Off The Record

ORD Camp tends to be a mixture of public knowledge (here's what we're up to, here's a fact about X that you probably didn't already know) and private conversations (we tried X and it didn't work, we're going to compete against Y by doing Z). Be aware of this and confirm the status of any information before you blog or write up something you heard.

We don't have a strict policy about blogging but we do expect that if someone tells you something in confidence, that you will respect that confidence as if it were told to you under NDA. We call this frieNDA. Much of the free interchange that happens at ORD Camp comes from people's confidence that they can tell each other things off the record. Please respect any request for privacy.

We'd rather not have the sessions recorded or live-blogged. We're hoping to encourage spontaneous conversation, and the idea that someone is recording can act as an inhibitor to that spontaneity. If you want to do a detailed writeup on a presentation you attended, it's probably a good idea to check with the presenter, or in the case of a discussion, the participants. That being said, many sessions benefit from someone taking notes and putting up the results on the wiki. So the point is really just to use discretion. There's a big difference between recording what went on for the benefit of the participants, and turning your experience into a media event. We'd prefer that you write about ORD Camp as a participant, not a reporter, and focus on your own experience of the weekend.

[Ruthlessly cribbed from Foo Camp's OTR policy]