Visited Berlin / Germany for the #IndieWebCamp to learn more about the #IndieWeb. We changed plans last minute and went by train to the camp when we found out about the new and kinda cheap #FlixTrain from Stuttgart to Berlin.
The #IWC itself has been a blast. The location was the office grounds of Mozilla Berlin and we were even offered a tour to take a good look at it (and it’s coffee machines).
The group was a very mixed bunch from various places. Some even took planes over the ocean to visit the camp on the continent. It’s nice to put faces on people I only knew from reading so far and I’m grateful for this chance.
The first day was all about getting to know the people. Organizer Tantek Çelik invited everyone to speak up and introduce themselves and their websites so we got a lot of examples of itches already scratched with #IndieWeb principles.
We also learned about the OptOutTools project from the keynote speaker Teresa Ingram with the bold claim to work on AI capable of detecting misogyny online. It’s browser extention is designed like an ad-blocker or personal firewall where the user can decide how much of offending text may be displayed (or even none at all). Undetected phrases can be added to the filter to train it even more as well.
This resulted in a lof of discussion about intented and unintended side effects and how and in what ways speech will change and how people will try to break it. Detecing e.g. hate speech by AI is a goal even FB was (officially) not able to tackle so far. I’m very curious if and how this succeeds so I’ll keep an eye on their GIT repositories.
Parallel other talks were held in various rooms. This way I learned about the proposed RFC 6920 on Naming Things with Hashes or a quick introduction to #microformats held by David Shanske. There were also some less technical discussions. Two teenagers attented to the camp as well so we had a talk about what’s in for them on the #IndieWeb and we learned about TikTok dances. Some did their very first TikTok dance this day. So perhaps we’ll soon see a #POSSE or #PESOS provider for #TikTok.
The evening was all about finding food for a group of ~15 people. That wasn’t an easy task. Berlin is an ever changing city and all restaurants were packed or gone for good. The online informations are sparse on this and way to often badly out of date. We were about to give up on this when we found a really small store that switches to some sort sort of food place in the evenings usually only visited by the local neighbourhood. They threw a bunch of tables together for us and somehow we all squeezed into it. Such a cozy and friendly place. I loved it and that night became a really short one for us.
The next day was about getting things done – a hard task beeing sleep deprived from the travels and short nights before.
While some just offered assistance others had more pratical goals in mind. This ranged from setting up a new #IndieWeb enabled blog to hacking on gallery systems, location visualisation or in my own case on my #POSSE provider for Okuna.io.
It’s really nice to see how other people work and get their projects done. Everybody has some very personal workflow here and I enjoy peeking over people’s sholders and catch a glimse of this.
In the end everybody got a chance to show what was achieved or learned. I got my prototype for backfeeding reactions going and used the chance to show this to the audience off the record without the cameras going. Okuna is still in closed beta so I’m sensitive on this topic. As mentioned I always have some invites to give away. I’d love to see more IndieWeb users on Okuna as well. I’ll need lab rats testers for my bridge soon anyway 😀
That was a great weekend and we met some awesome people at the camp. Of course we also snatched a bunch of new stickers and we ate as much candy from the stashes @MozillaBerlin as we could. Always fun to let the inner Geek run wild on such events 😉