MediaShelf Blog

In early 2009, I chanced upon becoming the only person to attend both Dev8D in London and Code4Lib 2009 in Providence, Rhode Island. While at Code4Lib, I had every intention of posting a comparison of the two conferences, but eventually decided that nobody would care to hear about it.  The blog post sat unfinished for a year until the news came out that both conferences would be happening simultaneously this year.  Suddenly a side-by-side comparison seemed much more meaningful.  I dug into my notebooks and found the table you see here.

Further down the page, for the uninitiated, I’ve included an off-the-cuff description of each conference.

Code4Lib & Dev8D 2009 - Quick Comparison

Code4Lib: the big annual download for coders in libraries

Code4Lib has a large, established community based mostly in North America.  As the name implies, the community consists of “computer programmers and library technologists who largely work for and with libraries”[from Code4Lib wiki]. The Code4Lib Journal and the #code4lib irc channel are hubs of intense discourse year round.  The Code4Lib conferences are run as a single track where every presenter delivers his/her work before the entire group of conference attendees. The lineup of presenters, along with the location and dates for the conference are chosen each year by means of an open, public voting process.

The annual Code4Lib conferences are the primary place for this community of extremely smart, innovative people to exchange notes about the work they’re doing.  It’s very intense, very technical, and extremely informative.  There is very little hand-holding; everyone is expected to keep up with the flow of information or get out of the way.  For the past two years (possibly longer), registration has reached capacity within 48 hours of opening up.

Taken as a group, the Code4Lib crowd can seem intimidating.  They have a very strong meritocracy, which is one of their biggest strengths.  The only sure-fire way to get attention in this community is to make great software and to share it.  If you do that, you will be acknowledged and socially rewarded.  I heard complaints about “cliques” forming, mainly because everyone was left to fend for themselves in the evenings - people who already knew each other clumped together and swiftly disappeared.  Arriving as an outsider, this was unnerving for me at first but in the end everyone was actually very friendly and eager to trade ideas with anyone who could keep up with the intellectual pace.

My most memorable moment at Code4Lib was the Linked Data preconference hosted by Ed Summers, Dan Chudnov and Michael Giarlo from the Library of Congress.  As part of the day-long workshop, they set up one of the best hands-on lessons I’ve ever been part of.  The premise was simple: use FOAF profiles as the means for entering into a raffle.  This relatively simple exercise forced everyone in the room to, at the very least, publish a FOAF document (anywhere on the web) with a couple of required assertions included.  Those with more experience helped those with less.  Everyone gained something and one key concept nailed its mark: the linked data movement of 2009 has many, many things in common with the early world wide web, and everyone is invited along for the ride.

Code4Lib 2010 will be held in Asheville, NC February 22-26.  It has been sold out since December.

Dev8D: making developer happiness in the UK

Dev8D is the brainchild of David Flanders at JISC.  The name, Developer Happiness Days, harkens to the meme of developer happiness that became one of the core mantras for “lightweight application framework” evangelists around 2005/2006.  As I understand it, David looked around at all of the developers working on JISC-funded projects across the UK and saw a massive pool of technical talent hampered by the fact it lacked an  ongoing community for exchange of ideas, skills, criticism and praise.  He convinced JISC to fund a small conference specifically for software developers, and specifically aimed at fostering a developer community.  They made him promise to provide proof of “innovation” happening and — tada — Dev8D was born.

I’m tempted to describe Dev8D as zany.  David threw in as many activities, challenges, rewards, and discussion topics as he could possibly muster.  His goal was simple — get people talking, encourage them to dream up new technical possibilities, reward them for sharing those ideas, reward them even more for executing those ideas, and have fun in the process.

It would have been hard for an enthusiastic software developer not to have fun at Dev8D.  We were all basically along for the ride.  Every time you turned a corner, someone had cooked up a new nifty little web app or come up with some novel way to use an existing service to augment our Dev8D free-for-all.  David used wordle to generate tag cloud “name tags” from everyone’s blogs.  By lunch on the first day, someone started projecting a twitter aggregation of #dev8d on the wall.  By tea time, we had two or three custom apps floating around that did wacky stuff based on codes in your tweets.  (In February 2010, this all may sound a bit tired, but remember that a mere year ago all things twitter were brand new to nearly everyone.)  The name of the game was “dream it up and do it”, and we certainly did that.

My most memorable moment at Dev8D was The Dragon’s Den.  This was David’s solution to JISC’s requirement that he provide proof of innovation as outputs from the event.   JISC set up a Developers Challenge, providing real-world users from UK academia and soliciting the Dev8D attendees to submit their best ideas for new software to solve those users’ technological needs.  The best team would win a wad of cash in exchange for documenting their idea.  The way you submitted your idea was by presenting it in the Dragon’s Den, where a panel of judges from JISC and local industry would hear your idea, ask questions, and provide feedback.  Though my submission didn’t win the challenge, I learned a lot from those judges and would participate again in a heartbeat simply for the feedback.

Dev8D 2010 will be held in London 24-27 February.  They may still be accepting new registrations, though all of the free accommodations have been slurped up.

Crosstalk in 2010

Later this month, Code4Lib 2010 and Dev8D 2010 will have three days of overlap.  I will be in Asheville, NC for Code4Lib and Eddie Shin will be in London for Dev8D, so MediaShelf will be plugged in on both sides of the pond.  We have promised to encourage crosstalk between the events, though we haven’t sorted out the details.  When we settle on a plan, we will post an update on this blog.

I just came across this post on Russell Davies’ blog titled I like things to be numbered.  It’s an extract from an episode of the BBC Radio Show Museum of Curiosity. In it, a railway enthusiast named Chris Donald explains the beauty that trainspotters find in the fact that the railway companies assign numbers to absolutely everything, including clocks. [listen to the mp3]

Listening to Chris Donald speak, I couldn’t resist seeing the connection to Linked Data and the Semantic Web.  He nails the key concepts of the beauty and the loaded possibilities that come from being able to trace the connections between things.  The three-minute account even draws out the aspect of Semantic Web that tends to make people squeamish:

[...] I like things to be numbered.  I don’t know why; I just do.  The idea that every bridge had a number attached to it appeals to me and it appeals to a lot of people. [...]  It’s all quantifiable.  They know how many trains there are because they’re all numbered.  They have a book with all the numbers in it.  It’s all very controlled and they can understand it and it’s very two-dimensional. [...] with trains - you stand on the platform and you look at the track and you know that that metal bit of track on the floor is touching every train that you’re looking for and you understand that it’s a puzzle that can be solved.

I frequently find myself trying to adequately characterize the distinction between Semantic Web and Linked Data.  Is it just a re-branding of the concepts?  Is it an offshoot of the greater phenomenon?  In this little account by an avid trainspotter, I see a wonderful way to point out the distinction.  

The past 15 years of noise about Semantic Web have had the ring of this trainspotter’s “I like things to be numbered [...]  It’s all very controlled and [I] can understand it. [...] it’s a puzzle that can be solved.”  While there is nothing wrong with this per-se, it is only going to motivate certain types of people.  Further, it lends itself to visions of grandeur that quickly wander into a quagmire of failed logic and, to be honest, treads close to the intellectual foundations of fascism.  

Meanwhile, the burgeoning Linked Data movement is much more akin to railroad engineers saying “Well, we numbered everything out of necessity.  Might as well let the rest of the world make sense of those connections too.  Who knows what they’ll get out of it, but it certainly doesn’t hurt us to share the data.”

There’s one key place where I wish to differ with Mr. Donald, and I think a lot of Linked Data people will agree.  He describes this world of connections as being very orderly, controlled, and two-dimensional.  He says this because he is only looking at a single set of data from a single perspective.  As soon as you open your eyes to the growing cloud of linked open data, the landscape becomes much more akin to a wilderness, or possibly a garden, where the surface may seem simple and pretty while the world underneath is thriving with the complex, messy stuff of life.