Steven Clift introduced City Camp Minnesota. He is director of e-democracy.org and leads a class at the Humphrey School. His class is helping to run this unconference. Food has been provided thanks to a number of sponsors.

While yesterday was 11/11/11, City Camp MN is taking place on 11/11/11 +1.

Session ideas were posted on a board and voted on with stickers. In a magic room, that will be used to help determine which sessions we have today. If we don’t like what was picked, vote with our feet!

Four principles of UnConferences. This is Open Space!

Today, I am attending City Camp MN, an unconference that brings together people working for local government, elected officials, non-profits, neighborhood groups, private-sector developers, journalists…basically anyone interested in making our communities better through technology. The idea is that we can collaborate and by doing so, we can come up with solutions better than if we were to all just work on our own. This is of course the basic theory that underpins the idea of government itself, but it is more than that, too.

Today, we celebrate 11/11/11. This feels significant.

The numbers are alliterative, a palindrome, binary.

This is the 11th day of the 11th month of the 11th year of this millennium. Or perhaps it’s the 12th year of the millennium. It depends on how you count.

We call this year 2011, because 2011 years ago was Anno Domini, the year of our lord, when Jesus Christ was born in the little town of Bethlehem.

As you probably heard, Gowalla recently revamped their service.

In doing so, I found myself no longer able to view my activity history on their website.

However, I found a way to retrieve my activity history using their API and PHP. So I thought I would share that method with others.

There has been a lot of discussion about whether designers should code lately. Again.

Here’s my take.

One definition of design is solving problems in a visual way.

Some of the problems involved in web design include:

Responsive web design allows our content to shine no matter the screen size, so it can be accessed easily on multiple devices.

However, devices are also starting to vary based on screen resolution. Can responsive web design handle that as well?

I believe it can, and it must. Here’s my take.

Right now, the iPhone 4 has a retina-display, with much higher pixels per inch than an iPhone 3GS.

The 3GS is 165 ppi, the iPhone 4 326 ppi, the iPad 132 ppi. That’s just for iOS devices. Resolutions abound.

Recently, a number of high-profile government website redesigns have launched with giant search boxes front and center.

This includes utah.gov, calgary.ca and pretty much every entrant in a recent New York City hackathon. Each of these feature a huge search box, and typically a gorgeous photo, with very little additional content on the home page.

Today, An Event Apart came to my turf, the Twin Cities. Last year, I attended An Event Apart Minneapolis: it rocked. Mind-blowing sessions, whip-smart attendees and some of the most accomplished speakers in the industry. This year, due to a number of reasons, An Event Apart Minneapolis was an event from which I am apart.

I tuned into A Feed Apart, which collects tweets using the #aea hashtag used at the event. There you can find a ton of great little nuggets to read, encapsulating some of the most potent ideas expressed at An Event Apart.

Reading these tweets and attending An Event Apart are not the same thing.

Microsoft has decided to remove conditional comments from Internet Explorer 10. This is not cool.

While IE has had more CSS bugs than other browsers, conditional comments have allowed us to target fixes not only to Internet Explorer, but to specific versions of Internet Explorer.

Try doing that with any other browser: it is extraordinarily difficult unless you use some truly hacktastic CSS, and that will likely hose things up down the line.

I love Google+. I have been trying it out for the past week. Lots of fun, easy to use. There is a ton of great potential here.

But is it a Facebook killer? Or even a Twitter killer?

The content I have seen people share on Google+ is in many ways similar to what I see on Facebook. Lots of fun videos, pictures, some status updates. The discussion and article sharing that does go on tends to be about Google+ itself. That makes sense: people are still figuring out how Google+ works. My guess is this will changes as people use it more.