I'm at BarCamp San Francisco, and one of the (half-joking) rules is I have to blog about it. If more events I attended included compulsory blogging, I might write more often. (I also attended a Mashpit on Tuesday, where I participated in the inchoate birth of PhoTiger.) I feel a little like I'm in a cleaner version of the sixties. Shorter hair, flannel pajamas instead of tye-dye, and the Microsoft office in the Embarcadero aint exactly the Panhandle, but the ethos is the same. BarCamp is basically a weekend-long be-in for geeks. There's a pervasive feeling of technical promiscuity -- free code, bluetoothing files, open networks. Document everything and put it online, so that other BarCamps can build on the stuff discussed. And it's all got a fight-the-man cadence to it. There is beer and pizza. There is shwag from companies I can't pronounce. There are acronyms UTW. It sounds like it's raining gently outside but it's really the soft static of constant typing on laptop keyboards. I'm having a blast. I think half the people who keep the internet fun are here. Notes:

• My three self-describing tags: events, politics, ShowComber. This list isn't as encapsulatory as I'd like, but it did the job.
• I led a discussion on political discourse during the first time slot. The Internet has been great for self-expression, and for finding like-minded people, but it hasn't been so good for fostering the less pleasant part of free speech -- the part where you actually have to listen once in awhile and keep yourself open to persuasion, so that ideas have a chance to circulate. I had an idea for solving that problem in a small way, so I was interested in getting feedback, and discussing other ways to solve the problem (as well as collecting insights about the nature of the problem itself). When I type them up, notes will be here. The tag for this discussion is "socialprotocols".
• Everyone likes my PowerBook (and everyone takes better pictures than I do). Also, this picture is great.
• "Led" a "session" on an idea I had for a document revision system. No one showed up, but there were two guys already in the room who happened to know a helluva lot about the field of document revision, and they gave me some priceless feedback. One of them was Adam Kalsey. The idea, apparently, is not without merit. I didn't take notes but maybe I'll write something up later. A quick straw poll: if you are in a situation where you have to edit a document with a bunch of people, how do you do it?
• Was going to lead a third session on ShowComber (and the larger problem of how to get automatic event notifications for stuff you like (two days later, this gives me an idea for implementation.)) but someone else posted a session about event aggregation, musicians and microformats, which is basically how I'd have described my session, so I joined that one instead. The guy running the session was Nate Aune, who runs bostonjazz.net and had some insights from a discussion at BarCamp Boston. If there were one CMS that venues and bands used to construct their websites -- the way that most political groups have adopted CivicSpace as their system of choice -- we could build hCalendar into that system and aggregation could happen automatically. Alas, as of now, the burden is on managers and fans to enter information manually into their mailing list, myspace and databases like upcoming.org. Tricky.
• One of the pieces of shwag available is a ruler from Microsoft. Unlike every other ruler in America, it only has inches on it. No centimeters. Even their tchotchkes aren't standards-compliant.
• Sat in briefly on a session about technology for non-profits. Did some evangelism for Drupal, CivicSpace and CiviCRM.
• There's a healthy tech/web2.0/barcamp community in Toronto! Yay! If they're anything like Malgosia and Jon Green, I'll be in good company.
• I suppose after I post this I should install some sort of tagging plugin so that I can tag this with all the right tags. I'm not a big tag guy, but what the hey.
• Now it's Sunday and I'll be attending a brainstorming session for a cooking site, because Chris Bauman has a great idea. Also wanna find out about Citizen Agency. And I suppose I'll help clean up.

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