Tinderbox Weekend London

Tinderbox Weekend London was held at the Rookery, a lovely little hotel in Smithfields, which is still London’s central meat market. They've taken several old butcher shops and remodeled them into a nice combination of old and new. They have real books lying about on nearly every table – there’s a volume of Ruskin in the front hall, and the Library has lots of old bound volumes of Punch. As someone twittered, it was a bunch of fine 20th century people in a lovely 18th century building, talking about 21st century software.

I spoke about Tinderbox dashboards, timelines, and the Cookbook. Mark Anderson did a fine exploration of new developments in Tinderbox export. J. Nathan Matias has undertaken a thorough exploration of version control as it relates to Tinderbox: he has a paper coming up at Hypertext 2009 about the problems of spatial diffs. (Bottom line: version control of Tinderbox files is hard right now. I think I know how to make it easier. Stay tuned.)

Robert Brook talked about Tinderbox and Parliament. Spatial hypertext works great in meetings. In fact, it works so well that we need to step back and think more closely on exactly how and why it works.

And then Michael Bywater wowed us all with Plotting In Tinderbox. We didn’t manage to plot a novel, but many fine ideas were thoroughly tossed.

It was a fascinating group: academics, lawyers, a writer, IT pros, a psychiatrist. I had a great time. As usual, I learned lots.