This is where you can add your ideas for sessions. These ideas may be preliminary and incomplete, and can disappear at any time!
Well I guess somebody's got to be the first so here goes...
Presenter: Evan Miller
Description: A common feature of online stores or review sites is the ability to sort items by "average rating." All-too-often, however, an item with only one or two five-star ratings finds its way above an item with 99 five-star ratings and one four-star rating. So how do you balance the average rating with the number of ratings? In this talk I'll develop a statistical model to sort by the probability of a high average rating. Statistical topics I'll touch upon may include Bernoulli distributions, Bayesian updating, and confidence interval estimators. Say good-bye to dirty hacks and hello to good statistics on your "Top Rated" page!
Initiator: Ian Bicking
Description: This is intended to take the form of a query and discussion, not a presentation.
Traditionally these discussions have asked "is blogging right for your organization?" or about standards and guidelines for how internal blogging should work. These questions have become boring, especially I hope for this audience. Instead I'd like to ask: how as a writer (or "idea generator" or whatever you might like to consider yourself) do you communicate your ideas inside an organization? How do you justify the effort to the organization and yourself? In an environment where your readers are at least somewhat coerced, how do you approach the idea of building readership? How do you talk about ideas without seeming to give orders (if that's not your intention)?
Presenter: Nate Kontny
Description: Would anyone be interested in getting out of their chairs and out of their heads a little for a session on some mixed martial art techniques? Been doing this for a couple years so I'm no expert teacher, but I think I can do a decent job communicating some of the basic techniques around defending yourself: throwing punches, applying chokeholds, some things to think about if you find yourself in a knife fight, what you want to do fighting on the ground, etc. I'd keep it pretty much about technique so no one's getting sweaty, but it'd be a chance to move around a bit if there was a large enough space for participants.
Perpetrator: Dan Ratner
Description: Although the web is a relatively easy place to search, it is still an almost impossible place to browse. While I've been thinking about this for some time a trivial use case fell (almost literally) into my lap recently. I wanted to buy a swim suit before going away for a few days on the beach around New Years (it's sounding even better now...) for reasons I'll discuss, I gave up shopping from my living room and went downtown to an old fashioned shopping mall and saved time (if not money). Recommendation engines are still very primitive but now-mainstream technologies like social networks provide some intriguing options. The idea of a semantic, browseable web isn't new, though some implemention alternatives might be. Is this the new IPv6, a good idea that'll never happen, or could this be genuinely useful technology that could be developed in, well, your living room? This is more than dirty laundry.
Perpetrator: David Beazley
Description: One of the worst things that can happen to any small business is to be a party to an intellectual property lawsuit concerning copyrights, patents, or trade secrets. Obviously lawyers play a major role in the mechanics of pursuing or defending a lawsuit. However, the role of lawyers often pales in comparison to that of the "technical expert" that the lawyers choose to hire. So, who is this technical expert and what do they do? In this session, I'll talk about my own experience of what it was actually like to be hired as a technical expert on a software-related lawsuit. This will be a session filled with hacking, suspense, intrigue, horror, stupidity, and insight into all of the things that you never see in the courtroom or read about in the news. It will also give you an idea of what happens if you are ever sued (god forbid). Legal disclaimer: this talk is not disclosing the specific details of any particular case.
Moderator? Presenter? Joe Born
Description: The TV market dwarfs the PC market, both in the US and worldwide. Every major electronics manufacturer is attempting to connect the TV to the internet via their devices. Most of the discussion has been surrounding all the better, faster, cheaper aspects of that connection, and that we need bigger fonts and a different UI, but what's the vision beyond that? What will "the couch experience" look like in 5, 10 or 20 years? The TV has traditionally been a closed ecosystem. What are the opportunities for innovators, developers entrepreneurs or anyone wanting to make an impact on the when a communication medium as huge as the TV opens up to all the world?
The Dude: Anders Conbere
Description: There are some pretty common pitfalls and questions when it comes to putting together a bike from scratch, most of these could be avoided with information that fits on a 3x5 notecard and 10 minutes with someone who knows what's up. So we'll cover picking a style of bike that works for you, frame sizing, head sets, bottom brackets, things you need to size ahead of time, pieces to care about and pieces not to. Etc. (are you bringing a built-from-scratch bike to demonstrate the results? Please do!)
Open to suggestions:
A) Id's, sequencing and counters in distributed environs.
B) overview of distributed filesystem concepts & examples
C) JiffyLite - minimal-impact, scalable, comprehensive web app logging
-jason
Title: Please Write A Compiler For Erlang/OTP
Presenter: Evan Miller
Erlang is one of the most advanced software platforms out there, with built-in features for high availability, scalability, and message routing. So why isn't it more widely used? Well, Erlang also has one of the most god-awful syntaxes of any computer language ever written. The syntax is tedious to write, difficult to refactor, and almost impossible to like. In this talk, I will show you how to write a simple compiler for the Erlang platform, with the hope that one of you will go out and implement a superior syntax for Erlang.
Title: The Bud that Doesn't Bloom
Presenter: Gwendolyn Graff
Taste Buds - they're really interesting actually!!! Although there are only a few basic tastes, it is surprising how much we really don't understand about these guys. From what we do know, I was fascinated to learn some of their function/mechanisms. So come and get acquainted with your sweet, salty, sour, and bitter side....and learn a bit about umami! On an entirely tangential note, I can show you how to blow Double Bubbles - just for fun
Discussion: Improving Chicago as a Startup Hub
Moderator: Adam Siegel
We know it's cold and that's why alot of companies don't even bother to think about starting up here. But there are also world class universities in and around Illinois/Chicago so the talent pool is immense. There have been some efforts to turn start-uppers in to more of a community but these seem to have had mixed success. What can we do to make Chicago as hospitable as possible to starting up companies and making it more attractive than the coasts? Rails was built here. Django was built here. It's insane Chicago doesn't get more props. A smattering of highly successful startups have gone on to prosper from Chicago so how can we increase that success? Designating start-up worker cafes? A program to facilitate older start ups mentoring younger start ups? yCombinator copycat?
Discussion: Cloud Computing: Is it <insert lame cloud pun here>?
Moderator: Borja Sotomayor
Cloud Computing is the latest buzzword floating around but... is it full of smoke? is it a nebulous concept? is it a stormy proposition? is it full of hot air? is it a blue-sky idea? is it the hurricane that will sweep IT? If anything, it has at least begotten lots of amusing cloud-inspired headlines. I propose a session to discuss what Cloud Computing is and is not, and to share how we're using it (succesfully or otherwise) in our own projects.
Discussion: News, what is it's future?
Moderator: Looking for one
The Chicago Tribune has filed for bankruptcy. They are giving away free hats to get the Sunday paper at the grocery store with a lady yelling for people to sign up and everyone ignores her. There is a 24 hour news state on cable networks like Fox, MSNBC, CNN not to mention Blogs, Twitter, Facebook News Feeds, Google News, Everyblock and SMS alerts. What is the future of news?
Discussion: What technological opportunities appear when gas is $20 a gallon?
Moderator: Zach Kaplan
The modern world will fundamentally change when gas gets to $20 a gallon. How will our world be different? Will computers and the internet take an even more prominent role in our lives? Will communities re-organize to eliminate commuting? Will new sources of energy power our vehicles? - Discuss.
I've really been digging the whole "software is like a museum and Steve Jobs is the ultimate curator analogy" Jason Fried might have started. I've started looking into museums a lot lately, and think there are some other great inspirational ideas from museums that are worth talking about and exploring in our software company. Anyone else have some analogies here they feel has helped them a pretty great deal in their life or work?
Why do we share online? What goes through our mind as we ponder whether to hit the share button? How do these processes differ from sharing offline? How do our national, ethnic, gender etc identities inform our understanding of what it is to share, and our perception of others' actions?
For the educators coming to ORD Camp, I think it would be interesting if we had a session to discuss not only how we incorporate Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) tools and technologies in our teaching but also how we foster FOSS values and skills in the classroom. I've had some experience using collaborative learning techniques in my college programming courses which attempt to develop skills like collaborative development, teaching oneself how to use a new tool, making sense out of other people's code, etc. and would be glad to share them, but I'm also interested in hearing about the experiences other teachers have had with FOSS in the classroom.
Moderator/Presenter: Nate Kontny
Inspired by the museum analogy and Obama, I've been exploring "clean desks". How many people feel soothed and love the view of a clean desk, whether physically or the desktop on your computer. How many people strive to clean off their dining room table and put a single vase on it. In this talk I'll go over some examples of very simply designed software applications (that most of us know and love), but perhaps don't take the opportunity often enough to allow users to enjoy a clean desk. We can discuss if I'm way friggin off base or maybe this analysis has some merit and what we can do about it. I do have a couple examples of how to achieve a clean desk more often, but maybe we others have more insight and expertise to share. If anyone's interested, here's a start of where my thinking is about this subject: http://n8.tumblr.com/post/73857484/why-dont-more-software-applications-look-like-clean
High-profile political campaigns are *using* OSS in high-profile ways, but the whole integrated package isn't making its way back out for anyone else to use. Also, campaigns in general are getting increasingly sophisticated about technology, but remain a step (or steps) behind other sectors. What functionality are they missing out on that would have a positive impact on their goals (organizing/outreach, message, voter turnout)? How can it be built with existing OSS? How can campaign software be made and maintained in the open, given the inherently competitive nature of campaigns, even with parties? What about key pieces of data -- voter file, streets DB (for geocoding, routing)? Campaigns also look very, very different at different scales: how can municipal campaigns profit from the software without the resources of a national campaign?