Full Circle Associates

Next Tuesday I'm on the line up for the second Ignite-Seattle "Ask Later" speaking thingamagic. (Examples from the first event here.) I bailed last time because work was overwhelming everything. Work is intense again, but this time I'm not letting that excuse keep me from a learning experience. You see, this is a gathering where the people are smart, mostly very hip and techie. I don't think I'm dumb, but I'm older than most of them and when the word hip is associated with me, it is with respect to a certain girth of my body. But I can't resist the learning opportunity of trying to share my thinking with a room of smart people. Add the pressure of the format, this will either be a great moment of making fun of myself or great learning. It is good prep for the raft of presenting and workshop leading I'll be doing in the coming months. (7 on the calendar between now and July.)

I really want more practice explaining the ideas out of Etienne Wenger, John Smith and my upcoming book on technology for communities of practice, particularly the concept of technology stewardship. We have talked about it so much between ourselves, we have an intimate short hand and understanding. Translating that fresh to unfamiliar brains is the next challenge. The acid test. So I decided I'd pick this topic for Ignite Seattle.

Here's the bigger picture. You get 5 minutes, 20 slides which automatically advance every 15 seconds. Interesting constraints! Ignite Deux: The Speaker Schedule

First Set of Talks (8:30 PM)

1. Brady Forrest (O’Reilly Radar, Ignite!) - Greetings & Salutations
2. Matthew Maclaurin - (Microsoft Research) - Programming for Fun/Children/Hobbyists/Hackers
3. Elisabeth Freeman (Author in the Head First Series, Works at Disney Internet Group) -The Science Behind the Head First Books: or how to write a technical book that doesn’t put your readers to sleep
4. Scott Kveton (JanRain) - OpenID
5. Avi Geiger (Hardware Architect,Microsoft) - “Power Consumption of Home Computers and Incandescent Lightbulbs” (Brady’s note - trust me this is going to be an eye-opening talk)
6. Ryan Stewart (ZDNet’s Universal Desktop; Threecast) - The Rich Internet Application Space: Everything from where AJAX fits to Apollo to WPF to the Flash Platform
7. Nancy White (Full Circle Associates) - What the Bleep is a Community Technology Steward?

Second Set of Talks (9:30 PM)

1. Hans Omli (Shoestring Ventures)- Elevator Pitches and Parallel Entrepreneurship
2. Sarah Davies (Freedom For IP) - Share and share alike: GPL, Creative Commons, and the future of digital freedom
3. Lars Liden (Teachtown) - Utilizing Web Technology to Help Children with Autism
4. Kurt Brockett (Identity Mine) - A Look at Windows Presentation Foundation
5. Marcelo Calbucci (Sampa) - Dr. Watson for AJAX
6. Lee Lefever (The World Is Not Flat) - Adventures from a Year of Multimedia Travel Blogging: A few inspiring stories from a year of travel blogging across 29 countries that produced 500+ blog posts, 24 original videos and 14,000 photos.
7. Barry Brummitt (Google) - MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters

Third Set of Talks (10:30 PM)

1. Ellie Lum (R.E.Load Bags) - “How R.E.Load Makes Their Bags”
2. Leo Dirac (Rhapsody) - Transhuman technology trends and their implications for a theory of morality
3. Deepak Singh (business|bytes|genes|molecules) - An Open Scientific Future
4. Mike Acuri (Ontela) - Escaping the Empire: how to leave a big company
5. Heater Ralph - Art or science? A multi-person pogo stick
6. Jordan Mitchell (CEO, OthersOnline) - Distributed Social Networking and a New Metaphor for Search
7. Corprew Reed (American Society for Information Science & Technology) - What the heck is the Pacific Northwest Chapter of ASIS&T?

Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking). The next one will be held upstairs at the CHAC on Tuesday, February 13th. The Make Contest (Egg Slam) will begin at 6:30; the Ask Later talks will begin at 8:30. Videos and photos from the previous Ignite are available. Admission is free.

In Seattle? Come along. Give me feedback. Reassure me afterwards that no matter what happened, it was worth the learning. :-)