[ via Bart Decrem's weblog ] OB4.org is a weblog based on CivicSpace that Bart, Mitch Kapor, and Joe Costello are going to use to noodle about

what we can learn from the Dean campaign, MoveOn.org, Ohmynews and other shining examples of the power of Net to help bring about democratic reform

There are lots of interesting things going on inside the building housing the OSAF offices. This is another one of them.

Another reason that I'm not missing JavaOne or WWDC terribly much is that I would really like to see more meetings that have the flavor of the DIY-IT events that Doc is thinking about. I go to conferences for the people and for the chance to do something in high bandwidth mode. For me absorbing information via presentations is low bandwidth mode. You usually can only learn enough to know that you need to go read a pile of specs or code, so it's not really that helpful. I can do that at home or online. The thing that is hard to do is real time full bandwidth discussions with other people.

One thing that surprised me was that Doc didn't think about the Sci-Fi con angle for his events. There's a reason that ApacheCon and PyCon are called ApacheCon and not ApacheOne or PyCon and not the World Wide Python Developer's conference. The names do say a lot. I guess Doc missed Ken Coar walking around in his Star Trek uniform.

It certainly has is a big week for conferences, with SuperNova just finishing up and both JavaOne and WWDC ahead. Of the three conferences, I regret missing SuperNova the most. This piece on Techdirt probably summarizes the reasons best:

the power of all of this "decentralization" isn't just focused on the technology world, but expands well beyond that. While many of the conversations were focused on technology, it's time we started looking beyond the nuts and bolts of decentralization and towards how it will actually impact real lives.

While it sounds like this conversation didn't actually happen on the official program, I'd guess that happened a bit amongst the attendees. The decentralization trend is a huge one in my own life. I'm working in open source, Julie and I are blogging our brains out, we're home schooling our kids -- there are many instances of decentralization settling into my day to day life. What about other aspects of society that are modeled on large centralized organization: the military (Techdirt covered this), law enforcement, government, institutional religion, large non-profits? The centralization or command/control architecture of much of society is so ingrained it's hard to recognize sometimes.

In no particular order, here are some other blogs that produced interesting commentary on SuperNova.

As for the other two conferences, I've been to JavaOne multiple times, and I just didn't enjoy the experience. There are too many people, it feels too mass produced, and I haven't always found the content to be valuable. The one thing you can say is that a lot of people are all in one place. Fortunately, many of the people I want to connect with will be at either OSCON or ApacheCon.

I've never been to WWDC (even when I worked at Apple), but now that I'm back on the Mac, the conference holds a lot more interest for me. Fortunately, the blogs and rumor sites will cover most of the details, and for the moment trying to ingest the content would be overkill.