One (of the many) things I appreciated about the last Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit was the immediate availability of session notes on the wiki. For each session, people wrote a wiki page and linked to it from the main schedule. I may even have started this practice two years ago, when only the sessions I attended had wiki pages linked to the schedule.
Looking at the schedule for the recent FUDCon BarCamp … it still looks like that Mentor Summit wiki of a few years ago, where mainly the sessions I attended have notes and are categorized. Noteable exceptions, though. Mel Chua, from Sugar/OLPC, was keeping great notes and session transcripts (via IRC logs.) Paul W. Frields wrote in some notes from his git talk.
If you kept any notes, create a [[Natural language page name]], such as [[RPM vs XO FUDConF11 BarCamp session 20090110]], link it from the wiki schedule page, and put in the page the link to add it to [[Category:FUDConF11 BarCamp sessions]].
If you have any memory of what was covered — make the page.
If you were one of the presenters and maybe have some presentation notes, slides, or demos to refer to — make your page and link to it.
While I appreciate the extra effort we all go to when we travel to FUDCon, we also have to remember all the people who cannot attend. There is a lot of valuable work shared and plans made during those sessions. It is all invisible to the larger community. Keeping some notes and posting them where others can read and learn is an essential part of bringing a FUDCon to a proper close.
Just discovered this post (right in time for planning for the next NA FUDCon, w00t). Full ACK on everything.
Session notes aren’t just useful to remotees who can’t make an event; they’re useful to people who do attend but want to catch up on sessions they couldn’t make (2 simultaneous talks you want to attend) and also people like me who do attend a session but can’t catch everything… and really, everyone who attends but doesn’t have perfect recall.
I’ll see what we can do about having logging be an expected part of the Toronto FUDCon – since many people will already be used to Gobby, perhaps we can set up a lightweight transcription infrastructure there (it worked fantastically for Wikimania 2006).
We’ll get a lot more logs written if we emulate Leslie Hawthorn. Not sure we can channel her entirely, but she did a good job of reminding people there is an obligation to share beyond the room.