From the remove of 3000 miles away, this year's ETech looks like it was a seminal gathering of social software thinkers. (I had an iron-clad excuse for not going, but I was still sad to miss it.) This post and the two below it point to slides or partial notes from the conference -- not perfect, but not nothing either. Sam has posted the slides from his talk on what he's learned from arranging a standards effort using a wiki. We've quoted Sam Ruby before about the use of the wiki to design a new syndication standard, in History, Personalities, Wikis ReduxTalking about about what they've learned matters because the strategy actually worked. The wiki broke the logjam around designing a syndication format, which format is now being sent to the IETF and showing up in places like photoblogging apps. The story of the centrality of the wiki, and the way it was used, is only partly told in the slides, but even the bullet-point version of the talk is good reading: