IndieWeb Summit Day 1

There was an interesting discussion tonight where Shane challenged each of us to write more long-form posts. He told us how he enjoyed reading Tantek’s recent articles about the movie Tomorrowland and missed Tantek writing longer posts. Thus the encouragement to Tantek (and all of us) to write things longer than our short notes. And here I am.

Today was the first day of the 2016 IndieWeb Summit in Portland, OR. This is the sixth year for IndieWebCamp and the third year that I have attended. It’s a gathering for independent web creators (everyone from designers to hackers) to share ideas and actively create things for our personal websites. During the introduction today, Tantek talked about the “whys” of indieweb. I liked how he said it all really starts with one goal: self-empowerment. As we each achieve different levels of that, we can spread empowerment.

After the introduction, we had time to demo our websites and show what we have working now. These varied from basic websites that have not been touched in years to more advanced sites. It’s not a competition and there is no judgment if a site is lacking in design polish or is in-progress. It’s a good way to introduce yourself, your site, and some things you would like to achieve with it. There’s quite a variety of designs, topics, software, and techniques represented, so it is also serves to get some inspiration and encouragement for your own site.

The second half of the day consisted of sessions the attendees organized barcamp-style. There’s an empty schedule grid on the wall and anyone interested in facilitating a session on a topic wrote it on a Post-it note and put it on the grid. This scheduling took place in about 15 minutes and then the sessions started. I participated in sessions about accessibility with web hosting, Camlistore, supporting offline content, and building for longevity. There was a blind man who attended and the discussions about improving accessibility were some of the most interesting to me.

Tomorrow is the create day, where we will work on creating something that we can show a demo of at the end of the day. I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone makes!