on hackfests (cont)

reposted from a private forum by request, we’re talking here about code4lib, but it also applies to other things like Seattle Mind Camp.

About participating in hackfests: I would advise everyone to participate in things like this as an acculturational process if nothing else. Technical conferences (and technical communication generally) works in different ways than what a lot of us see day to day, and it’s better to learn how to participate and communicate in them when the stakes are low than otherwise.

I’ve seen a LIS professor (not from here) go down in flames really hard when trying to communicate with a small group of technical people. The individual was making the point very strongly that users didn’t understand boolean search, when everyone else in the conversation was talking about something else entirely that happened to contain the words ‘user,’ ‘boolean,’ and ‘search.’

(insert statement about ‘training’ programs versus the theoretical aspects of the mlis program that the ischool uses to justify a lot of its skulduggery.)

There’s every reason that the professor could have figured out what was going on, but she was clearly communicating in his/her own world, without referent to the context of the people around him/her, and being entirely condescendingly ignorant of the fact that the people around him/her actually knew what they were talking about.

One[1] of the reasons that the Roman Legions got more or less paved directly into their beautifully constructed roads in the 4th C. was that the technical superiority they’d enjoyed over the ‘barbarians’ had faded through years of communication and trade over the Danube. The recent acquisitions of Flickr and Delicious (among other things) indicate that people outside of library science realize Even More Than Before there is immense value in metadata and books like Ambient Findability and Information Architecture indicate that the understanding gap between ‘information professionals’ and ‘people who want to exploit information like it was liquid dinosaur’ is closing sharply.

One plan for dealing with this sort of thing is to go fetal and hope that nothing bad happens to you and that ‘civilization’ wins eventually. In general, gothic cathedrals are very nice and lovely, but the sack of Rome kind of sucked for the Romans. Other ideas might involve meeting people half-way, and admittedly 540 is a retarded way to start down that path, but hey, nothing’s perfect.

So, overall, I’m ranting and rambling and you know how that sort of thing goes, but my advice is to participate in the hack-fest type things.

[1] it’s over-simplistic analysis day. whoopee!
hackfest
librarianship
technical communication