Courtesy of Fleep Tuque: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/SLCCedu07/interesting/?page=3
James Dearnley falling over his words: l-r: JD with microphone, Dave Taylor (NPL), Jeffrey Corbin (University of Denver), Eric Hackathorn (NOAA), Kat Prawl (International Spaceflight Museum).
I spent a most enjoyable few days at the SLCC in Chicago over the weekend - plus a rather less enjoyable day hanging around in Detroit airport waiting for a connecting flight to Chicago (tornadoes shut the airport, tsk).
SLCC took place at the Chicago Hilton, an imposing venue that was plagued by wi-fi dropouts, a NFL Fantasy Football convention (with rednecks a-plenty), triathletes, and the 800 individuals who made up SLCC. What was immediately obvious from the start was the sense of opportunity that SL has fostered - while the 'Developers meeting' obviously pitted competitors up against each other, the overall sense was that of shortage - of developers, and of experts. Despite the eight million SL users, many of the driving forces were on show in Chicago (variously, NMC, Millions of Us, 'famous Lindens').
As conferences go, this was probably the most interesting I've been to - primarily because the essential fluidity of SL development meant that nearly everything was interesting in its own right - there were odd exceptions (notably, the peevish, self-serving 'media' stream at the end of the conference). Our Scilands panel went off well it seemed, despite my mind going blank during the introductions (being streamed into SL!), and the numerous problems we faced with Internet access. Some useful contacts were made as a result. I also, throughout the weekend, tended to mix up real names and SL names, with odd results in the Scilands panel - luckily, nobody seemed to mind at all....
This was broadly speaking the perfect conference in many ways - slightly chaotic in places, populated by people who were genuinely interested in SL, and on the whole, there were few boundaries and obvious cliques. SL is still in its infancy, and the conference tended to reflect that. Long may it last. Certainly, the ideal place for networking, presenting a paper and making an impact - I'm keen that one of my PhD students writes a paper for inclusion in SLCC 2008 - the venue of which is not known yet. Hopefully, the east coast of the USA.
One thing I certainly will not be doing next year is travelling via Amsterdam, or with KLM. The airline threw my schedule off by cancelling the direct Amsterdam-Chicago flight, and provided an uncomfortable flight back which was livened up with an air hostess telling off another passenger for using the business class toilet...
Finally, I now know Detroit better than I should......
