Chatting and fueling up before the un-conference begins.

CloudCamp Chicago, a conference for people interested in a way of online computer facility distribution called cloud computing, was actually more of an un-conference. Dave Nielsen of cloudcamp.org, who has instigated dozens of CloudCamps around the world, uses principles of an Open Spaces meeting in his CloudCamps. (Here’s some background information on Open Spaces: http://www.openspaceworld.com/users_guide.htm) In a very small nutshell, the aim is to allow the participants to interact in the same un-constrained and productive manner of a typical conference’s coffee break time.

A CloudCamp is divided into four segments: Lightning talks, unpanel, breakout sessions, and a wrap-up.

The lightning talks were five minute speeches, with slides, presented by representatives of some of the event sponsors. This is a great way to get started. The speakers discussed how the technology, in the specific form of their companies’ services, works. And that is a big part of what many participants want to know. Five minutes is not a lot of time to talk, but it is enough time to raise a lot of questions. And questions were the fuel for the next segment.

Questions for the un-panel to answer.

The unpanel segment, which lasted about 30 minutes, began with no questions to ask and no panel to answer them. But we didn’t let that stop us. The facilitators, the volunteers from Chicago’s technology community who staged this CloudCamp, quickly gathered up some questions from the participants. Nielsen selected participants who admitted to being experts at cloud computing and let them field the questions.

In the third segment, the breakout sessions, participants put forward topics they wanted to discuss further and scheduled discussions of those topics over the following two hours. A few related topics were combined. Six breakout sessions, two sets of three one-hour sessions, utilized an adjoining room and two subsections of the main. I parked myself first in the “What is cloud computing?” session in the first half and then moved to the adjoining room for a discussion of the business aspects of cloud computing.

Organizing the breakout sessions at CloudCamp

At the end of each of the breakout sessions I attended, no one’s attention had been overtaxed. It was a little difficult to wind down the breakout sessions

One of the crucial parts of hosting a successful unconference of any kind has to be selecting the right venue. ITA was a great venue because it has just about everything a group could want in a location for sharing ideas. It is quiet and beautifully decorated. The lighting is adjustable over a wide range. The space is full of comfortable chairs. The central room is equipped with a wireless microphone system, in-ceiling speakers, video projector and screen, wi-fi and a dry erase board. It even has two retractable walls which could be used to divide the main room into three rooms. The adjoining board room has even comfier chairs, a conference table, and a large white board. The airy antechamber with sofas and pub tables makes a perfect place to serve lunch and snacks.

For me, the structure of the CloudCamp unconference is at once familiar and unfamiliar. The experience of an un-conference is quite different from most other conferences, meetings, seminars and conventions. But anyone who participates in online forums and discussion groups will find similarities to those channels of Internet-based communication. An unconference shares some of the best aspects of an online forum: Self-organized structure, democratic discussion leadership, focus on subjects of keen shared interest. Added to that are some great things that online forums don’t offer: Non-verbal communication, sandwiches, a reason to get out of the house, post-unconference drinks.

Learning can be fun.

See more pictures of this event here:

http://tinyurl.com/yjbnngm

Last weekend, I brought a camera to my extended family’s Christmas celebration. A talent show was the scheduled entertainment, so I knew there would be something to shoot.

I now have a tape full of my own family. Faces familiar to me telling stories about people I know. Because I let my brother run the camera for a while, there is even footage of me on my hard drive right now. The shoe is on the other foot.

I’ve heard that part of the training for police who use tazers is suffering at least one tazing themselves. The equivalent treatment for me, as a videographer, is to be videotaped riding a sled off of a snow pile or performing a sock puppet show. Then try to edit it. Ouch.

It’s a chance to develop empathy. It can be a lost virtue for a wedding videographer. Feeling a camera targeting me once in a while gives me a chance to feel the discomfort I am in the business of inflicting. When I snap open the lens cover of a video camera, relaxed people suddenly tense up like a herd of wildebeest sighting a lion.

Cameras are scary. I know I look goofy pretty often. But I’d rather not be the star of someone’s blooper reel. When my brother was recording me struggle to my feet after an unexpectedly bouncy sled ride, I just told myself all the things I usually tell other people: Forget about the camera. I’ll cut out the awkward bits later. You’ll look great. Marvelous, in fact.

By being on the other side of the lens sometimes, I can also tell the people I videotape “I know it ain’t easy.”

As a grown-up who has become a wedding videographer, I still focus in on the cake. The ritual cutting of it, anyway. It is the supreme king of Rituals after the Ceremony. I’ve never seen a wedding without a cake cutting. And it never fails to draw the attention of the entire crowd.

When I was just starting as a videographer, I wondered how cake cutting got to be such a big deal.

Video editing, fortunately, is the kind of work that solves mysteries. Pore over the footage, see the same event from three perspectives, trim it down to the essential moments, slow down, replay. I eventually saw what everyone was looking at.

Unbeknownst to the couple, they have just stepped into an Aristotelian drama trap. The cake is just bait. All six of elements of drama are there: spectacle, dialogue, plot, rhythm, character and theme.

Okay, the dialogue may be spare. And the scenery and costumes that form the spectacle are mostly held over from earlier events.

But force two people to share a knife and Snap! Instant plot. How many times have you willingly shared control of a knife handle with anyone? In my case, just once: September 16, 2006. Never once before or since. The unusual physical requirements of the ritual make drama unavoidable. It’s like a brilliantly designed improvisational acting exercise.

The drama plays out mostly in the rhythm of two people, freshly pledged to live life as a team, solving the problem of tandem confection service. The task is simple, but our two main characters must do it together. It’s like watching a three-legged race but with shiny cutlery. They have to stage themselves, fit in close enough to put each one’s hand on the same knife, decide on a place to cut, and guide the knife through the cake. Then serve it to a plate. Then feed each other.

A quiet discussion is conducted by the two characters as they work through all of this. It’s mostly looks and postures, gestures and sounds. Veterans of marriages know the couple have ahead of them a whole series of unexpectedly difficult domestic tasks. They crowd around the cake for a sweet slice of dramatic irony.

The theme of this drama is a message from our ancestors. Contained in the drama, which is embedded in the ritual, I read the snarky challenge: The two shall be as one, eh? Okay. Let’s see you cut out a piece of this cake, put it on a plate, and eat a couple bites. As one. Now play nice.

Piece of cake? Delicious.

I added this anecdote to my mental dossier on rural culture under “work_ethic/cant_leave_well_enough_alone” and kept listening.

They used to pickle lots of things. Things that I wouldn’t consider normal food. They pickled watermelon rinds. Eat the red part fresh, peel off the green part, then pickle the white part. Watermelons, in those days, had much thicker rinds. With modern watermelons, there is not much to work with between the green part and the red part. Which is too bad because, according to Grandma, rinds “make a good pickle.”

“Normal food” is a bit hard to define. While applying to participate in some medical testing today, I was told that my habit of vegetarian eating precludes me from participating in most of the studies. Participants generally need to have followed normal dietary patterns for at least the month before any study begins.

I can understand why pharmaceutical study participants should all eat the same kind of stuff. Under the banner of science, I can eat some animal flesh. It’s icky, but I can do it.

I asked how much meat I would have to eat in order to become normal again. The representative told me that’s a good question. With a slight change in speech cadence that indicated to me he had left the script, he suggested the “food pyramid”.

I’m impressed by the bold juxtaposition of absolutism and relativity demonstrated by the very existence of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005. Our bodies differ from those of our ancient ancestors only by individual permutation, yet these recommendations are mandated to expire every five years. Also, while Americans’ ancestry comes from all over the globe, this document is just “for Americans” and presumably does not apply to our cousins overseas.

“Normal”, it would appear, is a moving target. But what is normal meat consumption right now? At least until the new recommendations come out next year? This document says almost nothing about how much meat to eat. The closest thing I could find was this line:

When selecting and preparing meat, poultry, dry beans, and milk or milk products, make choices that are lean, low-fat, or fat-free.

And that’s just a conditional statement. “When selecting” it says. There is not a single line anywhere, that I can find, that actually recommends how much meat to eat. It even fails to explicitly recommend eating meat at all. Pickled melon rinds are also neither explicitly recommended nor proscribed.

A paper published in The Lancet, a journal which doctors ironically named for the medical tool most feared by patients, says average global daily meat consumption is about 100 grams. Actually, it’s way lower in poor countries and way higher in rich countries. In America, 250 grams is probably about average. A double quarter-pounder with cheese would roughly constitute average daily meat consumption for an American.

As I said, ick. But I can eat fifteen pounds of meat over 30 days in the name of science. But I’d rather have pickled watermelon rinds.

I think all I needed was a lidded coffee mug with a fine brew in it. Since I don’t have a cup holder, the coffee cup keeps me from shifting the rear gears. And forget about the aerodynamic tuck.

I ambled along to the drugstore thinking about poverty. In the news this morning, the National Academy of Sciences came up with new way to identify who is impoverished. Unlike the formula the Census Bureau has been using since 1955, the NAS factored in the greatly increased cost of getting around. They found that cars, expensive to own yet difficult to eschew, had driven millions into poverty.

I rode slowly across 27th street on my de facto single-speed Schwinn. I thought about what Jane Jacobs said about poverty. It’s not a thing. It’s the absence of a thing. Just as cold is a lack of heat, poverty is a lack of economic development. And development is nothing more than solving a problem and sharing that solution.

Around 30th Street, there are several residential blocks with sequentially linked alleyways. In some parts of town, you can ride alleys for miles. It’s like off-roading, but there are more barking dogs, treehouses and vintage motorcycle frames.

I enjoyed the slow ride but started to get tired of holding the coffee. If I just had somewhere on the bike to put it, I could ride through more severely derelict alleyways. I could cross streets with medians, and I could wave to people.

I really shouldn’t hoard the capital I’m not spending on gasoline and car insurance. I should use it to develop something. Something that would solve a problem I share with many others.

I probably don’t have enough money to develop the perfect handlebar mounted coffee cup holder. I’d have to make some flywheels on a lathe. I’d need to learn more about gyroscopes so I could get the holder to stay level and not spill my coffee while I carry the bike down the stairs. The real engineering problem would be the centrifugal clutch between the gyroscope’s flexible driveshaft and the output shaft from the front wheel hub. The gyro will have to spin fast enough but not too fast.

I hope someone builds one fast. But not too fast. Have some coffee if you need it.