Yesterday I spent the day at Mashup Camp 2. I missed the first one last winter, but what I read intrigued me enough to make a point of showing up when it came around again.
The two relevant things here, one having to do with mashups, the other with that word "camp," which is really a proxy for the whole "unconference" movement of which this event is a high-profile example in the tech world. (Mashup Camp organizer David Berlind wrote about the first event's experience with the format back in February.) Let's start with that.
When I showed up at 9 a.m. down in Mountain View, at the Computer History Museum, the conference had no schedule -- just an open grid on an eight-foot-long pad at the front of the meeting hall. An hour later, several dozen developers (and some "API providers," a k a vendors or company reps) had introduced themselves, proposed sessions, posted the sessions on the grid, and presto, there it was, a conference schedule.
There had been no arguments over process, no disputes, no grandstanding or boring throat-clearing. Part of that was the result of deft moderation by Kaliya Hamlin (she writes about the event here); part, no doubt, was the nature of the attendees -- this was primarily an engineering conclave, after all. If we'd been talking about Iraq, something tells me the process might have been bumpier.
In the pop culture world, "mashup" means creating a new work by combining elements of two (or more) existing works. (Danger Mouse's "Grey Album" -- the Beatles' White Album meets Jay-Z's Black Album -- is probably the highest-profile example in music to date.) In software, a mashup is a new program or service created by wiring up two or more existing programs or services.
Web-services mashups can be remarkably easy to hack together and provide immediately gratifying results -- the canonical example was the Craigslist/GoogleMaps mashup that Paul Rademacher made last year, placing the Craigslist for-rent ads on Google's map service. At Mashup Camp, developers got the opportunity to show off their projects during a "Speed Geeking" event (modeled on speed dating) at which visitors in groups of a half-dozen wandered from table to table to hear five-minute demos. Here's a full list of the participating demo-ers.
I didn't come away with the sense that any one of the projects I saw was going to change the universe. But put it all together and you got a window onto a simpler, faster, and perhaps smarter approach to software product development -- one that trades in the virtue of from-the-ground-up consistency and thoroughness for the even more compelling virtue of "getting something working fast." It's software development as a Darwinian ocean in which large numbers of small projects are launched into the water. Only a handful will make it to land. But most of them required so little investment that the casualty rate is nothing to lose sleep over.
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