And, in seriousness, many thanks to Nicole for supporting Baltimore Improv Group! It means a lot that you’re helping build a strong improv scene in Baltimore!
Jonathan and Marty look to warm up this week. Ivana Helper, world renowned philanthropist, brings some of her sweaters for nude cats in with her. What are her next steps and will she branch out?
Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!
jonathanprozzi.net — Recently finished a draft of a 45-60 minute activity for new folks to HWC to register their first domain. None of tonight's attendee's need a domain, so we'll punt on that for next time. Spent the time tonight setting up a notebook.jonathanprozzi.net subdomain to be a publicly accessible version of the Hugo site that he set up recently to take notes. He used it over the weekend at IWC Baltimore and now wants it available on his phone. He also subscribed to all the IWC Baltimore attendees on Woodwind.
derekfields.is — Working on VR world project where the server is a microcontroller with sensors that can directly manipulate the VR world. Dealing w/ issues serving an A-Frame VR web app from his nodemcu microcontroller. The nodemcu serves a big opaque string for content and he wants to have it load A-Frame and other third-party resources from a CDN. The trouble is that when your computer is connected to the nodemcu's access point, there is no access to the internet. He is looking at another possibility of serving those minified scripts directly from the nodemcu.
angelosresu.me — Just noticed his website is down, oops. Not been working on his site much. Has been working on setting up his first OAuth implementation at work.
Other things:
Baltimore had our own IndieWebCamp! It was great! Videos are available now for all Saturday sessions as well as Sunday morning intros and afternoon demos.
Lots of discussion about what IndieAuth is, vs RelMeAuth, PGP
W3C governance is interesting! And confusing!
Showed off Woodwind as an example of IndieAuth dance. Also got Jonathan set up with Micropub via Woodwind so he can send replies.
Open Graph Protocol, microformats
Moving the idea of computing out of the default idea of a screen and keyboard/mouse/touch and a bunch of storage and computing right in front of you into more interesting paradigms like little internet-connected microcontrollers, virtual worlds.
The idea of needing indie readers to start consolidating how people can read and respond to IndieWeb content as easily as on silos. We may all be asking Aaron for accounts on Monocle.
Attendees for tonight's HWC Baltimore: angelosresu.me, derekfields.is, martymcgui.re, jonathanprozzi.net
Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meetings:
February 6th (Note: this is a Tuesday). We'll have a new activity for new folks during this meeting starting at 6:30pm – getting started with web hosting!
This piece is part of a series of after-action thoughts about the first IndieWebCamp Baltimore.
When planning IWC Baltimore, one of the things I wanted to prioritize was having high-quality discussion sessions on Saturday, to take on issues that attendees have on their minds, and to get their creative juice's going for the Sunday project hack day.
Aaron, Tantek, and I sat down after IWC Austin to do some (re-)planning of the typical IWC Saturday schedule based on lessons learned in 2017. We had some things in mind:
People start to get tired and distracted after about 45 minutes.
Each facilitator often had a different way of running their session. This sometimes led to discussion ending early, but often meant going over time.
Attendees need time to move between sessions, grab water, use the restroom, etc.
We mapped out several combinations of time for lunch, session length, break length, expected end-of-day, and even decoy time ("we'll tell them they have 5 minutes when actually they have 10").
Secret schedules in the HTML!
With the constraints that we wanted to break for lunch at noon, and end the day before 6pm, we settled on a schedule of 5 sessions:
1 hour 15 minutes for lunch, with sessions beginning at 1:15
Facilitators should show up 10 - 15 minutes early to be briefed on how to facilitate well
5 sessions at 45 minutes per session
10 minute break between sessions
A final "Intro to Day 2" session to prepare attendees for the Sunday hackday, which we could shorten if needed.
To encourage more consistent facilitation, I created a "Running an IndieWebCamp Session" card that we handed out to facilitators encouraging them to assign at least one note taker a time keeper with checks at 10, 5, and 1 minute. The card also included tips on how to kick off the discussion.
SVG facilitation cards, suitable for pen plotting!
Overall I think our planning really paid off. We were able to stick almost entirely to the schedule (very few sessions went over time, and none started late), the day ended on time, and informal feedback suggests that the discussions weren't hampered by the format.
Of course, there were some changes:
Our morning session went long, so there were 55 minutes for lunch rather than an hour and 15. Still, we started sessions on time.
Rather than pre-prepping facilitators, we gave them the facilitator cards and explained their contents in the time between sessions.
In addition to the per-session timekeepers, one of the organizers (me!) was responsible for loudly calling the end time for all sessions.
Having the extra time allowed for the unexpected, such as taking extra time to end the live stream for one session and begin it for the next.
Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!
Marty has vanished but the show must go on. Jonathan and special co host Richard sit down with Linda Sterling to discuss life without traceable currency. No credit cards, no checks, and no banks. We're only dealing in bills and coins.
Feeling very grateful for all the folks that came out to make the first day of the first IndieWebCamp Baltimore a huge success! Great conversations, lots of inspiration for tomorrow’s hack day!
“you have to blog on your own domain. medium, facebook, linkedin, huffpo will do what are in their interests, not yours. i have been doing it every day for 15 years this year. feels great to own my archive, my brand, my content, myself.”
In seriousness, thanks so much to Danielle for her support of our show, and her generous donation to help the Baltimore Improv Group settle into our current home in Station North!
Marty's plane was delayed but the show must go on. Jonathan sits down with friend and expert, Danielle Smith, to discuss traveling to see concerts. What are tricks to get VIP tickets, how should you pack, and how far should you travel to see a concert?
Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!
Participants should bring an SD card with at least 2GB of free space and a way to take notes. Folks interested in hands-on time with editing are encouraged to bring a laptop with the Audacity audio editing software (http://www.audacityteam.org/) installed. Finally, to save, time, everyone is encouraged to create a SoundCloud account (https://soundcloud.com/) as well as an Apple ID (https://www.apple.com/shop/account/home) if you don’t have them already.
“We could do with more experimentation around how objects work, but that’s impossible in the languages most commonly thought of as object-oriented.
Here, then, is a (very) brief run through the inner workings of objects in four very dynamic languages. I don’t think I really appreciated objects until I’d spent some time with Python, and I hope this can help someone else whet their own appetite.”
“we’re missing some key pieces on the education front, we’re missing some pieces on funding makerspaces, both at the local and larger level. So, I’ve decided with some partners of mine and Network Society Ventures and labs, I’m gonna do an ICO this year, an Internet Coin Offering, a tokenization. This area needs a token…”
Marty and Jonathan make the choice of coming in from the cold weather outside. They bring with them expert life navigator Just Cecilia to help out with those choices that need step by step directions.
Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!
Marty and Jonathan discuss the security practices of M&T Bank Stadium, the home of the Baltimore Ravens. Jonathan talks about the long list of items prohibited from entering the stadium and his attempt to sneak a few of those items into the game.
