Moose Camp Wrapup

Posted on February 13, 2006 by agentrickard

I went to the Moose Camp wrapup session yesterday. I really wanted to hear what the organizers thought was successful.

I was going to keep my mouth shut, but....

I picked up on a cool concept -- teaching people to interview for podcasts -- and it triggers an idea:

What if Moose Camp sessions were all task-based. Not boring, work-type tasks. But cool geek tasks.

Here's how it might work:

Group A is given from 8:30 to 9:15 to record a podcast of an interview with Dave Sifry. During this time, Group A can accomplish three things:

• The interviewer can model how to conduct a good interview to make for an interesting podcast
• The technical people can discuss and demonstrate good recording and sound editing
• Passive audience can hear Dave speak (which is always good)

And at the end, we have a great artifact that says, "Hey, look what we did at Moose Camp."

(Roland's short film is the model here.)

[Another variant on this idea would be to have Dave lead a group to accomplish a task. Get the 'big name' invitees to lead small groups in a project. Possibly, someone noted, in an area where they are not an expert. This would bring the 'stars' to a more equal level with other contributors.]

The idea would be to schedule maybe a dozen sessions (or more?) from, say, 8:30 until 12:00. Then break for lunch. Reconvene at 1:30 to fine-tune (of course, people can do this over lunch, too).

Then at 2:30 or 3:00, we all get together and share projects. A good old show-and-tell. After that, probably around 4:30, some volunteers could combine all the work into a single entity. Even better: several groups could make different versions. That would give people an excuse to get together that night and keep working.

Then, when Northern Voice opens, we show the folks our collective memory artifact: What We Did at Moose Camp.

I think it's just crazy enough to work. I know I would go.