Michelle Bachler

Design Camp participants

So, the Cohere Jetpack was one of the 10 winners of the Mozilla Labs Jetpack for Learning competition and I got to jet off to Austin, Texas for a week attending a 3 day design camp, following into the SXSW interactive festival.  Another KMi entry also made it through to the design camp, Mupple, so I got to travel over with Laurian. I am easy to spot in the photo as I was the only female there and Laurian is in the red top.

Intensive coding session

Basically, the 10 winners where ‘trapped’ in a conference room for 3 days from 8am to 6pm. Breakfast and lunch where brought to the room, so we had no reason to leave! The mornings consisted of various discussion groups and brain storming sessions around the Jetpack technology and the future directions it could take. The first two afternoons we had intensive coding sessions to make final adjustments to our Jetpacks.  It was all great fun and there was a real group dynamic. The third day involved rehearsing and giving the final presentations of our Jetpacks.

Design Camp dinner at Mexican restaurant

In the evenings we were let out from the conference room and taken to various restaurants around Austin. The food was really quite outstanding.

The Mozilla SXSW Party

Three Jetpacks where then chosen for special awards which where announced at the SXSW Mozilla party. Sadly, Cohere didn’t get a special award, but Laurian got one for “sharing knowledge with others”.  There was an exciting vibe at the party with lots of people interested in the Jetpack concept. It was our job to act as Jetpack ambassadors for the evening.

Me leaning on the Mozilla car

The three winners of the special awards got a ride in the Mozilla car. I got to lean on it!

Collecting our SXSW festival badges

After the design camp was over we went to collect our festival badges courtesy of Mozilla.

Over the following three days everyone attended various panels and talks that where happening around the festival.

Some of the things we went to that I can recall are:

REWORK by 37signals

Wikipedia Gets an Upgrade: Collaborative Video

Design Fiction: Props, Prototypes, Predicaments Communicating New Ideas

Moon 2.0: The Outer Limits of Lunar Exploration

Mozilla SXSW Happy Hour

How WebHooks Will Make Us All Programmers

Beyond Algorithms: Search and the Semantic Web

SXSW Web Awards Pre-Party

13th Annual SXSW Web Awards Ceremony

Open Science: Create, Collaborate, Communicate

The Semantic Web Austin Meetup during SXSW

No Touching! Truly Invisible Interfaces

Plutopia 2010: The Science of Music – A Future-Focused Audiovisual Extravaganza

I did manage to fit in a little site seeing. Laurian persuaded me to to try a segway tour of Austin. It was really fantastic fun and I thoroughly recommend it.

Me on a segway

Posted on March 19th, 2010 by Michelle Bachler
Filed under: Cohere