My birthday is coming up on December 8. To celebrate, I'm planning to have a day full of spending time with people whose company I enjoy, and I expect to have some interesting and challenging conversations along the way. The theme of the day is a bunch of stuff that I am loosely calling "web 3.0" -
It's time to move on to build Web 3.0. It will be read/write, but more than that, it will be intensely about being in the here and now and focusing on what is going on in your place and time. That includes mobile computing, location-aware computing, and read/write not just for the web but for the world.
The birthday day is in the style of a couple different events. One is in the style of a "blogwalk", which has been done in a few cities (Nancy White has some pictures from Blogwalk Seattle). Part of the event is a trek from place to place gathering and leaving people along the way. We'll do that in the morning, starting at about 8:00am at Zingerman's Next Door and weaving our way via coffee and wifi through downtown. You'll be able to find the current location of the party through Plazes - look for Where is Edward Vielmetti? - or for the tag ed41.
The second part of the day is a lunch as part of my a2b3 bi bim bop lunch series. I'm planning that for a restaurant near Briarwood, Seoul Garden, which has lots of seating and relatively easy parking for those who must drive. It also has bus service, so the walking part of the day will end up at the Blake Transit Center to catch the bus to lunch if you don't otherwise have transportation.
The third part of the day after lunch is some time spent in an "open space" type conference event. The idea is that you get some people and some ideas together in an interesting venue, find some things to write on to self-organize some topics, and have some discussions. Whoever shows up are the right people, and the "law of two feet" says if you don't like what's going on, you move.
I'm doing the afternoon at a public meeting room at my favorite library, the downtown branch of the Ann Arbor District Library. It has wifi and books and music and DVDs for checkout, so bring your library card with you when you come and we can use the resources of the library to help the discussions go forward. I'm hoping some of the AADL librarians will be available during some chunk of the time to talk about "library 2.0" and all of the neat things going on there.
In the early evening (5pm-6:15pm) we'll be moving to the Old Town Tavern for a round of drinks. Meet at the table under the large Rubenesque painting. The 1998 Arborfood review says
Since the mid-1980s, Old Town has been the unofficial hangout of Ann Arbor's Unix community. What began as a Friday night pilgrimage for employees of COSI, the now-defunct software company, has evolved into a periodic congregation of aging software gurus as COSI's diaspora sent its alumni to positions at the U-M, ERIM, UMI, and a plethora of start-ups. The cabal has occupied the same table for a dozen years, eating, drinking, and ranting about AOL, Microsoft, clueless pointy-haired Dilbert managers, and the Y2K bug.
Finally, at 6:15p, I'll be taking the #5 bus home to make it home just in time to help with dinner and to spend the evening with family.
Everything (except dinner with family!) is an open event, though if you do plan to show up for lunch please let me know in advance so I can warn the restaurant. The afternoon session at the library was free to me to reserve the room but I'm looking to gather a few toys for people to look at - please either bring something for people to share or some useful portable office supplies to write on.
No gifts, please, but if you want to be nice, when you're at the library pick up some books or music you think I'd like to have so I can check it out!
Technorati Tags: ed41, annarbor, aadl, a2b3, library, web3.0, library2.0, coffee
