Mark Kuznicki has posted an insightful and entertaining look at the future of democamp and also the ever-burning issue of the ordinary-male-nerd to female-nerd to Hot Gay Nerd ratio. This later issue as something I’ve definitely noticed at least the half of (not that the deb’s, leila‘s, malgosia‘s, sacha‘s, jo brown’s, mira’s, estelle‘s, amber‘s, Siobhan‘s, Shelley‘s and many others of demo camp aren’t worth an entire demographic of women each on their own).
Naturally it’s hard for us to easily solve the WHOLE problem of women in geekdom all at once. For instance, others some argue it’s nature, others decry nurture, society the school system and so forh. Even others, more radically, might go so far to argue that (oh my!) it’s not women that have the problem (the so-called: Actually, “it’s because they all found better things to do†theory).
In any case, democamp content and culture is still a factor. We should be careful of habits like becoming over clique-ish as in the typically male/high-fidelityesque alphageek tendency to challenge the “do you have the geek-cred to join our club?†mentality. Elsewise…
Casecamp is at least half women. Enterprise20 Camp does okay. And UsabilityCamp too (leaving aside debates about whether the last was strictly “usability†or “campy†etc.). I have a feeling (I’m not one so I must resort to conjecture) that women are more drawn to application-focused camps. As in more design focused and what does it mean and what can I use it for camps as opposed to the raw techy tech demos/camps.
But what is democamp for? Is there not value in the raw transfer of bleeding-edge deeply-geeky innovation? There’s an argument that could be valid for democamp to just embrace it’s inherent geekness. Own it as it were.
Still, even with the most never-been-done raw techy-tech demos/camps there’s still wide disparity in perception of quality. One person’s killer fascinating hack seems to be another’s 15 minutes of life they’ll never get back. So this is why
I’m back to supporting Jay’s and Dave’s current working plan for boosting the quality of DemoCamp. Their ideas include:
1. A digg-like interface to vote on demo-applicants one week prior to event. Sounds great.
2. more focused democamps, do a general free-for-all DC at most once every three, meanwhile why not a just-mobile DC or a just platform-specific or what-have-you democamp
3. Embrace the spin-off camps (okay this was Mark’s, and one I’m partial too) but a solid idea for drawing wider involvement and for drawing connections outside the mono-culture.
Let’s give this a shot and see what happens.
As for Kuznicki’s more specific complaint, namely how can we help our dear friend hook up with more Hot Gay Nerds (tm) I think the solution here is clear. Obviously this problem cries out for a new niche web2.0-enabled online social networking community. shorely… somebody can easily have somthing whipped up in rails in time to demo ‘fore the camp is called to session?