I remember being very confused by the idea of an unconference. I didn’t understand what it was and why it had a special name distinct from a conference. Once I learned that it was a conference in which the talks/discussions were planned by participants, I was a little bit less confused, but I still didn’t understand why it had a special name. To me, that was simply a conference. The conferences and conventions I had been to had involved participants putting on workshops. It was only when I realized that many conferences lack participative elements that I realized my primary experience of conferences was non-representative of conferences in this particular way.
I had a similar struggle understanding the idea of Software as a Service (SaaS). I had never had any interactions with old corporate software that required people to come and install it on your servers. The first time I heard the term SaaS as someone explained to me what it meant, I was puzzled. “Isn’t that all software?” I thought. “Why call it SaaS instead of simply calling it software?” All of the software I had experienced and was aware of was in the category of SaaS.
I’m writing this mainly just to put my own thoughts down somewhere, but if anyone is reading this I’ll try to put a “what you can take from this” spin on it:
If your entire experience of X falls within X_type1, and you are barely even aware of the existence of X_type2, then you will simply think of X_type1 as X, and you will be perplexed when people call it X_type1.
If you are speaking to someone who is confused by X_type1, don’t automatically assume they don’t know what X_type1 is. It might be that they simply don’t know why you are using such an odd name for (what they view as X).
Silly example: Imagine growing up in the USA, never travelling outside of the USA, and telling people that you speak “American English.” Most people in the USA don’t think of their language as American English; they just think of it as English. (Side note: over the years I have had many people tell me that they don’t have an accent)
I remember being very confused by the idea of an unconference. I didn’t understand what it was and why it had a special name distinct from a conference. Once I learned that it was a conference in which the talks/discussions were planned by participants, I was a little bit less confused, but I still didn’t understand why it had a special name. To me, that was simply a conference. The conferences and conventions I had been to had involved participants putting on workshops. It was only when I realized that many conferences lack participative elements that I realized my primary experience of conferences was non-representative of conferences in this particular way.
I had a similar struggle understanding the idea of Software as a Service (SaaS). I had never had any interactions with old corporate software that required people to come and install it on your servers. The first time I heard the term SaaS as someone explained to me what it meant, I was puzzled. “Isn’t that all software?” I thought. “Why call it SaaS instead of simply calling it software?” All of the software I had experienced and was aware of was in the category of SaaS.
I’m writing this mainly just to put my own thoughts down somewhere, but if anyone is reading this I’ll try to put a “what you can take from this” spin on it:
If your entire experience of X falls within X_type1, and you are barely even aware of the existence of X_type2, then you will simply think of X_type1 as X, and you will be perplexed when people call it X_type1.
If you are speaking to someone who is confused by X_type1, don’t automatically assume they don’t know what X_type1 is. It might be that they simply don’t know why you are using such an odd name for (what they view as X).
Silly example: Imagine growing up in the USA, never travelling outside of the USA, and telling people that you speak “American English.” Most people in the USA don’t think of their language as American English; they just think of it as English. (Side note: over the years I have had many people tell me that they don’t have an accent)