Every year, I help organize Minnebar, largest and longest-running technology unconference in…the US?
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Our talks are now the 4th and 5th most voted (out of 185). Applying the formula we’ve always to compensate for late-arriving sessions receiving fewer votes, they’re the 1st and 2nd for estimated attendance. Apparently people really, really want to talk about this — but everyone was hesitating to start the conversation.
14/
This is mildly terrifying: now I have to figure out what the heck I’m doing in my session on Saturday! BUT…my problems are not the point. The point is:
Don’t let the loudest voices distort your perception of the world.
If nobody’s talking about what you wish everyone were talking about, don’t assume nobody wants to hear it. Be brave. Speak up.
If you think you’re the only one…you’re almost never the only one.
/end
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I will, however, draw two conclusions:
First, there’s an asymmetry between how many people will volunteer to •talk• about AI and how many people want to •hear• about AI. Without saying what it means, that asymmetry exists.
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@inthehands That asymmetry seems to be visible kinda all over the place? Look at... basically all the polls projects have put out about AI & such, the recent gallup poll, etc.
A lot of it looks like a class-alignment split to me; managers, business types, and people more aligned with the capitalist class, seem to skew pro-slop.
Those more aligned with the working class, (or with having a habitable planet, any vague sense of ethics or conscience...) skew anti-slop. -
This is mildly terrifying: now I have to figure out what the heck I’m doing in my session on Saturday! BUT…my problems are not the point. The point is:
Don’t let the loudest voices distort your perception of the world.
If nobody’s talking about what you wish everyone were talking about, don’t assume nobody wants to hear it. Be brave. Speak up.
If you think you’re the only one…you’re almost never the only one.
/end
Honestly, this is awesome of you. Considering how informative your threads are, I'm sure you'll do great.
I do wonder if people were afraid that if they submitted a session about ICE that ICE might try to stop it? That invasion likely caused a lot of trauma.
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Here’s the list of sessions — remember, completely volunteer-driven, community-based, bottom-up:
https://sessions.minnestar.org/events/46/sessions
You’ll probably notice what everyone noticed: wow, that’s a lot of AI. Sheesh. It seems like half the thing is about AI! (It’s about 40%.) It sure seems like the whole conference is dominated by AI!
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Reading through the first third of the list, it seems like a lot of the sessions that mention AI are critical of it
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If nobody’s talking about what you wish everyone were talking about, be brave. Speak up.
Right before the session deadline, I looked at the schedule and thought, “Nothing about ICE?? Really?! After all we’ve been through in MSP!” Feeling a little desperate, I created this session:
https://sessions.minnestar.org/sessions/2108I quickly got a DM from the inimitable Eryn O’Neil, who’d been thinking exactly the same and was halfway through writing up a session when she saw mine come in. We quickly determined our two ideas were complementary, so she created hers:
https://sessions.minnestar.org/sessions/212613/
I am part of a community group, and I would really appreciate hearing these two discussions. I feel like the more we hear people's lived experience, the more flexible in our responses we can be.
Anyway. Do you broadcast your unconference? Or will you maybe bootleg a recording for rr groups to pass, hand to hand?
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There are a lot of possible explanations for this:
Maybe the people who aren’t interested in AI also happen to vote for more sessions. (At a quick prod at the data, penalizing votes from people who voted for large numbers of sessions does not seem to change the conclusions above, but I haven’t investigated this thoroughly.)
Maybe AI is a more fragmented topic due to its newness, and interest has not coalesced, leading to a large number of small sessions. (But again, •total• votes for AI, including the whole long tail, were proportionally smaller.)
9/
@inthehands Is there a preferred voting strategy that helps you folks plan better? I basically voted for every talk that met or surpassed a standard of "Huh, that's neat, I'd see that if there was nothing better at that time."
I wound up with 40 total votes, which in hindsight is a bit high for 8 session blocks. I guess I'm just trying to get a sense of whether I fall in the "useful data" or the "just clicked on everything" bucket?
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If nobody’s talking about what you wish everyone were talking about, be brave. Speak up.
Right before the session deadline, I looked at the schedule and thought, “Nothing about ICE?? Really?! After all we’ve been through in MSP!” Feeling a little desperate, I created this session:
https://sessions.minnestar.org/sessions/2108I quickly got a DM from the inimitable Eryn O’Neil, who’d been thinking exactly the same and was halfway through writing up a session when she saw mine come in. We quickly determined our two ideas were complementary, so she created hers:
https://sessions.minnestar.org/sessions/212613/
@inthehands tell Eryn I said hey (we went to school together half a lifetime ago!)
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We’re not up to the interesting part yet.
My part in Minnebar is helping to create the schedule. We don’t hand-place talks in timeslots, or create “tracks” by topic. Instead, all the attendees vote, indicating •all• the sessions they’d like to see (as many or as few as they want to check off), and we generate a schedule from the votes. The schedule attempts to minimize attendee time conflict regret. That’s it.
(That process is interesting, but it’s not what this thread is about!)
5/
@inthehands I'd be interested in that process, could you further elaborate when you have time to do so?
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This is mildly terrifying: now I have to figure out what the heck I’m doing in my session on Saturday! BUT…my problems are not the point. The point is:
Don’t let the loudest voices distort your perception of the world.
If nobody’s talking about what you wish everyone were talking about, don’t assume nobody wants to hear it. Be brave. Speak up.
If you think you’re the only one…you’re almost never the only one.
/end
@inthehands People from Bluesky complaining that we here are an anti-AI echo chamber pretty much proves we are not alone.
Those slimy corp channels are heavily skewed towards the corporate agitprop du jour.
If they hate it here, it's because they need engagement to be tweaked to feel at home anywhere.
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@inthehands well, I know one of the people giving an AI talk and he operates in a linkedIn-fueled AI echo chamber.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/business/ai-job-cuts-wall-street.html
https://archive.is/cD3DyRemember who is paying a billion dollars to promote a malign influence operation on AI.
The Koch Network Is Pushing Trump to Accelerate AI, Documents Show
Right-wing political group Americans for Prosperity, backed by oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch, sees data centers as part of a larger pro-fossil fuel agenda.
DeSmog (www.desmog.com)
Billionaires do not give two hoots about "economic mobility"; NextLadder is just another fascist think tank like the Heritage Foundation & Claremont Institute.
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