apete, mattbot, d*, and I went to the CHI conference last week to present Fitster at the Student Design Competition. Out of 48 entries, we placed third! Fitster was by far the best group project I’ve ever worked on (with all due respect to all of my former teammates from other projects) and getting to present it at CHI was a total blast. It was really awesome to have a room full of people (including a good number of SIers) hear about our project . . . when they could have been at a number of super interesting panels and paper sessions.
Along with participating in the Student Design Competition, I was also a student volunteer. Being a student volunteer was fun but it added an extra level of unneeded stress. Trying to get 20 hours of work in within a few days was really hard. Even though it was financially very rewarding (both my registration fee and hotel expenses were waived), being a student volunteer meant that there were some interesting sessions that I couldn’t attend and I didn’t have hardly any time to explore Montreal. Part of my student volunteer duties included blogging a number of sessions on the Student Volunteer Blog. I was really expecting this task to be a lot of fun but it turned out to be such a huge hassle that it actually made me hate blogging for those few days. We (the blogging student volunteers) were given some very strict guidelines and there’s just something wrong with that. Blogging is a bottom-up form of computer-mediated communication that shouldn’t be restricted with top-down instructions. Of course, I knew what I was getting myself into when I agreed to blog CHI but I guess I didn’t fully realize the implications of those restrictions. In retrospect, I’m not really sure that blogging the paper sessions is really all that interesting. It seems like offering links to the PowerPoint presentations and papers would have done a better job at conveying the content than some second-hand scribbles. The SV blog would have been far more interesting if we were given very little guidelines and asked to blog about the conference itself. What’s the general vibe of the conference? What were people talking about between sessions? What happened at the parties on Wednesday night? Which of the exhibitors got the most attention? I think sending out a bunch of SVs with digital cameras would have been the best way to capture that.
Nice pics. You always take good pictures. I agree that having access to slides would be very beneficial. Podcasts/photos would also be better than SV blogs. Sensoring blogging activities is never cool.
Thanks! I really want to take a photography class sometime. I just experiment a lot without really knowing what I’m doing. I also could use a better digital camera.
Podcasting CHI is a great idea.
Yeah, the SV blog was disappointing. But the Flickr photostream was cool!
And the photostream was cool for the very reason that the SV blog wasn’t – it was ad-hoc and bottom-up.