The New Year is kicking off with a bang. Bootup Labs moved into our new offices on Sunday (Cambie at Hastings, the Flack Block - come visit!) On Monday morning Danny was in the Financial Post (actually, @trevoro from @layerboom has much longer quotes on page 2). Then on Tuesday (technically yesterday as I'm posting this), I got a call from @lalondetcbc and ended up with a short CBC TV segment talking about whether bloggers should be legally required to disclose payments and other bonuses they receive. I was "opposite" Rebecca / Miss 604. That is, it was supposed to be opposing view points. Rebecca is an excellent blogger. She is a professional blogger (i.e. makes her living from her blogging activities). It's great that she's decided to use CMP.ly to indicate her disclosures: it shows the kind of honesty and transparency that makes her a great blogger. Do we need a law for it? Well, the FTC in the US thinks it does, but the guidelines seem over broad - a $5 discount at a restaurant and a positive review could net you an $11K fine? Of course, they say it will be on a case by case basis. Hmmm ... a law that is hard to enforce and is applied inconsistently? Sounds like trouble to me! I like John Chow's disclosure policy -- everything he posts he's making money from. This is a pure case of media literacy - people need to learn about the sources they are consuming and make their own decisions. Of course, journalists aren't covered under these laws at all. Why not? Good question, and quotes like this one in a Reason Magazine article don't inspire confidence: "Yet I don't remember any reviewer in any print publication ever disclosing that the record, the movie, the meal or the vacation was free." Lastly, it seems like Rebecca and I were set up to have opposing viewpoints, since we seem to be on the same page. Oh well, at least they spelled my name right :P I have a few quotes bookmarked under the tag FTC Endorsement Guidelines for further reading.

So, that's a wrap: BarCamp Vancouver 2009 is "in the can". I really enjoyed this year's event -- I even went to and gave some sessions! (yes, that's worthy of note - as an organizer, it can be hard to relax and get into the flow)

I attended a great talk by Dustin Sacks on the 10 principles of Burning Man and how they compare / contrast with BarCamp. It was great, and made me think about a ton of things.

One thing that stood out for me is that I think that BarCamp has "moved on" from its original core focus on making code -- in part because of the principle of "radical inclusion". We kept making it more inclusive until lots of people that weren't at the same "level" started coming (in tech, in background, etc. etc.). It's not a problem, per se, it's just evolution.

What I've learned - and relearned with every conference and event I attend - is that every event is what you make of it. You are there, and you can participate. Nothing says you have to sit in the audience - get outside and network in the "lobbycon". Most especially with unconferences, the people that are there are those that make the event.

I'm one of the BarCamp Vancouver 2009 volunteers this year. Yes, you read that right: volunteers. In Vancouver, this has always been a community, grass roots event. You'll see some of the same names and faces involved with other events, but every year you'll also see new people that step up and GSD.

Joe is grumpy that we don't have more makers presenting. I would LOVE to see more makers. And I hope everyone with connections to makers encourages them to attend and present and share and make the entire community richer for it.

Here's the comment that I left on Joe's post:

Some of you may have heard that Twitter was down the week before last. This kicked out all sorts of thinking and discussion that, perhaps, one company shouldn't be a single point of failure.

The other item that has been coming up again and again is a request that the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society run a "social network" of some kind. People really enjoy Launch Party and other events, and have found them a great place to network.

More specifically, running Co-Founder Speed Dating, we set up Crowdvine as a mini social network. What we found is that it was heavily used - lots of people used it to check out the backgrounds of other people and it continued to be used after the fact. People who couldn't make it to the event checked in and contacted people, some of which actually resulted in companies being founded.

I got notice this weekend that my talk submission to Open Web Vancouver 2009 got accepted.

Open Web Vancouver runs June 11th and 12th and the brand new Vancouver Convention Center, and registration is now open.

Here's the blurb from the registration page:

This year's conference promises to be at least as exciting as last year's. So far we have an exciting speaker roster confirmed, including keynote sessions with Rickard Falvinge, leader of Sweden's Pirate Party, and Angela 'webchick' Byron, Drupal 7 co-maintainer and Lullabot. Other confirmed speakers include:

• Chris Messina ( OAuth / Citizen Agency )
• Jacob Applebaum ( Tor )
• David Ascher ( Mozilla Messenging )
• Evan Prodromou ( identi.ca )

(BTW Open Web Van peeps - I'm tagging this #owv09, please post this somewhere as the "official" tag)

I posted my talk submission to the Open Restaurants wiki. What's Open Restaurants? Well, it's the namespace for that Semantic Web Community Barn Raising that I blogged about a while back. We had our breakfast meeting, 8 people came, and we've got a great cross section of Drupal devs, Freebase / semweb schema nerds, open data policy enthusiasts, and NLP experts that want to use Twitter posts to create Skynet :P