The spawn, the spouse and I just got back from NewsFoo, an unconference put on by O’Reilly Media and the Knight Foundation. The 150-ish attendees are all involved in technology and/or journalism in an interesting way and I’m certain I was the dumbest person there.
If you’ve never unconferenced, the main idea is that at more traditional and scheduled conferences, all the best connections and interesting conversations end up happening at lunch or during coffee breaks. So unconferences aim to foster the coffee break vibe for an entire weekend by only setting session start and end times — the session topics are all pitched and plotted by the attendees after they arrive. No Powerpoints, no formal presentations, no nonsense. Below, some photos, and after the jump, notes from the Foo and links from my animations session.
Derek Willis and Chase Davis appear to be looking at something serious, but really they’re going over college football stats.
That’s Harper there on the left, rocking hair that looks a lot like my daughter’s.
The Foo attendee wall
Session choices.
There were many scenes like this one at meal time.
Knight Foundation’s John Bracken, photo-bombing
We had a Texas Tribune launch team mini-reunion with our launch CTO, HO Maycotte. Here he must have snapped a self portrait with my camera.
Eva came to Foo but was not interested in the future of news.
Closing session.
Our hosts from Google, O’Reilly and Knight.
Closing thoughts…
Dan Gillmor representin’.
Waldo Jaquith and Chris Sopher trade digits before saying goodbye.
I think the “let’s go get coffee” session was popular.
With my friend Kara Oehler.
Miranda Mulligan gives her Ignite talk about making design thinking and designers more prominent in the editorial process.
Rachel Sklar explains how her experience on crutches revealed we all have “default settings,” and that those default settings can discriminate.
Lots of charts and graphs in this session. And he drew them from memory!
