Jim Pick

VanDev: Vancouver’s Freebase plus Northern Voice/Freebase Meetup Summary

March 5th, 2009

Opening slide from my VanDev presentation about Freebase

Last night, I gave a presentation at the VanDev meetup about Freebase and the Vancouver Base. You can view the slides here and read the feedback here.

I think it went better than some of my past “semantic web” presentations. As the format was 20 minutes of presentation plus 20 minutes of questions, my strategy was to just give a very high-level overview of what Freebase is and what I want to accomplish with the Vancouver Base. I attempted to tone down the “semantic web” jargon as much as I could, and I hoped to describe the problems using more “layman’s language”, but I still ended up using too much of the jargon anyways. Standing at the front of the room, it’s pretty clear that using the jargon tends to lose a lot of people.

For the Question and Answer section, I showed a few web pages from the site, and tried my best to help the audience understand what they were seeing. I spent time answering questions, so I didn’t step up the pace enough to adequately describe things like Acre. And there wasn’t any time to show any mashups or get into some of the more developer oriented features of the platform. Reading the feedback, I guess I should have tailored the talk a bit more towards a developer crowd.

Now I’m going to rewind back in time two weeks, as I haven’t yet blogged about Northern Voice and the Freebase meetup. Kirrily Robert (aka skud) — Freebase’s awesome community director — wanted to come up to Vancouver to meet some of the local users and developers. I talked her into coming to Northern Voice to meet some of our local social media people, and we even gave a short presentation during the unconference (Kirrily made some slides, but unfortunately there was no projector).

Then on the Sunday after Northern Voice, Kirrily organized a Vancouver Freebase Meetup at the Irish Heather in Gastown. It was great to get all the local Freebase people in one place (plus Scott Blomquist who drove up from Portland! Dale McGladdery wrote up an excellent summary of the meetup and even made a video!

Finally, I’d like to organize another RDF Vancouver event sometime. I am hoping that we can convince Boris Mann to give us a version of the talk he just gave at DrupalCon – Practical Semantic Web and Why You Should Care.

Update: Boris has a post about DrupalCon.

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