[penguicon-general] A couple of thoughts about programming

[Rob Landley]

On Tuesday 24 April 2007 11:57 pm, Matt Arnold wrote:
> Since the two main tracks of Penguicon are computers and science
> fiction, a more restrictive definition involves events at the
> intersection of real-world technology with inspiration from futuristic
> imagination and vision.

Just to comment on this: the "open source community meets traditional fandom" 
provides an excellent structure to hang other stuff on.  Open source is good 
at gathering and energizing volunteers, pitching in, tracking and mobilizing 
necessary resources, etc.  The science fiction convention model gives us a 
model to work with, structure, and permission to do things purely for the fun 
of it.

But at this point, we've hung so much marginally related stuff on it (food, 
gaming, filk, anime, biotech/nanotech, chaos machine, ln2 in the pool) I'm 
not sure "main" is quite the right word.  The balance between SF and open 
source provides us our identity and our core structure, but at this point 
launching our own space probe wouldn't really be outside our mandate.  (In 
fact putting a hot fudge sundae into orbit would be pretty darn in character 
for us.)

> Others definitions are more restrictive, but no evaluation of the
> state of crossover programming can be effective without an
> understanding of what one means by the term.

How about "stuff that's in more than one track at the same time"?

> -Matt

Rob