Lanyrd.com is a website for conferences created by Simon and Nat. It is pretty cool, but I wanted to note some issues.
It seems to me that Lanyrd could potentially be the Wikipedia of web conferences. Here are some ideas of how it could make it that.
Fundamental issues
- How is the data licensed? I'm adding data to the site, but what if you guys get hit by a bus? Can we easily move our data collectively out of it as we can with Creative Commons data in a site like Wikipedia? Perhaps I'm just a bit paranoid and rabid, but it seems like an important thing to get this right up front, because you can't change that afterwards.
- And how about the code itself? Why not open source it and let the community add features?
- An API and data dumps would be tremendously useful. JSON, XML and RDF. I can help with the RDF, and there are plenty of others who will too. In fact, screw the API. Just do RESTful data properly and you don't need one. ;-)
Interface/experience bits
- Past-tense language. "Attend this conference" doesn't make sense for conferences in the past. How about "I attended this conference" or just "Attended this conference"
- Conference series: it'd be useful to be able to say that dConstruct 2009 and 2010 are the same series of conferences. Whether this is done by manually or not, I don't know.
- E-mail the organiser? A bunch of us are listed as the organisers of BarCampLondon8 (say), but it'd be useful if we could also have an e-mail address listed here. That way if some big company social media type who wants to give us loads of money finds us through Lanyrd, they can easily contact the nominated e-mail address.
Big dreams
- On sponsorship, that's a real potential use case: if you could have a way for events to be able to specify that they are seeking sponsorship, Lanyrd or a site like it could be a way to match together community events like BarCamp with companies who want to sponsor them. For BarCampLondon, way too much time is spent writing spamming sponsors for money.
- Backend for virtual grids. BarCamp grids suck, and I've been meaning to build something to replace them. Basically, mostly everyone brings a laptop or a smartphone (or iPad etc.) to BarCamp, so why not do all that online. If you could be able to add sessions, this could potentially be a back-end for such a system. My grand dream for such a system would be something that one could put up on something like Amazon EC2 for a few days around the event - thus costing only a few dollars to run. You could then go on there, login with OpenID (or Twitter or whatever), associate your account with your Lanyrd account, and choose sessions to attend. Then for notification, it could use e-mail, Twitter DMs, the iPhone notification system (through things like Notifo and Prowl), SMS, iCal and web hooks to notify people when a session they are interested is on. I also thought that if you are super-duper rich, you could have an iPad glued onto each session room showing "now and next". Heh. I'll continue dreaming and building boring corporate Rails apps.