notes from CrowdCamp part 2

idea nuggets from CrowdCamp and CSCW 2013:

• a lot of creativity is "riffing". see this and this
• here's an interesting way to create a story: tell someone that you have a story in mind, and have them ask you yes-or-no questions about it. You can answer randomly, and they'll effectively create a story from their questions. see this
• from a key-note, and from someone's interpretation of the key-note:
• longer one-on-one interactions with people are more effective for one's reputation than lots of small interactions, even if the longer one-on-one interactions exclude small peripheral interactions. The reason is that reputation consists of stories people tell about you, and not the interactions themselves, and longer in-depth interactions inspire better stories.
• it is valuable to have people be creative in separate groups, and exchange ideas more rarely, like every year. I don't know if the following anecdote is true, but I got the impression that Steve Jobs had many groups at Apple design an iPhone separately, without talking to each other.
• this is the first speaker I've heard make fun of the people asking questions. To one person he said: "people who start questions that way haven't been listening, but have just been focussed on the question they want to ask". To another person he said: "have less of a preamble to your question".
• the Microsoft Kinect can quickly identify all the pixels in an image that are part of a human. see this
• the river walk is nice. possible reasons: the road is replaced with a river; there are escher-esque stairs; people are laid back; it feels like a cozy canyon.
• Winter Mason suggested that oDesk include offline non-remote work as well, e.g., managing the payroll of small companies that have on-site employees.
• Anand Kalmari informed me that oDesk has healthcare options for contractors, which I didn't know about, see this.
• Anand also showed me a demo of a system for hiring writers quickly on Mobileworks, and I told him about the humanscripting idea.
• I talked with a few other people about humanscripting, including: Nikki Kittur, Walter Lasecki, and Nicolas Kokkalis. The idea that seemed to resonate most with people was thinking about specifications imperatively rather than declaratively
• I saw Nicolas present the GmailValet paper; I hope this generates interest in valet-keys for more services
• I told someone that it was exhausting to talk to lots of people at parties at the conference. They said that's what alcohol was for. This finally made sense. Unfortunately, I had to drive, so I couldn't employ that strategy.
• I saw the future or crowdwork paper. I think everyone has similar visions of where things are going, and I'm sure we'll get there. Though, I was reminded that it may be worth coming up with a compelling positive vision for the future of work as a defense against potential negative reactive regulations.
• I heard Rob Miller talk about plans for expanding a nice paired-research system he's been experimenting with. The idea is to pair people up every week so they can help each other, and presumably cross-pollinate ideas. Some people external to his research group are on the list, including me, and he pitched the idea of having groups at multiple schools on the list, where the system would usually pair people with someone at their own school, but sometimes pair them with external people. This idea seemed linked to the key-note mentioned above.
• I had multiple discussions with Walter Lasecki, who is an interesting person.
• He experiments with extreme sleep schedules, which interest me. I expressed my concern that waking up is hard, and asked him if waking up was hard for him. He said it was like sticking forks in his eyes. But he manages.
• He has 12 undergrads working for him, and he's starting to hire people on oDesk as well. I want to pick his brain about his process. It seems like he is doing something right with regard to management.
• I'd like to spend some time with his group (Jeff Bigham's group) at Rochester. I've been there before, while interning at Xerox. In fact, I was wearing a sweater at CSCW that their group gave to me :) — in fact, the logo on that sweater was drawn by Kyle Murray, who is now in Rob's group at MIT, and will be interning at oDesk this summer, extending the  humanscript idea, which he created. So, lot's of social ties.
• write more nuggets here when I remember...
• oh, I re-had an idea of extracting idea-nuggets from papers, and posting them, and trying to get the community to think in terms of idea-nuggets, rather than papers — assuming this is a good idea