It’s Dave Winer’s birthday today! I know he’s already gone to bed but I hope this still counts as it is not yet midnight where I live. From Susan Mernit’s post and Dave’s own, I’m happy to hear he had a happy time at the geek dinner tonight (wish I had been there too to see cake surprise). I’m not one of the first to greet him but perhaps I’m one of the last. 54 days until I see 50-year-old Dave at Gnomedex! May your sixth decade be your best!
Dave’s mom, Eve, encouraged me with her kind words to her son:
I have to pay homage to my son David who is turning 50 today. I find him to have become a thoughtful, caring and creative person. I think about what it was like to become 50 myself. And at that age I had just achieved an incredible milestone. I had gotten my Ph.D. and became a licensed psychologist. I believe that David is having the same kind of experience in his life at this time. So 50 seems to be just a brief stopping point in a surge of a rise in creativity and accomplishments as an outcome of previous intellectual and emotional work. Happy Birthday David.
Other birthday greetings are in order too…I’m overdue to wish Michael Hanscom a happy occasion. Jenny’s Livi has a special day this month and so do Don Park (on the other side of this midnight!), Enoch Choi , Anita Rowland, Randy Charles Morin (and family), Ariel Meadow Stallings and my brother. Today is also the day Sarah Hughes, one of our favorite skaters, turned 20.
Happy Birthday to all!
Ted and I had a great time last night hosting the first Bainbridge bloggers get-together.
The attendees
The group included many of those listed in the sidebar of this blog:
Busker (Chris Holmes), Capra hircus (Adrian Sampson), Casdra Blog (Mike Houser), Delivering Hope (Walker Willingham), Rowdy Rover (Ed and Mary Hager and family), Ted Leung on the Air (Ted Leung), The Binary Circumstance (Chip Gibbons), Voice of Bainbridge: The Blog (Philippe Boucher)
Also Dave Henry of bainbridgeisland.org attended.
As Chris noted in his write-up, a couple non-blogging spouses also joined us (perhaps they should merit a special badge? :-). My children were happy to have a few playmates, making friends with younger members of the Houser, Willingham and Hager households.
Mary introduced us to another blog of hers, Bainbridge Book Moms, an excellent idea. One member will post a review and others comment, using a rating system.
Missing from our group were Real Lawyers Have Blogs(Kevin O’Keefe) and the anonymous Bainbridge Beat. Maybe next time? I also hope Le blog d’Anne (Anne Boucher) will come, along with her father, Philippe. And as Ted has noted, it’d be great if Sarah Gould could join us too.
Side note: On my post describing our bash, blogger Beth Freeman commented that she will soon be returning to Bainbridge!
potluck = community
As part of our dialogue during the evening, we introduced ourselves and mentioned our interests. The descriptions eventually became a conversation on the definition of community. Someone said that community happens whenever you have a potluck. Potluck we had indeed, with plates of delicious food from hors d’oevres to desserts, including olives, muffins, bread, cheese, salads and apple cake. Cucumber sandwiches were conspicuously absent. Bloggers like wine, and also cranberry juice, as evidenced by the empty bottles on my countertop. We also enoyed a huge cooler packed with ice and abundant choices. I think next time we should try picnic at a park. Thanks to everyone for contributing to our dinner!
I took advantage of the occasion to cook two of my favorite soups: split pea and another one named Grubbin’ Spicy Chicken Soup, clipped from a magazine years ago. The latter has twenty ingredients, some grated and chopped, a mix of vegetables, rice, beans, chicken and flavors; I often wait to make it until my birthday or another event that warrants gourmet stew.
The bloggers bash reminded me of my wedding reception: I was having too much fun talking and hosting to eat. It was only after I was tidying the kitchen late last night that I started to realize all the goodies everyone had brought. But what I really want to know is who brought the slug?
I couldn’t believe it when I saw the creature emerge on my windowsill while I was scrubbing at the sink. Quite possibly it came in the house after my gardening efforts earlier that afternoon. But perhaps it was someone’s creative contribution to our potluck? 😉
our assembly
Everyone was sitting down to eat:
I didn’t remember the camera again until later, when the group was smaller.
for further reading
Other reports on our gathering:
Philippe Boucher posted first and twice, adding the Bainbridge Book Moms blog to the list of island bloggers linking to capra hircus the blog and capra hircus the lawnmower.
Mike Houser had fun and hopes we get together again soon.
Chris Holmes composed a thorough recollection of the evening, amusing and clever. Chris also explained in his post why I discovered pictures of Brad Pitt on my laptop after everyone left.
Chip Gibbons figured out that my neighbors were in Washington D.C. last night and not on Wysteria Lane. He explained more about the research done on my computer and discovered he now has some new connections to famous people.
Ted tried not to get too upset about Mike’s PSP (photo compared to the Newton!) Although he wasn’t as connected with as many bloggers as I was, he knew Dave Henry from previous island connections and had used Adrian’s iCAR.
Where do we go from here?
To borrow a phrase from Doc Searls (his Les Blogs slides are excellent and make me wish I could have flown to France!), I hope this meeting was the beginning of rolling the snowball down the hill.
Tonight I mentioned to Ted I might start a blog for our Bainbridge group but he groaned, overloaded with feeds already. So please comment below so we can discuss how to proceed from here.
I hope we can get together again sometime soon, taking advantage of the fact that Sarah and Adrian will be graduating and going to college in the fall. Perhaps we can hang out at the waterfront concerts this summer or potluck at a park.
Or we could meet somewhere with wi-fi to talk about technical issues and pursue the aggregator demonstration.
Here’s a thread I wanted to pursue further last night:
One comment that was made during the introduction-discussions seemed to imply that community was easier found outside the island rather than within the island. I wanted to pursue this but wasn’t able to follow up the idea. However, we could get together both in person and on-line to create community and to interact with the island. I like the Urban Vancouver blog – would anyone else like to create a group blog? How could we impact Bainbridge? How could we encourage others to blog? (through more fun potlucks?)
In addition, I’d like to organize a get-together for Kitsap bloggers, perhaps at a park in the middle of the county, sometime this summer.
A big thanks to everyone who came and everyone who helped connect us to each other. In comparison to many friends, I don’t think of myself as a Gladwell-categorized-Connector (I perform well as I do on his test because Leung is on his list). Yet yesterday it was fun to be in the room and realize I had helped people get to know each other. Thanks also go out to reporter Jim Thomsen, Google, flickr, and Jay McCarthy, among others…
Thanks again and please comment or email to continue our conversation…
I planted a few gallons of creeping thyme last spring in our sidewalk strip and a year later the flowers are noticeable, patches of bright purple amidst the mulch.
Although they are not the kind of blooms one can cut and deliver to others in a bouquet, with a ring of the door bell, I figured they would work fine for the purpose of wishing everyone a Happy May Day!
I imagined this skull at the zoo outside the gorilla cage was a prop for a Shakespearean play, awaiting the performance of a simian Hamlet.
The BlogHer Conference ’05 was officially announced for July 30 in Santa Clara, CA on blogher.org earlier this month.
BlogHer Conference ’05 will provide an open, inclusive forum to:
1. Discuss the role of women within the larger blog community
2. Examine the developing (and debatable) code of blogging ethics
3. Discover how blogging is shrinking the world and amplifying the voices of women worldwide
Here’s why I’m excited:
The advisory board listed on the blog side bar is an amazing group of women. I’ve already met a few of them and I’d love to meet the rest. Directed by these women, this conference will be fun and powerful!
The community coming together. It’s great to see bloggers supporting each other, contributing and making it happen in big and little ways. Wow! Nancy White noted this collaboration beginning.
Different voices! Nancy and dana boyd are plotting how to bring different voices to BlogHer. Reading through the comments on the BlogHer site and in Elisa Camahort’s del.icio.us bloghercon feed, I am hearing voices and meeting bloggers new to me, traveling around the country and world. How exciting! I’ve started adding some new feeds to my aggregator, thanks to the reading I’ve done for BlogHer.
New ideas! The Room of Your Own, opportunity for anyone to create and lead a session, is an excellent idea. I’m eager to hear what happens and who chooses to take advantage of this rich possibility. Volunteer Blogherships are another creative way of opening the doors for more to enter. The Birds of a Feather networking ideas sound fun and practical. The organizers seem to be simply facilitating what others desire, asking for feedback and soliciting suggestions.
How to be naked will be another rich discussion as others I have enjoyed in the past. It’s a hot topic, an intense topic, and one that has been powerful at previous blogging conferences so I imagine it will have a great effect with the community of Bloghers. How much of ourselves we choose to reveal in our blogs, the difference between our public and private selves, is an issue I’ve explored in the Emotional Life of Weblogs session at BloggerCon III, in my session at Northern Voice on Making Masks in February and in the talk I’m preparing for Gnomedex 5.0. The lines we draw, the shapes we make, the way we hide or share ourselves feeds back into our identity and helps us in the bridges we build to others. I believe too that there are aspects of this discussion that are particular to women, as has been pointed out in the comments. For example, we may be more likely to try to share from our relationships and personal lives, yet at the same time we may be more concerned for safety and privacy.
Reading through the session discussions reveals many great ideas. Besides the sessions themselves, I like the connections that are made at conferences from being together in the same room and hanging out during meals. Many of my closest relationships in blogs were cemented at conferences. I imagine BlogHer Conference will have many of the same opportunities.
So I’ve described why I am excited about BlogHer Conference ’05. It’s taken me a while to write this post. The past few weeks have been busy for our family and with much on my plate, I haven’t been blogging at my usual pace. But I’ve also taken my time to write this post because I didn’t want to write it. I didn’t want to say I can’t make it.
BlogHer Conference ’05 will take place July 30 in Santa Clara, California. I would like to be there. We have a few friends in the area so I could probably find a place to stay and when I looked at airfares from Seattle to San Jose last night, the cost was down to $200. However, before BlogHer Conference was announced, we had made other commitments of our limited family resources. Also, the date is too close to OSCON (August 1 – 5) for our family’s comfort. Ted and I try to avoid playing tag-team parenting, the exchanging of kids and kisses at the airport gates.
But never say never. I’m leaving open the possibility that perhaps something will work out last minute and I’ll be able to go. For now I think I should plan on staying at home and participating on-line as I can.
However, simply because I’m not attending doesn’t mean anyone else has to miss it: Go to BlogHer Conference ’05!
And please write a post or two to share the goodies . 🙂
Thanks to the organizers and advisory board of BlogHer for all the work they have done so far!
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Bonus links on gender issues:
Lisa Dusseault: I’m concerned about conferences with serious gender imbalances…
Amanda Witt: On Boys and Bikinis.
