Mashups created by Unconferencing

It all started with an "IT Business Hot Story" that appeared in my email pointing to a Blog entry from Vinnie Mirchandani entitled SOA = SOS that aroused my interest. This item is full of links to quotes from the great and good about SOA, but finishes by contrasting Enterprise SOA approaches with an alternative....

In the meantime, in the Valley, young (and old) kids, oblivious to all these weighty questions are writing their own SOA in very small letters - in mashup camps

What the heck is that all about then? Now I really was interested.

Over the course of two days, more than 300 people turned up for Mashup Camp at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California (right in the heart of Silicon Valley). At last count, more than 980 photos were loaded into Flickr. Not only do the pictures document some of the content that was generated during the event, they also show the attendees having a great time. Close to 40 distinctly separate discussions were proposed and held during the 2-day unconference.

So what is a mashup? And what is Unconferencing?
Let's take them one at a time...

A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into a new combination. Mashups take advantage of emerging simple and lightweight public APIs and Web feeds, which make it relatively easy to design and build on sources such as eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoomaps and Salesforce.com. Coupled with technologies like AJAX which allow the development of powerful clients, you can build quite rich applications combining data from inside and outside an enterprise.

It has been getting quite a bit of press recently because of interest generated by Mashup camp. Here's what one of the organisers, David Birlind said on ZDNet - Mashup ecosystem poised to explode. I think that remains to be seen, but The Programmeable Web currently references 192 APIs and 569 mashups.

As for Unconferencing, well I'm not sure I like the name, but it does convey the idea that it takes an opposite approach in some ways to a conventional conference.

One element is the escape from the "No space" phenomenon described so well by Naomi Klein in No Logo - the pervasive influence of sponsorship, where so many conferences have become merely marketing pitches from vendor representatives, rather than genuine discussion about the nitty-gritty of getting technology to work.

The second element, is that at an unconference there are no spectators, only participants. As Dave Winer puts it, the fundamental law of conventional conferences is...

The sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum of expertise of the people on stage.

So, instead of a bunch of prepared powerpoint presentations (Who hasn't experienced Death by Powerpoint? In the extreme, some people believe Powerpoint is Evil, but I digress...) followed by Q&A sessions, there are facilitated discussions where everyone is involved. Each session has a leader and covers an important topic and people go to whatever session they want to participate in. See
**here**, for example, the way mashup camp 2 is being organised, which embraces the practices of Open Space Technology

One of the best known is O'Reilly's FOO camp (FOO = Friends of O'Reilly)which has been running since 2003. Somewhat inevitably (as any LISP programmer would tell you)a spin-off/imitation of this called BarCamp was created. BarCamps are now being scheduled all over the world. Mashup Camp is another.

David Gammel's blog has a useful comparison of Conference v Unconference which summarises the main contrasts.

So, just think. What could you achieve with an Unconference of architects? What might the themes be? Maybe we should organise one. But first we need a Wiki....