Transit

Got into Boston late Saturday night after a long but fairly uneventful day of travel. No snowstorm, yay! Hotel is kind of on the 'wrong side of the tracks' but is fairly nice itself. Met chx and rok (other Drupal developers) and couldn't get to sleep till about 3am Boston time, so hung out for a while.

Yesterday, I bought a disposable cell phone, since it turns out mine doesn't *really* work here (even though Bell said it would), but it's okay cause I'll be able to use it when I go to LA too. Spent a couple hours checking out Boston with Scott, hopped on the subway, picked a stop that looked relatively central (which turned out to be the oldest Subway stop in the country), and ended up getting out right into Boston Common. Walked around there and a bit of the downtown, and an old cemetary. Spent the rest of the day eating, resting, geeking, reading, and playing a little bit of rock band.

Right now I'm sitting in a hall that can hold 800 people, waiting for the keynote talk to start. I can't believe how many people are here! And it really is 93% dudes. The Drupal Chicks Birds of a Feather (BoF) session is this afternoon, and I'm really excited to hang with the other Drupal girls, and get to know they are.

Dries Buytaert is the keynote speaker, and has been mostly speaking about the changes and improvements made in Drupal 6, as well as now the goals and improvements on the slate for Drupal 7. Now Dries is talking about RDF and crazy stuff I don't understand...apparently RDF makes the internet one big database. Well that's an interesting idea. He's saying that we need to make fields the most important thing as far as content, rather than nodes. And he keeps talking about something called SPARQL...it all sounds really cool, I will have to figure out what that's all about.

Keynote just finished, so that's all for now. Will try and add some photos/blog more later!

I know, I know, I'm totally slacking on the blogging. A week later, it's almost not worth blogging an event, but I just don't feel right about letting this one slide, so here goes--a rundown of Vancouver's first TransitCamp:

Organizer extraordinaire: Karen Quinn Fung who's been doing research on Toronto's TransitCamp at SFU.

(photo by Roland)

When/where: December 8th, 2007 at Workspace.

What it is: TransitCamp is an un-conference, in the same style as many of the tech un-conferences that go on around here, like BarCamp[Wikipedia], DrupalCamp, DemoCamp. Un-conferences are just like regular conferences, except that the content of the conference is totally participant driven--attendees choose the session topics and present the sessions themselves.

Karen was so inspired by the TransitCamp she attended in Toronto that she decided to try one out at home, and she pulled it off just great! She got a good amount of publicity[Vancouver Courier] and I was impressed with the turnout as well as a respectable diversity of participants from tech geeks to transit geeks to a few reps from Translink. There were definitely some heated discussions--it'd been a while since I've debated urban planning type issues, and forgot how worked up I can get!

Sessions I really enjoyed: 2 meshing tech and transit--brainstorming on interfaces for schedules and how to communicate between transit services and users led by John from Handi Mobility (who make really cool stuff by the way, you should totally go check their site out):

and the other on wireless on transit led by Joe from FreeTheNet with lots of interesting commentary from DaveO:

And one on creativity and transit led by Jason Vanderhill, which introduced me to Jason Turner who writes great zines and graphic novels set in Vancouver many written (figuratively and literally) on transit:

If you want to know more about what went on at TransitCamp, there are lots of other detailed reviews and photos by some of the other attendees:

• Miss604
• John [1],[2],[3-not really about TransitCamp, but perhaps inspired by it?],[4]
• Roland [1],[2]
• Dustin
• Karen
• Richard
• Paul Hillsdon
• Stephen Rees
• More Flickr photos

ps. I drew this:

(photo by jmv)