Bot Summit 2014

So. We're doing Bot Summit again. It's taking roughly the same form as last year: a simultaneous in-person and internet event. The Summit itself is planned for Saturday Nov 8th, 5pm to 9pm Eastern US time (so 9am-1pm Sydney time the next morning). This year we're also running a Wordnik Hackathon (see below) from Friday to Sunday that weekend. Anyone can participate in the summit or the hackathon remotely, but I encourage people to show up to the Boston (okay, Cambridge) event so we can hang out all weekend.

The Summit

The in-person Bot Summit is hosted at the MIT Media Lab (thanks to Greg Borenstein for setting that up). We'll be livestreaming the Summit via a Google Hangout On Air, and we'll have remote participants calling in to the Hangout to participate as well. If you want to get an idea of what this looks like, here's the recording of last year's event.

Who is speaking?

Unlike last year, I have invited some folks to speak already. I'm favoring people who I haven't really seen present on this stuff, and specifically people who last year weren't even on the "scene", so to speak. I will announce them soon, once I've confirmed with them.

We still do have some slots open so if you would like to speak (either in person or on the Hangout), please select the appropriate ticket and let me know in the questionnaire what you would like to discuss. I'll let you know if you'll get a spot to speak or not.

How do I register?

What are we going to talk about?

Like last year, I see us spending roughly equal time on the two major buckets of bot-building:

• The content generation piece (algorithms, corpuses, strategies, etc)
• The context stuff (internet-as-medium, social interactions, authorship and responsibility, etc)

These are things we are NOT going to talk about:

• "What is a bot?" type of boundary setting. That's boring.
• Programming language-specific discussion. I mean, yes, if there's a great library that's only implemented in one language, that's okay. But this is not a space for "my language is better than yours" type of discussion, or deeply specific "here's how to use Promises is NodeJS to make better bots" type of stuff.

Friday to Sunday: Wordnik Hackathon!

We're also sponsored by the Wordnik API (made by the fine folks at Reverb), which does the linguistic heavy lifting for a ton of incredible bots. This sponsorship makes it possible for me to provide snacks and refreshments for the in-person event, as well as to fly out a few people I've invited to participate this year.

That said, we will be doing a Wordnik Hackathon the whole weekend of Bot Summit! They're rolling out some new stuff in their API for us to play with, and November also happens to coincide with NaNoGenMo, so, uh, I think you all know what to do. So, make some cool stuff with Wordnik that weekend! We'll have a place to submit it and on Sunday night we'll collect everything and I'll publish a little website showing off all the stuff we made.

Here's where to enter the hackathon: http://tinysubversions.com/stuff/wordnik-hackathon/