No TTT, thanks
I just declined a very gracious and whuffie-ful offer to join LITA’s Top Technology Trends panel. Without sarcasm, irony, or any related nastiness—I’m honored to have been asked, and grateful to whoever whispered my name into the appropriate ears.
But no. This doesn’t make any sense.
The first and most immediate problem is that I am the wrong person for this panel. I’m so Luddite I don’t even have a cell phone, much less a Second Life account. I’m too frugal for gadget acquisition and MMORPGs and heavy-duty media consumption, and too set in my ways to be a bleeding-edge early adopter. I just don’t have my finger in those particular breezes.
Sure, I’m a geek. But I’m not a gadget geek or a Lib2 geek or even a web geek (more than incidentally). I’m not even really a markup geek any more; I sling XML now and then, but as a side requirement of my real work rather than the focus of my professional attention. What I am is a problem-solving geek. I have a problem with a technology (say, hm, I dunno, DSpace?), I beat the living daylights out of it with the nearest handy rock until either it does what I want or I decide that the problem needs a better tool than a rock and give up (complaining bitterly afterwards, of course). This is not the kind of geek that makes a good TTT panelist.
(I confess I do look for technology to solve problems I have, which is a good trait in a TTTer. But I do so too idiosyncratically for my experiences to be useful to others.)
The second problem? Well, let’s cost this out, shall we? TTT is purely whuffie-driven; there is no compensation involved. Given that I am not an ALA or LITA member, and would have to be to participate, the costs to attend one TTT panel run like so:
- ALA plus LITA membership: $115
- Airfare to Philadelphia for 2008 Midwinter: $241 (per Orbitz)
- Conference registration: $125 (based on rates from last Midwinter)
- One night’s cheap (non-conference) hotel: $90 (estimated)
- Travel incidentals (taxis and meals): $100 (roughly, give or take $25)
Total? $671, minimum. That is some expensive damn whuffie, I tell you what. Worse if I go to Anaheim for Annual instead of Philadelphia for Midwinter. (Besides, Anaheim? Been there. Never, ever going there again if I can possibly avoid it. Horrible place.) And note that this assumes I get basically nothing out of the conference—in, sleep, panel, out.
Now, I can without question get some of that covered by MPOW, but that would likely mean staying for the rest of the conference, so honestly, out-of-pocket costs would probably be about the same either way. Still expensive damn whuffie, and an added opportunity cost—I couldn’t then get coverage for a different conference from MPOW. As CavLec readers know, I don’t like megaconferences in general and have found minimal professional value in the ones I’ve been to, and the specialized ones directly relevant to what I do tend to be smallish and not cheap (I can say with authority, having self-funded OR ’07 due to being in-between jobs), so the opportunity cost here is fairly major.
TTT is a lot of whuffie. I get that. But it’s not nearly enough to cover the costs, given my limited appetite for whuffie—I’m in the job I want already, I’m not tenure-track, and I don’t have anybody much to impress just at present. Besides, given what I do and what I like to do, TTT is whuffie in the wrong areas of the profession. John Willinsky, Clifford Lynch (heh, my bad), Claudia Jurgen, Peter Suber, Leslie Johnston, Charles W. Bailey, Peter Brantley, MacKenzie Smith, Rea Davakos—do you imagine these people and their like attending TTT panels? ’Cuz I don’t.
The third problem? I don’t believe in ALA. I don’t support ALA, not with my money or my uncompensated labor. I have yet to be convinced they’re worth the staggeringly immense amount of money, time, and energy they drain from librarians and libraries. What would that be doing if it weren’t holding up the huge ALA obelisk? Dunno, but my money and time say “more than ALA.” I know there’s disagreement aplenty with me on this; I’ve read a lot of it. As I said, I have yet to be convinced.
(Why hasn’t most of ACRL signed this petition? I don’t know. You tell me. I suspect it has something to do with ALA/ACRL’s sclerotic communications practices and lack of political belly-fire regarding open access. You want OA belly-fire, you go to ARL/SPARC, not ALA/ACRL.)
So, sensible of the honor, but no.