Last but not least, our very own personal impressions on this
conference: the p2p diaries...;-)

The O'Reilly P2P Conference -- San Francisco, CA. Feb. 14 - 16, 2001

Ana's overall impression of the conference:
- In a nutshell: An incredibly new viewpoint into this space. Generally
speaking, I believe there was a serious exploration of serious technical
questions with social implications stemming from this whole p2p space.

- My own little fun highlights and thoughts:
* got to talk to Shawn Fanning... for a few minutes only. Surrounded by
very young people who kept on telling him "Shawn, you don't have to do
this" when photographers crammed to get his photo. Ana gets gutsy and asks
him what it would take to come speak to a university-driven event around
p2p and academia, to which he replied: "Can you get your senators to go
talk to Congress" mmm, guess he is not coming to UT anytime time soon.....

* The Freenet guys: not only clearly outspoken, technically leading this
space and most likely, not a single one of them older than 23 (and that
may be high...)

* Lots of people personally asking "so what brings you here? we don't see
people from universities here very often." "We serve mainly Fortune 500
companies." ok, not all of them said that...

* Very interesting conversations with those companies looking at distributed
computing models for some research-based uses. Some VERY interested in
seeing how Internet2 could fit in...

* Lessig: probably the best speaker I have seen and heard. Deeply
introspective; I have got to read his book and see what it would take to
have him talk at some kind of university-driven event.

* Some of these "apps" (besides the obvious file sharing ones) would have a
prime testbed in an university setting. more on this later.

***************************************************************

David Wiley's overall impression

- The Freenet guys rock. Of all the "technical track" sessions I attended,
these were the only guys running and reporting serious network
simulations, getting into hardcore graph theory with their architectural
design, and generally taking a rigorous research-based approach to what
they were doing. Have already formed some cooperative research
agreements here. Very useful. Great project.

- Larry Lessig needs to be the next president of the United States. It is
glorious and wonderful to hear my point of view defended by an
intelligent, articulate, internationally-recognized, Harvard Law
Professor. His keynote on economics, intellectual property, and
blindly-clinging corporate stupidity brought me to my feet. Time and
again the West Virginian in me kept trying to stand and yell "Amen
Brother!", but somehow I managed to fight it off.

- No one seems to have noticed that p2p has educational implications.
There were lots of vendors showing off their collaborative work (Lotus
Notes 2001) products and distributed research apps, but no one said "and
this could improve teaching and learning in these seven ways..." I've
got to do a better job of propagating this meme.

*******************************************************

Steve's overall impression of the conference:

- I'll have to admit that although I didn't fully subscribe to the idea that
P2P=Napster/File sharing apps, I can definately say that I saw legitimate
uses of p2p at this conference.  One thing that made that even more
evident was that distributed computing/distributed storage/grid computing
were all lumped together under the umbrella of the p2p phenomena.  One
attendee brought this to the attention of Tim O'Reilly at a
presentation.  He agreed that there could easily be a conference organized
around any of those technologies, however they shared enough similarities
to be brought together at least in this stage of p2p.

- Ana was right that just about every conversation started "So, are you a
researcher at the University of TN (or what kind of P2P apps is UT
developing)?"  I would identify that I was a network engineer.  "So, what
is your interest here at the conference?"  I didn't respond that it was
intially a "know thy enemy" kind of approach, because after seeing a few
presentations, I could safely say that the benefits of some of these apps
far outweigh the small amount of bandwidth a lot of them consume.

- I would also have to say that chatting with one of the attendees about the
p2p phenomenon, only to later find out from his business card that he was
the President or CEO of a development company was a new experience.  The
more business and research-oriented fully understood that p2p's reputation
had suffered a bit because of bandwidth-hogging file-sharing apps.  I
think they understood that some PR was needed to spread the word that p2p
is not necessarily something that should be feared because it will clog an
enterprise's pipes to the Internet.

- In my opinion, it was a great conference.  I met a lot of very interesting
people.  I was also exposed to quite a few interesting and exciting
projects and technologies.  One of my favorites was probably the nice
balance of free enterprise and benevolent endeavors the people at Entropia
are undertaking (i.e. www.fightaidsathome.org).


that's all folks.... let us know what you think.