Dyepot, Teapot

One of my favorite blogs right now is The Runcible Bin, because each post is a small brain-dump of what the author is working on and thinking about. If I were to do such a thing, today’s would look like:

The Lost Ring!

Now that MetroFi officially gave up, can we have Meraki instead?

Calagator. Now with fewer memory leaks caused by bad parser code (vpim. again.).

If I said I’d give a presentation on fun with location tracking next week, does that mean I’ll actually manage to build a working demo in time?

Julia Nunes is the best cure for a grouchy morning.

This might be of interest to fellow side-projecteers: the Portland State Business Accelerator is having a workshop next week called Advanced Invention to Venture, to help people learn how to fund their idea. It’s not just about venture capital, and covers several options. I’m also happy to see this in the description: “Focuses on how to successfully implement the new venture rather than on how to write a business plan.” Chris Dawson of Box Populi says it was a very useful experience and his team will be returning more at this year’s workshop. This is happening May 28-31 at the Portland State Business Accelerator offices in SW Portland.

This past weekend I attended WhereCamp, an unconference on all things geo-technology. I had a very fun time talking to everyone and camping in my Google tent.

I led two sessions: one on community-building and socializing with location-aware tools, and another the second day on social practice software, a term Anselm suggested to describe how we’re building Calagator.

Other things:

• Good group of Portland folks there. Me, Paige, Anselm, Jason and the Platial team, three people from TriMet, in all maybe a dozen of us.
• I bugged the TriMet team with all my burning questions about the tech side of what they’re doing. I hadn’t realized that they were such a key player in getting Google Transit started. These people need a blog. There’s a info about what they’re up to at http://developer.trimet.org/, and they’re really interested in hearing about anything people are doing with the API. I think I managed to convince Bibiana, the project manager, that they need to host a Portland TransitCamp. There’s some cool stuff they’re working on, and I’d love to see the local community collaborating more.
• Open Street Map. I first heard about them in 2006 when they gathered people to map the Isle of Wight. It’s easy to take access to geographic data for granted when you’re in the US, but not every country treats it as public property. If you’re not familiar with this project, go read.
• Andrew Turner and Seth Fitzsimmons led a lively session on privacy. The second half of the notes for this have a great summary of the current state of geo-privacy issues, which we talked through with the six de bono hats methodology.
• Dave Troy presented a neat way of encoding location data called geohash. It turns your lat/long into a single alphanumeric string. The cool thing here is that as you lose characters from the right side, the sequence remains valid at a lower accuracy, describing a larger and larger bounding box. I could see this being really useful for a site that had location urls matching some collection of data. it’s human-editable enough that people could expand the search area just by editing the url.
• NNDB does data visualization of the connections between people, that you can browse and edit. Best part: graphing conspiracy theories.
• Rich Gibson brought his Gigapan camera. It’s interesting to look at the results from smaller and larger spaces.

I think we really, absolutely need to have a WhereCamp Portland. Let’s say in October. There’s just too much interesting mapping and location-geekery happening here to not do it. Who wants to help make this happen?

This past weekend’s BarCamp Portland was a fabulous, fun, exhausting time. Thank you to everyone who came and helped out and lent their knowledge and interests to making this such a great event.

Keep checking Flickr for pictures, the Drupal site for session info and notes, and the Legion of Tech site for what we’re up to next.

Personal highlights: plotting the start of a new web service during Bikes and Geeks, Fermentation Club (coming soon!), the ongoing My Other Thing conversation, and getting to introduce my mom to more of the neat things going on in our local tech community.

I’ve been talking about doing some kind of survey of the local tech community for a few months now, but today it’s up and running. If you’re in Portland, and involved with any kind of technology activities for work or fun, please go to http://moourl.com/lotsurvey. The more responses, the better, since we want to see the breadth of our community, and whether Legion of Tech events are on your calendar. Tell your friends, coworkers, and neighbors. I’ll be posting here and on the Legion of Tech blog when we’ve crunched the numbers.