> For a non-technologist conference, there was a lot of technologist > companies making big technologist announcements. I had a great time > despite having people saying to me before I left, "You're going > where?". I think a bunch of the geowankers got free tickets at the > last minute, so gnat may have reversed his "I don't want wank" > statements. How can anyone not want wank? I hope I get invited again > next year, and more geowankers get to speak.
I did indeed change my tune. We were chasing a rapidly developing mashup world and trying to figure out how to do a Big Budget Conference with business people and the technologists we know and love. We started off thinking "business people want business wank", but there are dozens of conference offering business wank and everyone's sick of it. Business people turned out to really like meeting the people who were turning things upside down. I think Where 2.0 ended up as a pretty good mix of technology and business, and I want to do it like that again this year. Don't be put off by the marketing copy on the web site. I'm working on a version that better represents the mixture of technology and business, and the reason for putting things on stage. We're trying to showcase the projects that are shaking up the geolocation/mapping/local scenes. These projects are almost always from one or more of these worlds: * civic action work * hackers / geowankers / alpha geeks (hi!) * open source * startup They're never from big fat companies with "respect" and "names". ESRI is like Microsoft, like any big company, slave to its businss model. It can't do new things, because new things threaten old things, and it makes all its money off old things. (I realize you know this, I'm stating it so you know that I know it :-) Putting ESRI on stage to talk about disruptive innovation would be like putting the MPAA up to talk about disruptive music distribution models. There may be other reasons to put ESRI on stage, but it's highly unlikely to be because they're genuinely turning the GIS world on its head. So I want to show the projects that are hurting the old way of doing things, have some people talk about how things are changing (just to spell it out), and then leave it to the audience to figure out where to make the money, or even whether there is money to be made. I was talking with Chris Holmes tonight and in conversation came upon that formulation: we'll show you how the world's changing, you figure out for yourself where the money is. So I am definitely open to geowankers. Ignore what ur-Nat said. Nat in early 2006 is saying "bring me your geowankers, your open source toolkit creators, your huddled Google Maps hackers". If anyone reading this is interested in presenting at Where 2.0, getting your project out to the press (we had NYT, Economist, Wired, and others), getting in front of business people who are making decisions about what to use, or even getting in front of VCs and angel investors if you think that money could help what you're doing. Nat _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
