packing

I have way too much cr@p coming home than I did going out.? I think I understand why the post office has a booth at SXSW.? Unless I can be clever, then I may be visiting it myself.

the bulk of it at this point is all the wrong clothes that I brought…which didn’t seem like too many originally, but now is more than I want to deal with.

the excess of clothes is forcing me to judge very carefully what other things I bring back.? which may, in fact, be a good thing.

normally I would save things for their memory/nostalgia value — when I say “things” I mean bits of paper.? but I don’t want to be weighed down going home, so I’m tossing almost everything, including the big-ass directory, the nice little map of downtown, a handful of bus day passes.

(for motivation I have to thank Ralph for that conversation we had in the hall about pack-rats.? sometimes you have to hear that sort of thing from someone that you aren’t related to, and you don’t live with.)

postprocessing

I have a lot of mental work to do in order to turn the last week of my life into some sort of semi-coherent narrative.? some of it will go here, some will decidedly not.? (it’s not that it’s none of your business, but it’s none of the internets’ business.)

for now I’m back at Halcyon, digesting a cheese sandwich, and gathering enough solitude to be ready for the after party.? ’cause damn it, I haven’t been to enough parties.

I’m working on a massive “things I learned” post, and I’d like to write summaries for all the notes I’ve already taken, and then maybe a list of things I want to do because of the experience.

something I want to mention now, while I’m thinking about it (and was reminded by Shelley’s post), is the role of moderation in the success or failure of a panel.

one thing all the really good panels had in common was quality moderation, which consisted of….

  • not letting the introductions go on too long.
  • actively directing the discussion.
  • adding an interesting spin to audience questions.
  • keeping good track of time and proportionality.
  • humor and curiosity.

good moderators: danah boyd, Carrie Bickner, Jeff Veen, Heather Gold. they all had those common factors, even with different styles.

I will not name bad/mediocre moderators, but there certainly were some.

more postprocessing to come, probably this evening even, assuming I’m awake after the party.? definitely tomorrow, while I goof off before flying back to the land of drizzle. (tomorrow’s forecast: 50 & rain.)

bruce sterling talk

still processing the experience of the last panel. this is in the same room as next-gen web apps, now I owe George Kelly a beer for his forethought in bringing a powerstrip.

the party doesn’t scale. :(? no, you are too big, too professional.

he’s in a dark, introspective, literary mood this year.? just had a party in belgrade, with 20 serbian webgeeks.? in 2006 you cats don’t need my party.? this is the hottest time.? good to see this crowd.

“welcome to the bubble echo”

when there is a web 2.0 bust, we’re all welcome.

commons-based peer production is coming up.

if gnu’s not unix, what is it?? flickr isn’t a hippie knockoff of anything else.? collaborative web filters are spooky, unlike anything else.

hard to explain this stuff to people who are not geeks, but it’s important.

tech economy is not on the coattails of gates.

windows live?!

something about global criminality.

look at page for city of austin in guidebook, nice little NGOs.? very richard florida.? warm feeling as an austinite.? scary sign of incompetence on the federal level. only in america do old telcos lobby as if they were indian casinos.

broadband in serbia; $20/month; it works, and is run by actual criminals in exile.

decadent, sclerotic, looks like soviet union. banana republic with rockets; politically and technically incompetent.

when you ignore reality for years on end, the payback is a bitch.

visionary in residence, his new book came out last week.? audacious & freaky stuff.

oil industry kid.? married to a serbian feminist peacenik dissident, met because of the internet.? always wanted to know what went wrong in yugoslavia…now he knows.

serbia has one of the most dysfunctional societies on the planet.? “some of my shoes are there.”? “I live out of my laptop now.”? will be meeting cory d. on 3 different continents in 5 mos.

listening to him is like listening to luscious techno-poetry.

“nobody notices that I have left austin.”

he does rather live in a different universe.

“like the last reels of gone in the wind here”

losing our cultural cache.? oil, real estate speculation, and blood.? we’ve always been loud & boisterous, but now we’re “hugely & scarily fat.”

slovenia == iowa.? serbian truthiness.

frantic collisions of fundamentalism with reality.

like the witching hour, death cult.

“accidentally killed 8000 people” — “8 on camera and that seems to make all the difference” — those two guys (serbian war criminals) are in monesteries.? vaclav havel with a submachine gun.

“the troubles”, “the disorder” — when it’s over you don’t get to say I proudly served, because it’s a war on morale/pride.? always covert, fake, trumped-up, compartmentalized.? this is the stuff of the disorder.

secrecy always & everywhere, and no end.? (damn I need a drink.)

on the slider bar between teh unthinkable and the unimaginable, between the meathook future and the green shiny one.? there’s a way out, but we haven’t invented the words yet.

warren ellis: there’s a middle distance between {collapse} and {nerdvana}; the human dimension, how it’s taken on board by smart people.

the street (still) finds its own uses.

yipes! back speakers came on as they opened up the barrier between rooms.? I coughed, Denise jumped.

if you took mao & ghandi and put them on the streets, they’d have no idea what to do with it.? everything that desperately poor people could do to survive has been done to the environment, but they’re booming…because of the people.

spime.

hey, now I can see him, since the crowd has thinned out into the new space.

“you are a philistine and you have no taste”

“only realized two weeks ago that it’s a tag” laughter “it’s a theory object”

gibsonian cyberspace is a consensual hallucination…we don’t have any of that, and may never do, but the term already has a period flavor to it.

elevator pitch: speculative imaginary object:

  1. interactive chip so it has a unique identity
  2. local precise positioning, sort where things are and where you are in re: them
  3. search engine, auto-googling object
  4. cradle-to-cradle recycling, transparent production
  5. 3d virtual models of objects, product of cad-cam, schematics are on the net, befure they become objects
  6. rapidly prototypes (like the app design discussion this morning); dreams clang right on the ground.

book by worldchanging cadre.? index of ways out of the smokefilled room.

then people would interact with objects in a truly different unimaginable way.? transparent & participatory.? see the garbage.? material instances of immaterial [missed that]

why would we want to do such a weird thing? an internet of things.? because of the way it will feel, no longer inventory my posessions inside my head, done by voodoo.? no longer both to remember where I put things, found them, cost of them, etc., etc.? search engine of things.

google your shoes in the morning.

am I the only one for whom it sounds entirely weird and a little terrifying?

just a design professor for a year.? knock on it to see what falls out.

(his voice reminds me a little of Ralph’s. and I’m going to need to put my wrists on ice for a couple of days once I get home.)

30% of you are googling spime right now.? (not me, but the woman next to me had the wikipedia page for it open.)

he talks like he writes, big and weird and gorgeous.

the 20th century couldn’t deal with this shit.? real theory object has website, tags, user-centric web apps, etc., etc., etc.? as if the surrealist cafe had been frozen into linkage.

legacy people.

trying to write a novel, because it’s his job description.? and what is that now?? matches into the bog of language and most of them deserve to die.

frankenstein is lost, the creator.? 19 year old feminist who’d run off with an atheist poet.? be the change you want to see.

make no decision out of fear.

motto of the serbians.? people tire of fraud, evil, sheer stupid pettiness, being promised jam & fed ashes.

the great american novel is over.? need regional novel about the planet earth.? human resiliance & history.

the people loved the serpent miloscevic.? “if he did some bad things, he was doing them for us and our usness.”? posters of him look like an injured muppet.? “they’re real holy now […] giant turnips of nationalist resentment”

evil has a face: the person who resents you because you don’t buy into his nationalist crap.

cure: historial perspective.? time passes, you come to your senses.? patchwork of faith-based bullshit. hammering the electoral districts of texas into shape.? the old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

serbian has a small language, so they have a lot of poets, like right-wing public bloggers.? when you can comprehend poetry it means your heart is not broken.? anna ahkmatova…”could you possibly bear witness — yes — and it was true”? and they listen and they weep aloud.? they don’t deserve to be europe, but they’re not dead.? even the pirates are in retreat.

they know how to go with it.

1937.? “couldn’t get venture capital back then”

carl sandburg

the people yes

the people will live on

the learning and blundering people

wil live on

and sold in a dense soul

[i can’t keep up, and he’s near-teary.]

a vast huddle of many units

if i had more time

i could read & study and talk things over and find out about things

book recommendations from others in the audience:

  • Islands in the net
  • Distraction

open source management

was originally going to be called “vulnerability” — but trying to ease people/corps into honest.
charlise theron is in the building?!

want to run it like a talk show. heather gold as host. big frustration: trying to be herself or not being herself at work. not go into “drag” at 9am. (indeed!)

david callisch, ruckus wireless, history with startups.

michalski, used to edit esther dyson’s release 1.0? aw, cares a lot about trust.

giovanni rodriguez. senior vp at eastwick pr. background in theater. callisch is one of his clients.

mark glaser, with pbs. mediashift.

heather is laying on the floor, so as to sound like the voice of god.

cathy brooks, the other girl, because “all boys isn’t any fun” great chicken matzoh soup. funny interaction with meri. gefilte fish: like hot dogs for fish?!

help mark think about what he’s trying to do….

“we have this problem, and we haven’t solved it” their product is a box that does tv over wifi, but they sell to telcos. want to connect to people, to have us/them pressure the telcos?

“why can’t they sell it directly to us?” — because they can’t handle the support issue.

comment: I think you should change your business model. if you were selling it to me, I’d buy it. long story about home networking, etc., etc. and the content isn’t available directly to you.

lots more questions….

paul: analogies to audio, if I buy your product by way of my phone company then I have to suck it with whatever they do.

league of technical voters woman: I totally didn’t catch this.

the carriers own my mom?

worst of two models: like a new channel AND like a more technical tivo.

meri fscking cracks me up. you’re missing the tivo step: recruiting the early adopters.

I think they’re a lost cause. like the ipod w/out itunes. but the ipod went for a while w/out itunes….

where is iptv working? anywhere outside the US! italy, spain, hong kong, etc., etc.

brooks is not sure about who their web site is talking to.? not sure where the audience is.

registering people with zip codes, getting kewl bloggers to play with some version of it.? hard to prove demand with something that doesn’t exist.

it’ll be on sourceforge in like 2 weeks.

cheap marketing by way of nerds.? get it in the hands of low-maintenance — bored, nerdy, etc. — users.? waiting for home wifi until all the ISPs thought it might be a good idea.

because the business in curtains in front of tables will be harmed?!

heather asks if they can give away 10 to nerds here.? will people commit, hell, I’ll do it.? if C & I can make it go, then anybody can.
these days a lot of VCs, the smarter ones, are open to this sort of thing.

simon: worried about where you’re heading, has seen this sort of thing.? telcos are late adopters, in a marketspace that’s about to be owned by apple (itunes).? people in this room would love to get ahold of your stuff.? “most nasty…industry”? (re: telco!)

municipal wifi networks & public access?

ILECs all have their own research going on.? (dude, R should totally be here.) cable tv people are perhaps the right people.

they’re just trying to solve that one little problem of wifi tv w/in the home.? I remain skeptical.

current tv.? also google video? youtube?? the actual tv channels are interested.

he wants to see how to use the new media stuff to get the buzz.

bashir of lyceum.? (media genius)? if you’ve told your investors that you want to wait until we’re like italy or korea.? moms can use airport express, but there isn’t one for video.? if you don’t want to do that, that’s fine.

would like to talk more generally about opening up management.

heather sez they’re trying to show not tell.

I jumped up and said something, about the accreditation process, and people talking whether they know the facts or not.? which wasn’t what I really wanted to say.

what david came thinking about was open source management: does your audience/customers like your board, locations; do your people vote on what products should get produced, etc.

derek becomes non-anonymous.? doesn’t like TV.

would it have been different if the CEO or whoever had been here?? yes.? getting the connection between us & them is “like climbing a mountain”

brooks worked on a startup w/out transparency and was prsenting to the board the business they thought the board wanted instead of the one they could do.

glaser: more of a big deal for the pr folks.? um, yeah.? “how can we persuade people to buy this crap” vs. bringing people into the process.

vulnerability & transparency: huge issues going forward, “what the hell are you doing?!” surowecki.? open space technology meeting?

appropriate credit?? something to think about….

simon: suggestions: asterisk in the pbx market; mythtv community; transparency is the key, his co’s president is blogging out in the open; people don’t contribute to open source unless it’s worth their while somehow.

mba student & marketer: thank you!? a cool company.? would rather work for someone willing to do this.

comment: reminsicent of the 0-advertising threadless panel yesterday.

heather will be blogging, possibly while laying on the floor.

next-gen web apps

a little drowsy, a little chilly. Bruce Sterling is a few chairs down from me, but I’m about used up of my store of fangirl moxie, so I just took his picture from a distance.

I’m mostly in this session to hear from the ginormous Veen about the uncannily addictive Measure Map.

Ev, Mena, Veen, eric r (map-based stuff for ????), somebody from flickr.

damn this session is fscking FULL. literally standing room only. glad I stayed where I was.

mappr, so that makes him from Stamen Design. visualization of IRC channel here. stoney. animated cab data, speed as color. whoa. C would FREAK out on this. project for exploratorium. “invisible dynamics”…okay, it’s time to plan a trip to SF.

mena doesn’t have anything beautiful to show. (except her own cutie-pie self.) iteration based on multiple products. “comment”? new product. looks/feels like livejournal, sharing with groups (friends/family) to key to getting next 300 million (?!!!!) blogging. APIs for internal use, unglamorous stuff like common billing, etc.

splashblog, acquired by 6A. the phone, instead of the computer.

“flickr is a big weird messy place”

instead of trying to think like your user, talk to them directly. funny quote from forum, what flickr is for.

UI improvments for the new. show don’t tell, again.

straightforward feedback cycle.

organizr. (I like it for sets.) she doesn’t use it herself, but probably will later. (y’know, I think I prefer the old version, because it is a space where I can see a lot of photos at once.)

Ev. “we work on audio stuff” — with the very femme up-tone! “I don’t remember my password”

hey, I wonder if C would be more likely to audio-blog than to text-blog. (he seems to love gtalk phone calls, and the phone in general.) or if Elizabeth might like it?

interesting discussion of how the tool effects the format, re: Odeo. shortform vs. longform; radio show vs. voicemail.
Veen on measure map. no use of pageviews. mixup of flash & ajax. it is damn pretty and quasi-magical. started with design, working very fast, multiple releases per week.

“the way to maximize user experience is unquestionably through iteration” — something to think about with book exchange? oddreview?

mena, something about a husband & a wife talking in a bedroom. :)? good laugh line.

now they are 125 people…how do you go from 1 engineer & 1 designer to a group like that.? partially by breaking into teams.? learning, sharing with other teams.

can’t learn until people start using something.? (not necessarily the public, but somebody!)

working with “enterprises” with MT vs. working with drunken Brad on LJ.? speed, caution.

MM slowed down updates to Monday/Thursday only, once they got users.

flickr releases stuff 14/20x per day.? any developers could deploy any tweak at any time.? hail mary mother of jeebus.

one of veen’s frustration as a consultant was not being able to do lots of little iterations.

kewl graphs.? not just crazy/wacky for wacky’s state…it’s a question of not knowing what the end state is going to look like exactly.? solutions may change the problem.? (hrm, 2nd quasi-quantum mention this week.)

scrub methodology?? from Ev, 2 week iterations.? scrum?? helpful in cutting down the decisions, not getting derailed by discussion, because you know what you’re going to do for the next week.

architecture of participation.

how many people talked to a human to book their travel here?? (maybe 10?)

clay shirky quote: basically, writing isn’t worth paying for.? ::sigh::

no difference between consumers & producers.

blog reading as gateway drug?

wisdom of crowds.? she’s worried, deeply, about being misquoted (mena).

selecting audiences.? some people at 6A were happier blogging to a smaller, selected audience, plus getting livejournal info.

odeo default recording status is private.? increased people’s willingness.

flickr, veen: live on stage! what’s up with interesting?

russian genius who saw patterns in data.? capturing activity around any given photo.

no photos on linkedin so it wouldn’t become a dating site. no emoticons in MT to keep it more of a CMS instead of a community site.

designing w/out stuff, or around stuff.? designing for flow.

veen: bottom-up semantic web?? indeed.

chicagocrime.org.

damn, I want to start doing interesting things again!? what does that mean for how I run my life??!!?!?!?!
mena doesn’t use greeking.

time for questions in the last 10 mins.

is that Meri again?? I heart her.? thinks important to design for the blank/newbie state.

eric: don’t need the word “just” — design is a container!? and that’s fun, exciting, etc.? I GET to design for something that flows, breathes, has life.

missed some stuff because I was chatting with c.? flipside to incrementalism?? can only get so far until you need punctuated equilibrium.? damn veen has a sexy brain. 😉

q: how do you build ethical standards into applications?

mena: export is big.? should be a requirement.? you have to accept that people evolve and not hold data hostage.

veen: example of feedburner: a big committment! right up front they tell you how you can quit if you want.? huh.? vs. outlook designed to never let you leave.

understanding the value of various kinds of feedback.? kinda like knowing enough about who gives writing feedback in a group to be able to filter it through your own goals.

what about release and “oh jeez that was stupid”?? and how do you get to the thing that’s entirely different?? things people don’t know they want.

innovation!

research as a foundation from which you innovate; rules of English as a foundation from which you write great stuff.? nice analogy.

mention of pattern language.? where are you getting inspirations?

books, magazines.? mena got her design training from just looking around.? another english major! abstracting craft.? (book to look up.)

it’s 12:30 so I should probably bail.

digital craft as a potter’s wheel instead of as a discrete set of steps.? spiffy.

convincing your co to support standards

came in late, or they started early.

lawver had good stuff about building a standards support team. I wish Deirdre was still around. 🙁 fun, management liasion. should talk to Dale about this, to start something on a statewide basis, maybe in connection with WaSP etf?

netscape/aol guy feels lots of empathy for the opera guys.

kim sez: providing good tools for creating good markup provides good feelings…you’re making their lives easier. roll your own training program? hrm. 2nd mention of “brown-bags.” identify experts/believers and pair them with others not quite there. even to the point of seating charts!

perestroika. learn to speak their language.

is this whole panel AOL-Netscape-TimeWarner people?

give folks a daily reading list, examples. (ah, the Zen Garden.)

oh, that’s the Slayer Office guy. his color palette creator is one of my absolutely essential tools.

fun thing, create your own internal zen-garden-esque moments.

let your people play on company time. time to play means time to learn.

don’t stay silent. “nothing bad will happen to you”

have the group so you can pass the torch, work in pairs, etc. guerilla redesigns…the first one was a nightmare, because they weren’t constructive. don’t call anyone’s baby ugly.

bandwidth math helps…a number with a comma in it.

he (lawver) uses drupal for organizing group. pick off people from other groups to infect, plant people.

when you screw up, apologize, say you were trying to help, and make it better.

show don’t tell.

who is this frickin’ guy? blah blah blah, white coats, other standards, widgets, yadda yadda.
the only thing you need to say is: it’ll save time.
Meri. what about work only done by outside vendors? goes back to finding high-value targets: the person who writes contracts. that’s why I insisted on that in the webadmin guidelines! I need to make sure that’s being followed up on.

Jeremy Keith. what about working with the wider web? vying to be the coolest developers. does transparency help? “maybe they’ll come work for me someday”

becomes both an internal & external tool. (talking about netscape devedge)

what about working with tools that are harder to get standards-compliant, accessible? particular reference to .net. (oy) “if there’s a huge technology investment…you have your work cut out for you. […] good luck with that.” (fsck.)

eric (meyer?). having teams compete in making pages smaller was very helpful. if the teams like each other.

this panel is the one that gave me the most to do later….

best mocha of my life

I’m finishing up a gorgeous smooth creamy chocolatey iced mocha at the same coffeeshop I went to Thursday morning.? the adorably disheveled English (?) barista brewed the shot directly into the plastic cup with the chocolate syrup.? milk & ice went into a cocktail shaker separately and then poured over the top, stirred together.? even the foam was tasty, and I hate foam.
and that combined with a banana & a cinnamon bite (itty bitty cinnamon roll), plus a bit cooler weather, and my last ride from hotel to downtown being absolutely gorgeous….

feeling pretty darn good.

question for the day: should I skip today’s keynote at 2pm and return my bike then, or wait until 6pm?

the moon is full and so am I

tonight I feel awake.? today was, overall, a very good day, enough to redeem yesterday’s exhaustion and frustration and then some.

I even got back to my hotel to the Breakfast Club (already in progress, as they say), which I haven’t seen in years and just loved in high school.

the sessions today were engaging, lunch was excellent, and I had a very nice evening with H. she had to go to the Austin Organic Gardening Club meeting…but I ended up with a nice little rosemary plant and learned something about water policy in Texas.? (short version: outdated and bizarre.)? then we went to dinner at Magnolia Cafe South, where I had that lovely omlette a few days ago.? magnolia enchiladas: cheese, avocado, olives, and tomatoes.? yum.? I even succumbed to the craving for dessert, and we split brownie ala mode, apparently with blue bonnet ice cream, the best in Texas, according to H.

I feel sated now, both gastronomically and emotionally.? I’m going to sessions tomorrow, and I don’t leave until Wednesday afternoon, but already I feel satisfied.? (definitely looking forward to lunch with Andrea, though.)

WaSP annual meeting

Molly calls everybody up front, I shout that we have power, and zeldman’s voice is very ragnarok-like on the mike.

zeldman!

started selfishly, no particular understanding of the real benefits of standards. were rebellious 14-year-olds because they had no hope. so to speak.

funny story about being anonymous. WaSP: “oh, Glen’s thing.” but now there’s the perception that it’s his thing, but it isn’t and wasn’t really. by being helpful, offering suggestions for improvement instead of ranting.

mmmm…webmonkey….

published all on the same day (bunch of different sites/lists) when they announced the WaSP.

John Allsop (?), people doing things idealistically is the herding cats thing. Z recruited him. a lot of people fought a lot of battles, and Z was the general. looking back on 1997-1998…which is where I got started.

MS gets a round of applause. (?)

lesson that we learned, and are now having to learn them over again. CSS Samurai.

man, my wrists are killing me today.

his claim to fame: introducing Z & Eric Meyer.

“good luck to the next lot”

steve champeon. funny story much like zeldman’s.

andy clarke. silly (fictional?) story. history of the wasp site. (ah, I remember that turn of the century orange look….)

pulled out of room by phone call, came in to unveiling of new design. very sexy.

kim…wouldn’t be where she is today w/out Duran Duran, Molly, and something else that I missed. AOL gave her the free time. 😛 very oscar-like speech.

new site has comments. (keep sharp objects away from Steve Champeon.)

“in these times a conversation has to happen for things to get done”

a new era!

WaSP roll call. oh, hey, that’s photomatt. I should go tell him thank you.

most frequest comments: how can I get involved? you should have a task force for $i.

what about handheld/mobile? kelly goto has contacted them about coordination of a renewed TF.

represents french-speaking people, has been translating wasp stuff into french. how can they mimic what wasp is doing? want to have more internationalized presence!

government, policy makers, etc. Justin Stockton. go find him later.

addition: Europe needs a lot of work.

workflow problems. project mgmt applied to web site design/development. xhtml wireframing, christina wodke. yeah, I saw her present on that at webvisions, that was cool.

boeing in getting to standards took a year to work with their CMS.

it’s 5 after, and I need to go….

WaSP panel

A really good lunch with Ralph. The kind of excellent friend conversation one would hope for, and which is too nice to be blogged. (the Taco Shack is tasty & cheep)
Kimberley Blessing, is she the ETF person?

I think Molly is rad.

Drew on the history on the WaSP, browsers supporting standards. must be more specific now, everything on the web is more specialized.
“not one person can do every job on the team” heh. I still need to write that article idea.

the task forces break into those new specialties.

ATF had a sit-down meeting here. (Matt May) Andy Clarke, Derek F., Jim Thatcher(?), Matt & Molly.

did a bit of name surfing. when I started paying attention again, Matt is talking about helping create knowledge around accessibility for designers/developers, spread the knowledge around. also want to work with software developers, all the tools. being involved with WAI.

Molly on ACID2. came from Opera, has flaws that need to be address, to test any kind of rendering/user agent. absolutely an agenda. and the test is not an accurate measure of what they really wanted? does something, what that means is up to you.

a time to review Acid2: what’s the next steps? no clue or consensus yet. collaboration?!

Dori Smith. co-leader with Jeremy Keith. JS: don’t call it little! because of the origins, people either think of the language as not-real or themselves as not-programmers. enough browsers support “good enough” JS that it’s time for good practices. now it’s DOM scripting! they aren’t about lobbying the browser makers, not now. digression re: XMLHTTPRequest (or whatever). longer term will be server-side developers, and they aren’t ready yet. plan on articles, members working on books. if you’re writing, let them know and they’ll point. if you have a good article & nowhere to post, let them know.

best practices…unobtrusive scripting. Dori’s having a hard time talking. not either/or js vs. access! graceful degredation. usability. separating behavior from content :: css does sep presentation from content.

DW task force. project manager for dw! many of original goals (as of 2001) were met with MX release, a good first step. a rallying point within the company. some progress, room to improve. “genius of the obvious”: standards & accessibility matter. in DW8 default is for alt on insert to be on, and they get feedback: do more for accessibility!

but we can’t save users from themselves. no kidding. they learn from us out here on the ground. in the combined company, they have lots of tools that author stuff to the web, and want to bring the whole company to the task force. (she looks really familiar, like that Jen who was in my college spanish class.)

yep, Kim’s the ETF gal. a wide audience. indeed. two objectives: teaching standards, promote creation of standards within academic sites. (we rawk…table-free since 2001!) came prepared to announce 9 members of ETF: Mark Trammell (I need to find him!!!! UFlorida!) & four other higher ed people.

edu-tfpp — proliferation project. anyone (like me!) can join. many students have joined: “I’m being failed because I’m using standards!” instructors learning to change how they teach. 70+ people on the list. IRC channel. (I wonder if I should try that.)

participate in events for higher ed webbies: HighEdWebDev. looking to expand their role there. fsck. I wish I could go.

W3C QA group is interested in investigating a standardized curriculum, and will be working with ETF. sexy.

what’s missing is the applications that students have to use: online registration, grades, calendaring, application, etc., etc. the big vendors.

recoginzing for good or for ill, supporting people in need of help. questionnaires about programs that are in their area, to get data and investigate.

MsftTF head has been with MS IE since mid-90s after working on Mosiac. but has also been an open standards guy from the beginning, career focal point. challenging position at microsoft. TF has helped by giving web developers a voice w/in MS.

not just about IE. .Net, etc.

his participation in WaSP was covert before, he wanted them to be good at guiding MS. he came back to IE to drive standards forward. his problem with Acid2: people take it as an expression that MS doesn’t care about standards. he mentioned the 3-pixel-jog, my personal nemesis. no, actually, the disappearing text bug is my true nemesis. it hurts, hurts, hurts.

he said some stuff, but I was im-ing with C.

time for questions, open annual meeting will be at 5pm.

q: have big company employees felt that you were putting your careers at risk by being standards advocates? Jen from DW: absolutely not. it’s been bringing the customer’s viewpoint into the company. MS guy: hasn’t put job at risk…he started with standards as a goal. his boss wanted to put NS-style frames in, and he advocated for including CSS instead. (back in IE3 days.)

q: when will IE7 be released? trying to think of how specific he’s supposed to be…. the intent is to release with Vista. might ship anyway in 2nd half of 2006 if Vista ain’t done.
q: what do you wish there were time & resources for? Molly sez they want to hear about that in the open meeting. CSS & mobile are the ones she has at the top of her mind.