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"Unlike most traditional academic conferences, sessions at an unconference don't consist of one or three or five people delivering papers to an audience. Instead, they might feature project demonstrations, discussions, creative work sessions, or other formats that build on the knowledge and expertise of whoever attends. For the Texas THATCamp (and I think this is fairly typical at others), participants posted session ideas beforehand on the website, followed by a 45-minute scheduling process as THATCamp began. Topic headings generated by those initial session ideas were posted on the walls of a large meeting room, and participants circulated through the space to meet up with others interested in similar topics. After some productive chaos (which admittedly tested my structure- and schedule-loving personality a bit) the group developed a schedule of sessions that represented not only a variety of interests but also the desire to cluster certain topics into tracks. Like any conference, I frequently wanted to be in two places at once - which I see as one marker of the event's success."

Tagline: A forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshine thinking and teamwork. Similar to TED talks, but with a (so far) much smaller archive, each talk in this series focuses on solving a "moonshot" problem, generally through significant and radical innovation. From their About page, "Solve for X is a place to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems."

By Joe Wikert, part of the TOC podcast series, on O'Reilly Radar, April 2 2012. Wikert interviews Hugh McGuire, founder of PressBooks, a newly developed publishing platform. PressBooks, which will be available both to commercial publishers and to the general public, uses WordPress as a CMS/platform on which to put a book together. The output can be a printed book, an e-book, or a podcast. This page provides an intro to the podcast, including the major themes of the approach (and the time-stamps for each).

An interesting idea, particularly for self-publishing.