We deployed Pathable at Foo Camp June 22-23 and ever since I’ve been telling myself I should blog about the experience. As is often the case for me, it wasn’t until I woke up today quite literally dreaming about it that my impressions were sufficiently crystallized.
Foo Camp is an invitation only two day conference, mixing web 2.0 alpha geeks and other “Friends of O’Reilly”. I was reading Tim O’Reilly’s post on Foo Camp takeaways, in which he outlines some of their goals: trendspotting, testing ideas, meeting new people, having fun. I was surprised, however, he didn’t mention building community as a goal. At the final wrap up session, Tim said that one of his greatest joys is to connect people. Well, what happens when you take a bunch of people and weave them into a knot of colleagues, collaborators, and friends? You get a community. I am a connector myself (well, half connector, half maven, in the tipping point vernacular) who has both studied and struggled to build communities, and as I meandered from session to session, chatted with people about Pathable, and played werewolf, I could feel the hum of Foo Camp’s community building engine.
Speaking of connectors, it was Brady Forrest who orchestrated our invitation to Foo Camp, and suggested we might be interested in trying out Pathable (our event based social matching tool) at the event. He mentioned that everyone was expected to participate in discussions, and the degree to which people participated had a big impact on their likelihood of being invited back again. It reminded me of the Burning Man philosophy of “no spectators”, striving to remove the distinction between audience and show – which is lauded as a key to their success at building a thriving experimental community. I have had mixed experiences about the unconference model, because often I will find myself in lackluster sessions, too resonant of many past discussions. The unconference model works best when everyone is an active, expert participant, and at Foo Camp the presentations and discussions were energized, intelligent, and full of ideas, demos, and dense information that I had not seen or heard before.
As someone who is more comfortable as an active participant, rather than merely an observer, my favorite aspect of the experience was our deployment of Pathable. Pathable’s goal of helping people connect is well aligned with those of the event. About six weeks prior to Foo Camp we met Sara Winge, VP of communications at O’Reilly Media and the event organizer, who told us Pathable sounded like fun but could we coordinate with Tony Stubblebine’s social networking system, Crowdvine, and Rabble’s event scheduling system, to assure the attendees had a reasonably seamless experience with only one log in. In the next couple of weeks Peter and Tony collaborated (through a mad flurry of IM messages) to enable us to collect social data through Crowdvine’s profiling system, and feed the Pathable similarity and clustering information back as a web service. Foo Camp had its own badge system already, so we decided to make Pathable buttons and worked with O’Reilly’s designer Suzanne Wiviott to create their look and feel. Our friend and affiliate collaborator Jordan Schwartz (now at Microsoft) wanted to explore an SMS component, so we got together, spec’ed out a tagging based Pathable SMS service, and Peter and Jordan worked together to build a smartphone server that communicated with Pathable’s web service to enable lightweight, ad hoc interest based SMS groups. Tony and Rabble worked together to integrate the unconference event scheduling system.
In other words, there we were, individuals from five separate organizations, collaborating to create a fully featured, unique social networking experience for Foo Camp attendees – with only six weeks to piece it all together. This, as much as anything, emphasized for me what a great job O’Reilly has done in creating an environment that generates the level of trust and shared passion that enables this sort of effort to succeed.
And succeed it did! At least 95% of the attendees completed their Pathable profiles in Crowdvine prior to the event. A similar percent of the attendees wore their Pathable buttons. People reported their matches seemed accurate, and were strongly motivated to track down and meet their opposites. They were not always clear on the meaning of the color clusters, but nonetheless found them a reason to engage in conversation. One woman, in fact, was quite upset with us when her cluster changed (indicating weak membership, shifting as new data came in) because she’d already made plans with fellow yellows. We provided people with the opportunity to update and reprint their buttons, which only a few people decided to do. We were disappointed the SMS service wasn’t more used, but the event was dense enough and small enough that there was little demand for mobile coordination. I consider it a good sign that even as I was packing up our button making system at the end of the event, three people asked me to print out their button so they could take it home with them. In sum, it was a great experience, gave us an excuse to talk to everyone, and we got a lot of great feedback from some very, very smart people.
Thanks a lot, O’Reilly crew, we had a lot of fun.
