Connect Ann Arbor

cross-posted to Facebook group, pardon the weird link language.

Arbcamp is coming up on Saturday, and I wanted to take a few moments and share three things with you that can help everybody (even those who don’t attend!) have a better event. Arbcamp is unusual: it will be active, open, and weird. Each person that attends isn’t responsible for anything — except his or her own engagement and learning. So here are some crib notes that might help you think about

1. what to expect,
2. what to bring, and
3. what’s happening online at/around Arbcamp.

Thanks so much.

(1) some logistical and scheduling stuff.

The day’s schedule, in full, is at http://arbcamp.org. But here’s what you need to know:

At 9:45 AM, we will sit in a large circle and convene Arbcamp. We’ll start with an open (empty!) agenda, and work together to schedule out sessions to be held at various places and times throughout the day. The basic mechanism for this is that, if there is something you want to talk about, you’ll be invited to write the name of your session, and your name, on a poster — and pop it into a slot on the agenda corresponding to a specific place and time. We’ll get into slightly more detail at the event, but the key — for now — is that this is a critical time to be there.

After the agenda is filled up with sessions, those discussions, demos, work sessions, etc. will then commence. If you haven’t been to an open space meeting before, you’re in for a treat! My friend Michael Herman put together a nice, very short photographic introduction — http://tinyurl.com/2odzwg — if you’d like a sense of what we’ll be doing (albeit in abbreviated fashion, because it’s a one-day event).

After a few sessions, and after box lunches, at 12:45 PM, we will then schedule out the remaining afternoon sessions. Some of the afternoon times and places may have been spoken for in the morning — but we’ll make sure to leave some open, as well. Ideas may come up in the morning that deserve pursuit in an afternoon session. Additionally, some folks may choose to arrive later in the day, e.g. for the afternoon. So if you’re not able to make it in the morning, sometime around noon would be an ideal time to arrive.

At approximately 3:30 we’ll gather, again, as a group to finish off the open agenda and move on to the keynote (Joseph Jaffe) and/or discuss other places to go or meet after Arbcamp is over. (At a minimum, there’s rumor of a night at the tap room…)

If you’ve already registered, you have our thanks. We’ll have your name at the door! If you haven’t registered, but would like to come, feel free to register online at http://arbcamp.org — or you can sign in at the door.

Finally, here are some details from the venue (Washtenaw Community College) about finding the building, etc. — http://tinyurl.com/38sm75

(2) what to bring.

Bring yourself!

Bring things to talk about: questions to ask, demos to show, a book you want someone else to read. A list of potential topics is at http://pageoftext.com/arbcamp_topics — feel free to edit this wiki page, but nothing is set until you (or someone else) puts the session up on the agenda wall on the day of the event.

The venue has open wireless, a variety of places to sit, a nice view, things to write on. We’ll have projection in one meeting space. So bring your laptop, swag, props, etc.

It sounds like there will be a Pecha Kucha session (http://tinyurl.com/2xyupg) for a series of short — six minute forty second — presentations. If that sounds like something you’d like to take a swing at, bring a powerpoint or Keynote deck.

(3) what’s happening online.

• http://arbcamp.org — boring old web site
• http://facebook.com/event.php?eid=18550969376 — facebook event

Arbcamp is also on twitter and jaiku, take a look if you use either of these services:

• http://twitter.com/arbcamp
• http://arbcamp.jaiku.com/

Jaiku in particular is set up to pull in Flickr photos, del.icio.us links, blog posts, and all kinds of other stuff that mentions arbcamp, either by name or by using an “arbcamp” tag. So http://arbcamp.jaiku.com/ is a nice single place to see whatever is happening online at — or relevant to — Arbcamp.

Finally, we’ll have a mechanism at Arbcamp to capture and post session notes, creating a record we can look at in the future, and that will hopefully be useful to people who aren’t actually at the event.

Thanks again!

Please get in touch if you have any questions. — Brian http://joechip.net/brian

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 11:49 am and is filed under Arb Camp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.