Aaron Swartz has some interesting thoughts on Improving the Foo Camp Format

I will try to think a bit outside my usual web box, on the assumption that you should be able to navigate SciFoo entirely offline, by looking at the session boards.

First, it seemed to me that the transition from digital to analog was awkward. There was a lot of discussion in the SessionSuggestions part of the wiki, but #1 it was hard to follow since the wiki has no “diff” like change-comparison, #2 the session suggestions weren’t numbered, so you couldn’t find new ones easily as some were added at the top and some at the bottom, #3 there was no linkage of the online discussions to the final analog moment of the rush up to the sessions boards.

So I suggest:

o use a different wiki with change comparison features, so people can tell exactly what’s being added
o number the session suggestions as they’re added online
o have a voting system, a la SciFoo prototypes and have someone (Timo?) post the top three rated/voted sessions onto the sessions whiteboard the first night

Once we move into the analog world, it also seemed to me that there was little integration between The Wall of People, the Friday night standup, and the sessions themselves (although I did hear someone yell out “talk!” periodically when people did their standup, which I assume was to encourage them to do a session). I wonder if Friday can be made a better session-creation engine. I have a personal bias against these “let’s go around the room, who are you” formats, particularly when there are hundreds of people, many of whom are jetlagged and it’s already late in the evening. I like Aaron’s idea: “all the people who want to hold a session form a line going towards the back of the room. Each person in the line gets 30 seconds to pitch their session.”

Unlike Aaron, I don’t think you need to measure the audience response electronically or e.g. through clapping (which could be embarassing if you pitch and get no response). Rather, I think you then proceed to the usual session board process. Here are some ideas for hacking the session board, based on visual thinking (which is far from my strength):

o make the size of the session blocks on the whiteboard proportional to the room – not exactly proportional, but say the 100 person room slot is 4 times the size of 5-10 person rooms, and twice the size of the 20-person rooms. That way you can tell at a glance the proposed size of the session
o Make all the slots sticky notes, with a different colour for each column. That way you can immediately tell visually when a session has been moved from one room to another, since the colours will move – this would also help the Google people trying to keep the online version current
o Give everyone a set of sticky dots as part of their conference package – then they can indicate their attendance by sticking dots on the sessions they plan to go to – this will serve three purposes #1 you can tell when a session (like the Godel one) is going to overflow its roomsize #2 it provides a visual recommender service to see what the popular sessions will be and #3 if your session only gets a couple dots, you can cancel it and attend another one

Another approach would be to have giant writeable touchscreens, which would save the Googlers having to transcribe everything since it would be simultaneously editable online and offline, but that may be techno-overkill.

Another idea to integrate online and offline would be to have a scifoosession tag in Connotea, so people could bookmark interesting postings throughout the year, and then find some way to use that in session identification as well.