I’d always wondered why Philadelphia is called the City of Brotherly Love, thanks to the Philadelphia entry in Wikipedia I now know, from the Greek: philos-love and adelphos-brother. Thanks Wikipedia.

Thanks also to Dickipedia - a wiki of dicks for providing useful background information on all the political candidates as we head into the election and in which I cannot vote. A gem from the Sarah Palin entry:

On August 29, 2008, Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain performed perhaps the greatest political mindf**k in American history by announcing that he had chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin celebrated by ovulating.

Now that’s what MediaWiki should be used for…

I was in “Philly” (apparently a contraction of the phrase “Philly Cheese Steak”) at my now annual National Program Committee meeting to set the program agenda for AAM’s Annual meeting. Register here. This year saw a bumper crop of proposals – 280 – and just three weeks to review them. Thanks, ‘cos I really didn’t have much else going on. Two dozen of us crowded into a seminar room at the Philadelphia Art Museum to slug it out for two days over the various merits or demerits of the submitted proposals.

Despite the hard work, its actually a rewarding experience. Everyone rates each proposal on various merits, eight categories in total on things like concept, panel diversity, learning outcomes and relevance to the conference theme – which for 2009 is The Museum Experiment. The scores are tallied and the first day we review those above the average, arguing why they should be removed, or not, then the second day we review those below the average and why they should be in the program. Or not.

People are fickle, sometimes proposals that scored high are suddenly out, while those that scored low are in. But that’s my role. Four SPC chairs are on the committee, advocating for all the SPC-endorsed proposals, trying to woo the crowd about the importance and timeliness of our endorsed proposals, after all, we are the experts. But some you win and some you lose. One of my other roles is to help the (largely technology-illiterate) committee make valid decisions on proposals that include TECHNOLOGY. Submitters assign their proposals a category such as leadership, planning, interpretation and TECHNOLOGY.

TECHNOLOGY appears to be a bad category. One committee member confessed purposefully ignoring the proposals categorised as TECHNOLOGY, on the grounds of techno-illiteracy. However, said committee member cheerfully reviewed Web 2.0 and similar TECHNOLOGY-infested proposals that were labeled INTERPRETATION, apparently because they didn’t contain any TECHNOLOGY. As it turned out, many of the TECHNOLOGY proposals could have just as appropriately been categorised as INTERPRETATION, but that’s what makes my role much more interesting and argumentative.

The competition for available slots this year was intense, of the 280 proposals we only had less than 160 slots. Some proposals are easy to lose, obvious sales pitches or “look how great our website is”, which it isn’t and which offer no broadly-applicable information are not going to fair well. The ones I like are the ones in which one person, more often than not a student, wants to talk for a double session (2 hours 30 mins) on their dissertation. Priceless. Tedious. Easily removed.

Anyway, there were some great TECHNOLOGY proposals including some Web 3.0 topics.

Say what now? C’mon, we’ve barely got a handle on Web 2.0, let alone whatever’s next, but, I guess the theme is The Museum Experiment.

So wtf is Web 3.0? Let’s check Wikipedia:

Web 3.0 is one of the terms used to describe the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0. Given that technical and social possibilities identified in this latter term are yet to be fully realised the nature of defining Web 3.0 is highly speculative. In general it refers to aspects of the internet which, though potentially possible, are not technically or practically feasible at this time.

Well, that helps and it certainly goes with the theme, but if I might add my own perspective…

Despite the current Web 2.0 nomenclature, we’re actually in the third iteration of the web. First there was just “the web”, people put up a website because they could; then came “my web” with personalization, segmentation and content and information targeted at me and things I like and need; now we are experiencing “our web” with social interaction, networking and collaboration.

My problem is that I’m having trouble coming up with a cutesy term to describe what’s next. For sure it will be distributed and interoperable. I know it will be intelligent in that it will understand down to the nuances of what I’m searching. It will be mobile, in that it will know where I am and where the things I’m searching for and need are. In deference to that web conference sponsored by IMLS and NEH, maybe the cutesy term is “wise web”, or maybe we just circle back to the first term and given that it will be all-knowing and everywhere (a nice twist on intelligent design theory) we call it “THE web”.

Whatever term is coined, its definitely coming, as is the annual conference in April next year. Experimental or not, its going to be a great conference, but more on that later.

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