Conferencing

Today was a busy day of meeting people and talking tech. It was fun running into a couple old acquaintances from back in the day when my family lived here, including the guy who got us online in the first days of the Internet here in Turkey, back when it was amazing that I could download a megabyte in an hour. We heard some pretty cool reports about the growth of the Internet and other technologies in Turkey over the last few years. In addition to being the third largest user of Facebook in the world, Turkey is also in the top ten Internet-using countries in Europe. From the sounds of things, computers are becoming common enough in households here that people are having to figure out what home networking is all about. Things have definitely changed.

One cool thing I learned about today interested me not so much because of its application in Turkey, but because of another project that a friend of mine has been asking me about. He works with a US-based organization that works with other organizations on the ground in South Africa to help deal with the AIDS crisis there. They want a way to use cell phones and text messages to gather patient data in the field and send it back to a database at headquarters. Well, it turns out this has been done all over and there's already open source software out there for that purpose. The software is called Frontline SMS, is freely available, and it sounds like it's pretty straightforward to implement. I don't have the bandwidth for that sort of project right now, but if you're interested, let me know!

I found myself translating between English and Turkish quite a bit today, which I didn't expect. It was in an unofficial capacity, but it came in handy and helped some folks out. The breakout group I joined, having to do with social networking, ended up being entirely in Turkish, and I ended up talking about Facebook and Twitter in Turkish, picking up the appropriate vernacular as I went. It was a lot of fun. One topic of conversation--privacy on Facebook. A big one.

During some of the presentations today I zoned out a little and focused on learning Joomla, the content management system being used for the website I'll be working on. While the speakers spoke about forming Internet strategies and relationship building, I was learning about how Joomla implements a model-view-controller paradigm with some pretty complex views. A model/controller can have multiple views, the views can have multiple layouts, and those layouts can be displayed in multiple positions within a template, which in turn can override some or all of the layout functionality. That raises a lot of architectural questions for me... it'll be insteresting to see how this all works out.

After dinner this evening I went out for a nice stroll through the restaurant district where we ate last night. It felt a little weird being on my own since so far my time has been mostly directed by my host and by the conference agenda. I hadn't had to depend on my Turkish entirely until then, but today's translating helped my confidence. I enjoyed going into a cell phone shop and not missing a beat talking about my options for getting a cell phone for these weeks that I'm here. I don't think I will making such a purchase, but it was still fun to have the conversation. :)

I don't have many pictures today... we were inside most of the day. But here are a couple.

Thanks for reading!