Paul and Graeme, the human mobile multimedia nodes,  say:

We’re incapable of writing anything any more, but what did we learn from our ‘live’ APG paper-writing marathon yesterday?

Well firstly and most importantly, that we’re very bad at reading the rules of entry for APG. They state quite clearly that the deadline is Monday at 12 noon – not today as we thought (‘Doh!’ doesn’t quite cover it).

Despite having this news shared with us late in the evening we plowed on regardless, and more-or-less wrote the paper yesterday. There’s still a lot of tweaking to do, tidying up and that, but the guts are done.

Other things we learnt.

1.    APG papers are not easy to write quickly. 24 hours is not enough time, nowhere near enough. We’re still not really sure if we got to something interesting (it’s too early to tell) but you definitely need longer than the time we had in order to explore the dead-ends, argue the toss about some really unimportant thing like whether to use the word ‘paradigm’, and speed seems to mean that process and point get muddled, and you end up worrying about all the wrong things.

2.    The internet is distracting, really really distracting. Fun, but distracting.

3.    On the whole people are good. Funny, helpful, and nice. Even other agencies. (Hello, Mother).

4.    When you set out to do one thing (write a paper) you end up finding something else out, something far more interesting. For us that was the power of community, and the sense of responsibility it demands. Of course we know lots of people thought what we were doing was a little silly (maybe even a lot stupid), but knowing there were people watching and sending messages changed things. There were several moments when we just felt like jacking it in, but it felt that if we did that we’d be letting down the supportive people, and letting the ‘haters’ win. In a small way, I guess it felt like it wasn’t just our thing.

So, it would be nice to say that we’ll see you all at the awards ceremony, but we might be getting a little ahead of ourselves.

Other interesting facts: