No maps for these territories

Back from Boston and Montreal where I attended RoCoCo Recent Changes Camp, a conference about wikis and their fans. It was great fun to meet so many enthusiastic people: people from a multitude of different projects who could still share some common values and love for how people use and think about this technology, and how they become part of the wiki way (props on this front to WikiOhana and the other recognitions of shared community). Plus, bonus points for going to Montreal, where I haven’t been in years and years (it’s a lovely city, worth the trip); and for driving up there through Vermont and New Hampshire, which I believe is previously uncharted territory for me. I-89 is a lovely, easy highway, fun to drive and highly scenic; one passenger described it as “industrial grade highway from nowhere to nowhere; the best road in the country.”

There were other nice things about the conference, of course: like the fact that it was fluently bilingual, and that it was a fine example of open space/unconference collaborative techniques, and that people came from at least four countries that I know of. I had many interesting discussions but certainly the most productive part for me was more meta: this was the first time that organizers from the three big wiki conferences (Wikimania, Wikisym, RCC) had ever met or talked in person, so we did a bit of high-level meta planning and brainstorming about how to collaborate in future. I have high hopes for the community going forward — it was exciting to really articulate the shared goals that we’re all working on.

Boston was nice too: saw lots of people, had a lovely dinner in the north end, did a bit of work, stayed up all night working on a manuscript on a long conference table in the ever-amazing OLPC offices, argued as much as ever: good stuff. The highlight was perhaps a trip to the Boston Athenaeum, where a friend is a member so we could go up into the stacks to work and study. It’s a truly amazing library. I made a lame computer analogy for my friend to try to explain how much of a lightweight the place made me feel like — librarianship as practiced in the Athenaeum compared to the kind of librarianship I practice is like programming in Assembly versus, I dunno, Javascript. It’s not even the same league… they still have most of their stacks in Cutter. Cutter! More on this later, perhaps.

Now, home, and a late-night dinner and work tomorrow, filled with more goals and projects than ever but which I am reinvigorated for. I trust this trip will serve as the break between what has really been a fairly unpleasant spring and what will hopefully be a fine and productive summer. Here’s hoping.