Joe’s Amazing Technicolor Weblog

Ignite Boston - not a terrorist plot, but a geeky gathering at a bar. Kind of like Nerd Nite, actually, only bigger. They’ve been happening in Seattle (and elsewhere?) for a while, but last night was Boston’s first. Was at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square, which was totally packed. There was mention that sufficient buzz, and attendance at future events (next in September?) might lead to some O’Reilly conferences happening on the East Coast someday.

The format involved some social time, which included optional popsicle-stick bridge building, a 20-minute kickoff, and then a whole mess of 5 minute speeches. I didn’t make it through the whole slate, but the one that most grabbed my fancy came first, Matt Welsh’s intro of the City Sense project. In a nutshell, he & his collaborators got $1 million to deploy 100-some super fancy computers with embedded sensors on a mesh network throughout Cambridge (and beyond?), with the aim of letting any random hacker / researcher / whoever run code & otherwise do interesting stuff with the data.

The sensors sound pretty amazing; in addition to some very fancy weather sampling, apparently they’ll be monitoring various atmospheric substances too, so one could imagine interesting research on, say, air quality as correlated to various things. I don’t believe there will be the ability to track cocaine but who knows? I chatted with Matt briefly after the talk, as a number of Environmental Health people I know might be pretty interested in the project. On a personal note, a copy of his book Running Linux helped get me going on my current professional track 9 years ago - thanks Matt!

Scott Berkun kicked things off with a summary of his new book, “The Myths of Innovation”. I was enjoying his speech until someone in the audience interjected that one of his example innovators (don’t recall exactly who - Samuel Morse maybe?) hadn’t actually invented what Scott was claiming he had invented, but it had instead been someone else, possibly a woman - couldn’t really hear, because it was crazy loud - and Scott made a crack about how all the feminists should go stand in the back, and there weren’t very many because the gender ratio was so skewed, ha ha ha.

I’m sympathetic with Scott’s position at that moment - he was operating under some serious time constraints, it was a noisy room with people in the back ignoring him, and the audience had been offering some friendly challenges - but I found this particular crack to be, at best, a serious distraction. Most obviously, the idea that women == feminists just doesn’t hold, as there are women who don’t buy into feminism, as well as men that do. Also, Scott’s analysis of the percentage of women in the audience seemed way off to me. There were more men than women, sure, but there were quite a few women, more than I tend to see in these sorts of situations. Certainly more than are found in open source generally, based on Melissa Draper’s recent open letter, which incidentally makes a good case against jokes around this sort of gender issue in this kind of setting.