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Entry tags:
Geek Networking
I went to Ignite Boston 5, an O'Reilly sponsored tech geek gathering, and they seemed to be gathering on a theme of data for social good and democratized data, so I presented a talk on my impartial automatic redistricting work.
It was great! (except that I hadn't rehearsed my speech well enough and it didn't quite sync with the timing I had programmed into the slides and so there were some awkward pauses and a couple moments of shuffling through notes to see if I'd covered everything and some filler and I think I did miss a couple small points, but in the end it was ok)
I wound up missing most of the talks after mine because I got absorbed in talking to people who came up to me to talk about my presentation. There was of course the one guy off on his own wonkish tangent too loudly and for longer than I was prepared to feign interest, politics does that to people sometimes. Mostly it was really good to talk to people who were interested in the subject. I got a couple good comments along the line of "hey, I had wondered if this could work, I'm glad you're doing it". I think the biggest thing my redistricting project needs if it's going to have any real effect is networking and mind share. Eventually someone with the platform to make things happen or spread the word more effectively needs to have it introduced to them. I don't know who that will be, so I'll just go on talking these things up now and then and see if anything happens.
It was great! (except that I hadn't rehearsed my speech well enough and it didn't quite sync with the timing I had programmed into the slides and so there were some awkward pauses and a couple moments of shuffling through notes to see if I'd covered everything and some filler and I think I did miss a couple small points, but in the end it was ok)
I wound up missing most of the talks after mine because I got absorbed in talking to people who came up to me to talk about my presentation. There was of course the one guy off on his own wonkish tangent too loudly and for longer than I was prepared to feign interest, politics does that to people sometimes. Mostly it was really good to talk to people who were interested in the subject. I got a couple good comments along the line of "hey, I had wondered if this could work, I'm glad you're doing it". I think the biggest thing my redistricting project needs if it's going to have any real effect is networking and mind share. Eventually someone with the platform to make things happen or spread the word more effectively needs to have it introduced to them. I don't know who that will be, so I'll just go on talking these things up now and then and see if anything happens.