In Value in the online world, Meredith Farkas mentions the need for a conference “that sort of fits into the big space between something like Internet Librarian and something like Code4Lib.” She goes on:

We need a conference for librarians who are tech-savvy enough where most of Internet Librarian is a review, but who would feel totally over their head at a Code4Lib. There are a lot of us who fit into that category. We also need online conferences. We aren’t all in the position of being able to travel all over the country several times a year, so it makes sense to develop online alternatives. And technologies have come so far in recent years that an online conference could be developed that would be highly interactive and provide real value to attendees.

She brings this up in the context of how people assign value to free vs. paid experiences, but I’d like to just think about this idea on its own merits for a bit. In the comments, Deborah Fitchett mentions that this might be the kind of thing that the Library Society of the World might want to do.

And I suppose it might. Depending on the circumstances, I personally might want to help organize and/or attend such an online conference. I fall into that gap that Meredith describes, and I have also thought about the need for this kind of conference that would bridge the gap between using online tools and actual scripting or coding.

But before I got too excited about this kind of conference (free or not), I wanted to think about what it would take to really make it happen.

What would such a conference cover? There are plenty of tutorials and websites (online and free) that can teach one the basics of PHP or Python or Ruby on Rails or whatever. This kind of information isn’t hard to come by. I also expect it would be hard to teach enough programming in a short conference session to be worthwhile (I could, of course, be wrong about that). So instead of trying to teach programming or scripting languages, the conference might instead try to get people to think like hackers. I love Dorothea Salo’s exhortation to beat things with rocks until they work, but often it’s not clear exactly which things are most likely to respond by being beaten by which rocks. If an online class could teach us what to consider before picking up the rock, that would be worthwhile.

I think this kind of conference could also teach us how to find good problems to solve. I have picked up a few books on Perl and JavaScript and PHP over the pst few years, but have never gotten far because it wasn’t apparent what I could use them for at my library. A conference like this might make it more apparent what problems or projects are the right size for someone to cut their teeth on, and put it all in a library-specific context.

Who would teach or present at such a conference? The same people who attend and present at conferences like code4lib? Would they want to present at this kind of bridge conference? Could be.

Is an online conference really the right way to learn this kind of thing? Steven Kaye has talked to me a little bit about his ideas for face-to-face conferences that would be entirely hands-on workshops. Could an online conference even do that? I suppose Five Weeks to a Social Library was very hands-on, but a five week course isn’t exactly the same thing as an online conference.

Lastly, Meredith writes about people feeling “over their head” at code4lib. Is that bad? Might it be better if people for whom “most of Internet Librarian is a review” just went ahead and embraced the confusion at a conference aimed at systems librarians and coders? I could see a lot of good coming out of an immersive experience at a conference that was over my head: a better understanding of what the hot topics and technologies were, a notebook full of stuff to look up later, and a pocket full of business cards (or Facebook contacts or whatever) representing people I could go to later with questions.

I still think the idea of such a conference is interesting, and I’m curious to see how other people feel about some of these questions.