t match what I am on paper. I’d like to be able to define them myself, and I’m sure many would agree." read more

Own Your Phone Number
Presented by: Aaron Parecki.

What can hosted systems do to support the Indie Web?
'''Presented by: Ben Ward

Retweets, Reblogs, Faves and Hearts. What could Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress or any other hosted system do to better integrate content from elsewhere on the web, and what can they provide to the to help independent sites integrate smoothly with users of those services.

= Want = Stuff you'd like to see sessions about.

Finding content in a distributed world
There are many benefits of silos of data, such as a single place to go to search for information. Specific cases come to mind such as RSVP lists for events (see Plancast), posting photos of an event (Flickr), collections of recipes, etc. Until we can come up with a better solution for these situations, the silos will win. Google + Microformats have done a pretty good job so far of aggregating information from multiple sources in a way that everything can be found, but how can this be applied on a smaller and individual scale?

I would like to be able to list an event on my own website and allow others to RSVP to it in a way that reflects the action in their own networks as well as collects all the RSVPs on my own network. Until this problem is solved, there will continue to be silos like Plancast, meetup.com, upcoming.org, etc.

Another example of this is Delicious.com. One of the main reasons I used Delicious.com was because when I wanted to post a new bookmark, I would get excellent tag suggestions based on what tags were in my account and what other people tagged the link I was bookmarking. How can I get these excellent tag suggestions without Delicious.com being the central repository of tags for URLs?