Still catching up after Chicago...

I had a fun trip to CSCW in Chicago, especially since I snuck in some time to go on an awesome architecture tour and see jazz.

My talk apparently went well (thanks danah!) although a mid-talk crash led me to forget to show off the topic clustering and similarity coloring that constituted the text analytics. We also got some good questions about the possibility of shared read wear and user profiling.

I'm still sorting through my notes on what I saw and reading through papers. There wasn't anything that really blew me out of the water, although the session on backchannels was interesting and exhausting (I like the idea of augmented classrooms), Barry Wellman was entertaining, and the brief discussion of IDiag was intriguing. The idea of Wikilens was also interesting, and the sessions on software develoment, cultural issues in face-to-face collaboration, and organizational issues rang true. Cliff explained how e2 was supposed to work to me (and gave me some explanations of Slashdot's moderation system). He also pointed me to Susan Herring's work comparing e2 to wikipedia.

Some interesting ways of organizing things: McGrath on ROI, Quentin Jones on wireless. Good explanations of acquiring common ground in different environments. Cool demo of CoWord.

Frankly, commiseration over the election really impeded discussions about collaboration. Larry Lessig, in an awesome-if-generic closing plenary fused the two with his mention of opt-in communities, but didn't really offer any solutions. He did repeatedly mention the book republic.com. Maybe I should read it.