did you ever come across the predecessor to the modern "unconference" or "foo camp" -- open space technology from the 80s?

EcoHack has a good model that keeps it fresh -- they draw a varied audience including designers, coders, hardware hackers, community organizers, and organizations with data problems that need solving. Anyone who has an idea up front gives a 5-minute ignite style talk on Friday night to attract a team. First thing on Saturday, EcoHack organizers help ensure balanced membership on teams, and during the day also float from team to team helping with any technical issues that arise. They get results! http://ecohacksf.org/#projects http://www.ecohacknyc.org/#projects

Hi cfastie, Luckily, and/or by design, the images speak for themselves -- see more at http://publiclab.org/wiki/infragram-media. The acronyms are kind of special, but all the "RGB"s basically mean "red green blue". The "N" may be a new term for some readers -- it stands for "near-infrared". The "V" is about vegetation. The "I" means index, except in DIY which stands for Do It Yourself! Most of the acronyms are about rearranging which wavelengths are represented as which visible colors, so that we can represent information that would normally be beyond what we can see with our eyes, as a photo with "false colors".

judging is also distributed -- leading community members in Public Lab (http://publiclaboratory.org/wiki/organizers) will choose the winning entries to Spectral Challenge.