User:CKoerner (WMF)/Notes from Strange Loop 2017

'The Strange Loop logo is not a mobius strip. This bothered some people.'

At the tail end of September I attended a yearly tech and community conference called Strange Loop. I was attending in my role at the foundation as an opportunity to learn more and discover new people and ideas to connect to.

Hosted in my hometown of St. Louis, MO USA the event was an opportunity to learn about emergent trends in the technology field. Topics were spread wide, from new programming languages, the intersection of art and technology, security best practices, to programatic work to leverage technology for positive social change.

There were nine - yes NINE - tracks throughout the day, meaning any review will be woefully incomplete, this one especially. Out of all the sessions I attended the general theme I walked away from the conference with was, "Machines. Are they real?".

Not an overly useful one-line summary. :) In earnest, this theme touches on the importance of using technology like machine learning and supportive programatic resources to create technology that amplifies the abilities off all people.

Prior to attending I had heard great acclaim for the event. Looking at past, and even current, schedules gave me pause to attend. Many of the sessions appeared to lean heavily into seemingly purely technical presentations that appear to be beyond my own kownlelge and interests. However, as emphasized this year by the organizers, the sessions were very diverse and approachable. As an example, the first session I attended was titled, "The Biological Path Toward Strong AI" (video) and the presenter basically gave a "Neuroscience 101" session covering how the neurons in our brains work and how we might be able to programmatically understand how the coding works to generate artificial intelligence. While a topic I had personal curiosity toward I was prepared for a deeply academic approach to the subject. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I understood and the skill in the presenter in approaching the subject without assuming prior knowledge.

General organizational notes
The event was well-organized with plenty of pre-event communication and documentation. All sessions were listed on the website in advance, each with a short description of the talk and its location within the venues. Having the talks in two venues, each nearly 3 city blocks away from one another and with only 20 minutes of time between each created a feeling of, "Eh, maybe I'll just stay here and settle for a different talk".

Given that food is 90% of the reason to either greatly enjoy or deride a conference, I was pleasantly surprised that the food options were well prepared and catered to those with explicit dietary needs. They even served some of my favorite cliche local dishes like toasted ravioli and gooey butter cake - making what could have been a rather generic event feel very St. Louisian.

The evening before the event attendees were welcome to a social gathering at the City Museum, a pretty unique local attraction. Snacks and drinks were provided. Riot Games, who have offices in St. Louis, hosted a boardgames room. I arrived a little early and was able to chat with a non-technical staff member. Their technical operation dwarfs that of the foundation by a magnitude of 10x. Curiously, as I talked with the staff member, they expressed that Riot staff have a rather competitive streak. The voracity and seriousness of the games played betrayed this truth. All in good fun, of course. A similar, albeit different kind of folk than what I have experience working with at the foundation and in the wider movement. However, I haven't yet had a serous round of Dominion with anyone yet. :)

Videos of all recorded sessions were professionally produced and available on YouTube hours after the event. Keynote presentations (of which there were four(!)) and all sessions in the largest space were also live captioned, with the captions available to read immediately afterward.

A great divergent mix of people were represented in both the session presenters and the attendees. This created a great opportunity to meet and hear from people not like me and learn from their experiences - both in the technology field and in general.

The event had a Code of Conduct and photo policy. An interesting idea that was utilized was having a duty officer available at all times at the registration table in the main lobby. They stood out by not only having a specific role in helping attendees feel safe, but also by their easily identifiable orange shirt - different from the rest of the organizers and volunteers.

I made a light-hearted bet with a friend on how long it would be until a session mentioned a Wikimedia project. The first keynote was about long-tail optimization. The research was run on a dataset of English Wikipedia articles. Apparently the time-to-first-Wikimedia is zero at Strange Loop.

Sessions I attended
As mentioned, there were far too many tracks and interesting sessions within to be able to attend them all. Here's a small collection of the sessions I did attend with some notes for each.

Friday
The Biological Path Towards Strong AI - POH Midland States Bank Community manager - matt 1

This Cruise Ship Can Fly - Laura Webb

Arguably one of the more passionate sessions and encouraging for any cultural organization wanting to increase awareness of their institutions and collections by working with open-technology communities. I have aspirations with following up with the present to see if there is an opportunity to connect her with the local Wikimedia community in Philadelphia, or perhaps with the developer community for future events.

"It Me": Under the Hood of Web Authentication

Narriated Reality

EXPERIMENTAL CREATIVE WRITING WITH THE VECTORIZED WORD

THE FUTURE IS NOW

Saturday
Wait, it does ??tahW: How supporting Right-to-Left can expose your bad UX decisions - Moriel Schottlender

ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE-LAND

HOW TO PLAY WITH DEEP SPACE DATA

Data.nasa.gov

KEY TO THE CITY: WRITING CODE TO INDUCE SOCIAL CHANGE

People I want to connect with further
Laura Webb

Nadia (keynote) carnage Mellon colleague did some research

Love to have them talk to wmf about her presentation

Matt Mitchell and the numerous resources he listed

Notes to be incorporated
https://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/

http://themaintainers.org/blog/

https://hypatia.ca/2016/06/21/no-more-rock-stars/ less rockstars more revolutionaries

Lexiconjecture

https://github.com/strangeloop/StrangeLoop2017/tree/master/slides

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zoa3xkzgFk&list=PLcGKfGEEONaDzd0Hkn2f1talsTu1HLDYu

https://open.spotify.com/user/puredanger/playlist/32m01FMYGGCtF6IzLgxkGv

Sessions I wanted to see, but did not

 * THE TRUTH ABOUT MENTORING MINORITIES
 * TUNING ELASTICSEARCH FOR ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PRECISION
 * DEATH OF THE TRUSTED INTERNET
 * Kevin Shekleton - video game security