The 2012 Seattle HVTN conference was from Monday 29 – Wednesday 31 October. I went to Seattle for that and to see friends.
I flew to Portland on Friday 26 October to attend the Wiki Loves Libraries event organized by Jason Moore, user:Another Believer, on Saturday 27 October. We went out for breakfast, did the event, and went for coffee after. He has excellent ideas about the future of Wikipedia and about how to do community organization. In particular he has worked extensively to organize WikiProjects, improve the sorting of outreach events, and help to develop community chapters. I would like to see him become better recognized for his abilities because he is an excellent Wikipedia editor and because he is a natural leader, presenter, and group manager.
I went to Seattle the evening after the meetup and after having had several cups of coffee. Portland coffee and coffeehouses are wonderful and I missed them a lot. In Seattle I immediately started meeting with my friends and it felt really good to be back. Lee and the hamsters were great. I was surprised the hamsters were both alive – they were nearly two years old and I thought that when I left for NYC I might not see them again.
On Sunday I went to see Ian and Darrin. Ian was a few days a way from a trip to Kentucky where he was to do funding review for a health outreach effort targeting people of rural Appalachia. I already knew about this project and the fundamental problem – it is not possible to do externally coordinated health intervention on an isolated culture, and there is no one within the culture who can manage the intervention themselves. It was odd that we talked about this because just the week before I had met with Jim Guest at work and he threw the hypothetical problem to me of how to do outreach to this specific population. I think that the solution is to enable people in the community to raise their personal agency, and then just assume that eventually these individuals will seek to raise the agency of their entire culture. This is a highly inefficient solution but it is the best I have. Ian and Darrin were fun to visit.
The HVTN conference was great. The new developments included more talk about overlap between the HIV Vaccine Trials Network and other kinds of HIV research, expansion of the HVTN 505 study, the building of a new major clinical base in South Africa, and the introduction of a new major clinical trial in Africa. I still have big ideas for developing the organization’s online outreach but I do not have time to implement my ideas, nor can I think of a more efficient way to proceed than for me to set up the project. Currently I have a WordPress site at HIVvaccineResearch.org. It looks fresh but it is difficult to update, and I really need an interactive forum for news and conversations. The problem with WordPress is that even though it is very easy to use, it still cannot be updated as easily by anyone as I would like. I was thinking of migrating the concept to a Wikimedia installation. The immediate effect of that would be the ability to allow anyone to contribute or talk with no permission-granting.
On Monday night there was an HVTN reception at the new Chihuly Garden and Glass museum. It was good to see my HVTN friends and I am especially happy to see Lisa and Victoria. They cheer me up a lot and I like their enthusiasm in organizing community outreach. On Tuesday night they organized a get-together near the hotel and I went to that also with Christopher Sheats. I met him at the Convention Center Tully’s during the day when I stepped away from the conference, and then we checked in with Victoria and Lisa’s thing, then we went to his place and talked until late. Christopher is thinking of his career. He is talented in many ways but somehow he is not getting the job he wants. I think he is so close and that his only problem is lack of social networking because he has rare interests in an in-demand field and is highly competent, and at his worst if he joined a company doing Internet security then he could at least service a lot of mid-size business clients and make them and any employer very happy. He wants a few things, but he needs job satisfaction in the form of having his work align with his activist interests. He feels strongly about access to academic information and the rights of journalists to peacefully collect and deliver neutral interviews and research, and his naturally conservative views on this would appeal broadly to anyone who also saw value in this humble and fundamental human rights need for modest people to be able to do basic reporting. We talked about Brian and the Open Science Federation, about Tor, about personal Internet security, and about security problems in clinical research such as with the HVTN. He is dating someone right now and seemed blissed out about that and I liked seeing him happy. He did complain about a commute between him and his love interest but it seemed short in comparison to what so many people accept as normal here in NYC where people routinely have roundtrip work commutes of two hours or more.
Wednesday 31 October Halloween I went to Vancouver with Evan J. Peterson. He was doing a poetry performance at Cafe de Soleil on Commercial Drive. I was to go with him, but before then I went to meet Darren Fleet of Adbusters. I have been a fan of Adbusters since I discovered them in 1999 and I went through a phase of fandom for their work for a period of about four years, then I stepped away from following them. I went to their office and then got to meet Darren at a nearby coffeehouse. Adbusters is a relatively small operation, perhaps with 10 full-time staff, but they have had major successes in doing outreach by developing social movements like Buy Nothing Day, the cultural jamming concept, and Occupy Wall Street. Meeting Darren was highly encouraging for me. I want to find some common ground on which Consumer Reports and Adbusters could collaborate, and what immediately came to mind is developing Wikipedia content related to the history of the consumer movement. After I meet with Darren I met Patrick Earley, [[user:The Interior]], who is an information scientist and one of the organizers of the proposal to reform the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada. We talked about barriers to expansion of the education program, methods for conducting trainings, and ways to get more scholarly review of Wikipedia articles. Patrick emphasizes the need for community organization with support from a central office, which is currently missing and which I think is a practical response to many of the problems which the education program currently faces. After meeting Patrick I went to Evan’s performance which was great as always. I am sure that had I been in NYC I would not have been able to find a poetry reading in a coffeehouse on Halloween night, even had the city not been devastated by Hurricane Sandy.
On Friday night I went to Brian Glanz’s place for dinner. It was nice to finally meet his wife Mohini and Christopher and Jacob Caggiano were there. Mohini prepared Indian food and talked about living in New York City – she seems to miss it. Brian was recently laid off from his job at NWABR and while I feel bad that they are unable to finance him further I think that his time there was beneficial both to that organization and to Brian and I am sure that Brian will go onto bigger things, and I hope sooner rather than later. Brian and others in his network had been talking about establishing a US based chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation as one does not yet exist. I also want this to happen, and lately in the Wikipedia community people have been talking about establishing a national United States Wikimedia Chapter for the United States, just like every other country has. A strange precedent happened in the United States in which NYC and DC both have chapters, but there is no national chapter, and every other country has a national chapter but no city chapters. This is problematic because other regions in the United States are not well-represented. I was thinking that it would be great if there could be alignment between the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Wikimedia community such that a national US Open Knowledge Foundation chapter could be formed, and immediately that community could support a national Wikimedia chapter and vice-versa. Brian has excellent connections to the open science community through Seattle-based biomedical organizations, Science Online, and other networks, and Christopher could get Pirate Party support and probably Tor community support for the foundation of an OKFN chapter also. Jacob works closely with journalism organization who need support and have support to give. I am sure that there are many people in the Wikimedia community who want this also. We talked about how we can make this happen, and for my part, I told them I wanted to develop a pitch to ask that medical organizations, both in healthcare and research, would commit to do some online education to the public. Medical organizations often already do educational outreach, and I find their outreach strategies to be inefficient and without sufficient consideration of the advent of the Internet. I make the appeal that all health organizations which have as part of their mission the goal of educating the public that they should consider integrating their information into Wikipedia, because Wikipedia is the most popularly used educational communication channel for most Internet-using demographics and it is probably like that Wikipedia is generally the world’s single most popular information source in most fields.
I had to leave Saturday and I did not think that I would be able to see Patrick. He was just finishing a cross-country drive from Connecticut after settling his family’s estate, and now he was just arriving in Seattle that Saturday morning after having been awake all night. He texted me in the morning and said, “Meet me at that coffeehouse” and I told him when Google projected that I would arrive. He was there just before me and ordered a doppio, and right when I walked in the door it was being served to go. I was in a hurry and he knew it, and we walked to the light rail and he accompanied me to the airport. He is just the nicest, most thoughtful person and a great pleasure and comfort to me. It felt really good to talk to him again in Seattle after he had visited me in NYC so many times. He is just getting back into school after so much disruption with death in his family, and I expect him to continue to do interesting things with success.