In other words, a standard Open Space:

"Essentially, it’ll be Wurman and 100 of his pals (and as he so eloquently put it, “I know fucking everybody”) talking about a particular topic for a certain amount of time. The “intellectual jazz” will be filmed in black and white, and then later released as an interactive app. ”I’m terrified,” said a coy Wurman, looking absolutely nothing of the sort. ”I don’t know if I can pull it off.” And while a gathering of 100 bigwigs in some ways sounds like the worst kind of elitist horror show, I actually found myself rooting for him. I mean, the world needs contrarians, and Wurman sure is one of them."

"Agile Coach Camp is about creating a network of practitioners who are striving to push the limits in guiding software development teams, while staying true to the values and principles at the core of the Agile movement. We've invited practitioners who, like you, are passionate about their work, active in the field and willing to share what they've learned.

Do you have a technique or practice worth sharing with your peers? Or an idea you'd like to test out with some leaders in the community? Are you facing challenges and want to get some perspective from other practitioners, or hear how they do things? If you feel you’d benefit from connecting with 70-75 Open Agile Process Facilitators, ScrumMasters, XP Coaches, Trainers, Change Agents, and Mentors to talk, draw, debate, and explore ideas, then this unconference is for you."

I was lucky enough to be able to present as a plenary speaker1 as well. After being repeatedly told to “bring my A game” I had completely psyched myself out. In direct retaliation I decided to introduce as many elements of “randomness” as I could into this presentation.2 I’m not necessarily arguing that all three made the presentation better but it did make it more interesting to me and I think they did add some interesting elements for the audience.

This was the first annual Data Scientist Summit, and I will no doubt be back. With that said, discussion of technical topics had a bit of an introductory flavor to them, which made the discussion of the technology seem dated. For example, “Vanilla” Hadoop was introduced as a tool for processing vast amounts of data. I would expect that most Data Scientists have worked with Hadoop, or at least know what it is. Hadoop is somewhat old news in terms of “cutting-edge technology.” Tools like Pig, Cascalog, HBase, Hive, Cascading, etc. would have been a better discussion topic. I was also disappointed with how little coverage of tools (except for Hadoop, NoSQL, and enterpise databases) there was. It seemed as if R had gone M.I.A. and I was surprised that there was such little discussion of visualization tools like Tableau, Processing, Gephi, D3, Polymaps, etc.

"The 2010 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering & Technology (fPET-2010) is an outgrowth of the Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering (WPE-2007 in Delft and WPE-2008 in London). The mission of the Forum is (1) to encourage reflection on engineering, engineers, and technology by philosophers and engineers alike and (2) to build bridges between existing organizations of philosophers and of engineers. fPET-2010 will be held as an intensive one-day meeting on 9-10 May 2010 (Sunday evening-Monday) at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO."

Workshop on Philosophy & Engineering, 2008

"Humans are habitual problem-solvers, so obsessed with puzzles and patterns that for millennia we’ve posed riddles and created games to fill our “idle time.” But these obsessive problem-solving habits are traditionally seen as a distraction from the “real work” of business, scholarship and public policy.

That is no longer true… if it ever was.

This is the first of a series of three open-format workshops scheduled for 2009 & 2010, where we’ll gather to explore the new ways game play is becoming “useful” work—useful for people and institutions."

'"What is it that identifies humans? The use of tools. For that reason, perhaps engineering is the most human of studies. ... Maybe we should teach engineering as a liberal art, and maybe a piece of every literate person's experience should be to create a useful artifact that improves life, including something as important as communication."'

"In order for buildings, especially multi-family apartment buildings to be truly bright green they must be within the reach of average people. But how?

To investigate this question and other issues surrounding green building and design, "deep green" professionals met at the third annual Living Future unconference in Portland, Ore., last week. On the first day, attendees had the opportunity to visit three of Portland's best examples of affordable, green buildings: Central City Concern's Richard Harris Building, Reach Community Development's Station Place Tower and the Turtle Island Development LLC's Sitka Apartments."

A technical conference schedule from my Dad's papers.

"Open Everything is a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of 'open'. It gathers people using openness to create and improve software, education, media, philanthropy, architecture, neighbourhoods, workplaces and the society we live in: everything. It's about thinking, doing and being open."

"Most large organizations have a "top-down" central planning function, although they operate externally within a "bottom-up" (market) economy. As the business environment becomes more complex, top-down planning systems have been hard pressed to adequately understand and effectively respond to the quickly-developing challenges.

To cope with the complexity, some leading organizations are introducing more market-based BI systems to help with organizational decision-making. One of the emerging practices is called, prediction markets."

"A successful essay is a clear and compelling piece of writing that explores a topic important to the software community. The subject area should be interpreted broadly, including the relationship of software to human endeavors, or its philosophical, sociological, psychological, historical, or anthropological underpinnings. An essay can be an exploration of its topic, its impact, or the circumstances of its creation; it can present a personal view of what is, explore a terrain, or lead the reader in an act of discovery; it can be a philosophical digression or a deep analysis. It can describe a personal journey, perhaps that by which the author reached an understanding of such a topic."

"Agile 2009 will be an exciting international conference about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and first-hand experience, from both the management and technical sides of agile software development. The agile approach focuses on delivering business value early in the project lifetime and being able to incorporate emergent requirements. It accentuates the use of rich, informal communication channels and frequent delivery of running, tested systems, while attending to the human component of software development.

... The conference is not about a single methodology or approach, but rather provides a forum for the exchange of information regarding all agile development technologies."

Can I pay in Social Capital? How about Intellectual Capital??