We mean literal birds this time, because the Beeminder meetup is going to be at Chapman school on the evening of Saturday, September 22 from 6pm to 8pm, when a massive swarm of swifts fly into the enormous chimney of a school building. It’s a weird Portland thing, ok? Also it’s walking distance (sort of — a 29 minute walk) from the Quantified Self conference. Also there will be picnicking.
(To be clear, we mean literal birds and figurative bees — well, one literal Bee aka Bethany — and definitely not metaphorical birds-and-bees.)
Backing up, let us tell you about our excuse for doing this, namely the global Quantified Self conference which happens to be in Portland this year. See also our recent post about the Beeminder scholarship program or all our old posts tagged QS.
But the meetup isn’t part of the conference. If you’re into Beeminder you should come even if you don’t care about Quantified Self (if that’s possible). And vice versa, if you’re attending Quantified Self and have the merest curiosity about Beeminder, by all means come hang out with us!
For anyone who is attending the QS conference, or still on the fence somehow, here’s what’s most Beminder-relevant or just what we’re most excited about (see the full program for details):
Saturday, September 22
- My talk describing Commits.to and tracking my reliability
- Maggie Delano on 5000 pomodoros to a PhD (featuring Beeminder, we hear)
- Tracking Work Distractions and Quantifying Focus
- Office hours for Rescuetime, Eternalist, and Mymee
- Elizabeth Ricker on something that sounds remarkably like Commits.to
- Breakout session on subjective self-tracking
- How-to session on machine learning for N=1 data
- Lillian Karabaic on privacy risks
- Platforms for N=1 experiments
- How-to on building DIY trackers with open hardware
- The Open Stack: Rethinking Our Self-Tracking Tools
Sunday, September 23
- Building an external brain
- Lillian Karabaic again on 100 days of QS
- Elizabeth Ricker again on self-tracking vs self-experiments
- Aaron Parecki on 10 years of location tracking
- Office hours with Elizabeth Ricker on meditation and neurofeedback, and with the creators of a one-button tool for recording observations
- Breakout session on Self-Tracking for Kids with Kyrill Potapov
- Breakout session on data-driven behavior change with the Beeminder founders
- Ioan Mitrea on drugs (wait, that didn’t come out right)
- How-to by Aaron Parecki on long-term location tracking
And, finally, the details on the Beeminder meetup…
Saturday, September 22nd, 6-8pm at Chapman School
<Link to exact realtime location>
Food will be provided! If you’re coming from the conference you’ll be a bit late, which is fine. Just make sure to arrive a bit before sunset at 7:08pm when the swifts will do their thing.
Thanks to everyone who replied to the straw poll in the forum and thanks especially to Kim Harrison for organizing!