Learning from TechCamp

IRISH SOCIOLOGISTS are going to love the next 20 years because we have entered a phase where connections to our virtual communities transcend our ties to our physical surroundings. This fact was quite apparent during the day-long Tech Camp held in the Northside Community Centre in Coolock on 15 October.

Ten years ago, reports on RTE had to use the term “information superhighway” because Ireland had become a part of a high-speed electronic motorway without even completing a national motorway system. People started flocking to the internet like lemmings.

Today, the things that cause people to continue connecting normally arise outside of gated communities. People connect to interesting things. They interact in new social spaces in unexpected ways. Importantly, their interactions normally transcend parish, borough, and county borders.

I remember when Captain Kirk talked to his computer and got answers. Today, people tell their computers how they want to connect to people. And instead of one-to-one communication, ideas pulse around in cyberspace between dozens (even millions) of interested people. “In cyberspace the economies of interaction, communication and co-ordination are different than when people meet face-to-face,” explains Peter Kollock, associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. “These shifts make the creation of thousands of spaces to house conversations and exchanges between far-flung groups of people practical and convenient.”

In late August, an electronic conversation started among a mixed group of Irish marketers, technologists, writers, students, public relations consultants, solicitors, lecturers and community workers. Nodes of the conversation percolated from different sources. The Irish Linux Users’ Group carried a discussion thread, along with boards.ie and the Planet of the Blogs news aggregator. Within a week, a single page editable document appeared on a planning site. Most of the people who used this single page had never revised a web page belonging to someone else—they had never added information to a wiki. They figured it out and something remarkable evolved.

Within a fortnight, more than two dozen people had proposed an agenda of a day-long conference called Tech Camp Ireland. Visitors to the wiki added content that would interest them, followed by presenters who offered to explain the concepts during 25-minute sessions. The idea stepped up from being a simple Saturday chat session to a sophisticated discussion of web technologies, digital rights, marketing on the internet and technology that makes life better.

Billed as a “self-organising conference”, the event’s logistics landed in the laps of Gavin Byrne and Piaras Kelly, both working with the Media Cooperative in Coolock, County Dublin. Byrne and Kelly had to sort out rooms, a coffee dock, a free lunch and audio recordings of the main events. They did all that with a skeleton crew. (UPDATED: Ed Byrne did much of the organising along with Piaras Kelly. Gavin Byrne, who conducted one of the most interesting sessions, keeps IT ticking over for NEAR-FM.)

With a well-appointed venue set up to accommodate the Saturday event, Tech Camp Ireland drew 35 participants from Canada, Cork, Dublin, Galway, Holland, Kilkenny Tipperary, Wexford, and northern Ireland. Bloggers provided interesting teasers before kick-off and several continued writing about various sessions while they were in progress. During the day, Robin Blandford snapped pictures with his cameraphone and sent them to Flickr, the free photo-sharing service where they’re tagged as “techcamp” with captions explaining each image.

The after-action publicity may actually surpass the lead-up because several of the topics discussed attracted deep interest. The not-for-profit group Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) made its soft launch on the day, hitting home with vignettes about how people in the room were involved in criminal activity on account of things they admit to doing with their digital equipment. One attendee did not know it was illegal to rip a rented DVD onto his laptop to play it. He doesn’t have a DVD player and he watches all his movies on his computer. He was duly cited by the DRI team. Most listening did not know it was illegal in Ireland to record from CD to iPod. Few had considered the data mining the government could do when combing through a person’s web browsing history, phone call records, and subject lines of e-mails. In a lively session, people reacted to the realisation that they have ceded their digital rights to the government.

Like several other topics, digital rights transcends cyberspace. In a few years’ time, sociologists will have to examine how electronic social relationships re-stitched the fabric of Irish physical communities. Based on what transpired in the making and presenting of Tech Camp Ireland, the collective process is well underway.

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Published by Bernie Goldbach in the Irish Examiner, October 21, 2005.

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Comments

[Piaras Kelly]

What page did this appear on? It wasn't in your regular column Inside View.

Just a couple of things to point out. I don't work with the Media Co-op, I work for Drury Communications. Ed Byrne was also the other main organiser.

Now back to scouring the paper for that article :D

[Ed Byrne]

Thanks for putting in that update - just one other thing - I don't work with the Media Co-op or have any affiliation with Near FM - I run BDM Innovate (hence the wiki was at www.bdmwiki!).

Ed.