Dyepot, Teapot

I saw Dawn’s post about her Art of Community session tomorrow, and realized that not only is it already the week of OSCON, but I really ought to tell people about the things I’m participating in. How did we get to the middle of July already?

Wednesday (that’s today) at 5:20 I’m moderating a panel called Tools for Local Communities. We’ll be talking about our local open source groups and communities (spanning the US, Brazil, and Latvia) and what we’ve learned about making them go.

Tonight, I’m participating in FOSCON 2008, Cooking With Ruby, which starts at 6pm at CubeSpace. The highlight of the evening is a web frameworks cookoff between Ruby on Rails, PHP, Seaside, and Drupal. We’ll also have a fun set of lightning talks by local Rubyists.

Then tomorrow, I’m giving a lightning talk at the Art of Community session called “Friendly Anarchy”, about what I’m learned from participating in pdx.rb.

I’ll also be helping staff the pdx.rb booth in the exhibit hall, so stop by and say hello.

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.

BarCamp Portland is happening just two days from now, starting May 2nd, 6pm, at CubeSpace.

If you’re not familiar with BarCamps in general, this is an unconference, an event with set times and dates, but the schedule determined on site by participants. It has a technology focus, but really anyone who can read this blog is likely to find something of interest. And it has one of my favorite rules for any event: if you’re not learning or contributing by staying where you are, then you should respectfully find somewhere else where you can be. If that means switching sessions, or adding something to the schedule, that’s great. You have the ability and the responsibility to make this your event.

Some topics that have been suggested so far:

• Design and geekdom
• Digital photography
• Object-oriented programming
• Erlang and Haskell
• A mini WordCamp (for users of WordPress) on Sunday
• Software business cooperatives

This is only a start. We’ll have over 100 session slots filled with … something … that you can help decide with the rest of us this Friday evening and through the rest of the weekend.

We’ve set a date for the next Portland BarCamp. It’ll be held May 2-4 at CubeSpace. If you’d like to participate or help, check the link above or contact Dawn Foster or myself.

Corvallis is staging their own as well. BeaverBarCamp will be on March 1st, at Oregon State. Topic ideas from their wiki include rockets, kinetic sculpture, and a tour of the OSU Open Source Labs.

I don’t often read Scobleizer[3] but his job change announcement caught my attention yesterday.

In particular, this part explaining reasons for moving to Fast Company rather than start his own business:

I want to build communities that lead to interesting events. But if I did my own business, running an event team would have to wait until I got my business on solid ground. That could be a year or more. That would mean opportunities lost. Fast Company and Inc have awesome event and marketing teams — I’ve been to their events and if I wanted to build a team like that it’d take capital, time, and talent that I don’t have.

Maybe it takes all that time and capital to do a big corporate conference, but when I see “community”, I think of what we’re doing here in Portland with the user groups and Ignite and Legion of Tech… and absolutely none of that required formal event or marketing teams, money up front, or things of that sort. These events are happening because some of us started going around and talking to people about doing something fun in our spare time. It’s amazing what you can pull of with a small group of volunteers, and the act of planning and running an event creates community in itself.

People shouldn’t be intimidated that they have to do it big. Simple works well: a space donated by Free Geek or CubeSpace, a company or two chipping in as pizza sponsors, recruiting a few people to talk about fun stuff they’re doing, and emailing everyone we know to show up. That’s really all you need to start. Maybe things grow from there, maybe not. Either way you’ll meet people and learn something new.

There’s details, of course, especially when you start to grow. Legion of Tech[1] is working[2] on a guidebook to what we know about running events, so hopefully soon I’ll be able to point people to that as well.

[1] Which is a non-profit corporation, but mostly because the things we’ve been planning started to involve more cash and liability than any one person should be responsible for. We could get by without a formal legal organization (and did, for the first Portland BarCamp and Ignite), it just makes bigger events harder to manage.

[2] By working I mean that I think we have a couple of wiki pages set up to start writing things down.

[3] Why? It makes me feel like we’re from different planets, and not in an interesting way.

There’s some interesting things coming up in the new year for Portland geeks. Ignite will be back on February 5th at the Bagdad Theater. You can submit a proposal to talk anytime between now and January 15th. We’re also looking for sponsors.

Putting on big events like Ignite or BarCamp requires all sorts of resources (sponsorships, volunteers, friendly spaces) and coordination. In order to do this more effectively, we’re starting a non-profit organization called Legion of Tech. I’m excited to be involved as a board member. We’ll be the umbrella organization for future Ignite, BarCamp, and Startupalooza events. We’re also looking at other ways we can support the Portland tech community.

One of my personal projects, the PDX Groups wiki and calendar, continues to grow, thanks to help from several local community members. Since I started this, I’ve heard from a lot of people who want to see the calendar become a better tool for everyone. So one of my new year’s projects will be to try to connect all of the people who want to work on this, and try to make that happen. We have a really friendly and active tech community forming here, and the more tools we have for connecting people with resources that match their interests, the better.

I’m spending this week at the first ever Platform International Animation Festival. Portland has a really amazing animation community already here in town, so it’s very cool that the organizers chose us and not NY or LA or some random spot in the mountains (and yay Cartoon Network for underwriting it). It opened tonight with the first set of competition entries followed by a party. My plan is to go to as many events as I possibly can, follow Shawn around in hopes of meeting interesting people, and hang out at Podcast Hotel.

If you are even slightly interested in seeing animated works from around the world, I encourage you to pick up tickets to at least one screening (I think most events are $10). Lucas and I were both really impressed with the first night’s lineup, and there are some great feature-length works, lectures, and other events on the schedule.

I’ll post more when I’m more awake and sober (opening night == champagne. with blue curaçao. mmm and oof and the same time.)

I didn’t take a single picture at BarCamp this weekend, because there were already so many people with cameras out. It was nice to stand back and not worry about documenting things during the event. You can see everyone’s photos so far on Flickr thanks to the magic of tagging.

Here’s a few of my personal highlights:
* Noticing that several other people had written “knitting” as one of the tags on their badge, and having a knitting meetup in response.
* Seeing kids play with the OLPC prototypes.
* Dawn’s session on collaboration in communities. Lots of discussion about community moderation and management, and dealing with problems that crop up on both the organization and community ends of the relationship.
* Paige’s discussion on science fiction, women, and the future of technology. We talked about role models, things in books that do or don’t come true, and wishing we could use Google to find out what aisle the cornflakes are on.
* Hosting a session on publishing in the 21st century. The discussion included using the internet to connect with readers, the different benefits of paper and electronic formats, and generally getting closer to your audience. If anyone took notes (I should have asked one of the people who had laptops out), would you leave a comment here?
* Initial planning for a benefit concert based around women in open source to occur during OSCon this summer.
* A session on Portland user groups and how we can get more cross-pollination and inclusion. If anyone was there and needs the user group wiki link again, it’s at pdxgroups.pbwiki.com. I’m really glad that Marshall brought up the issue of diversity. I think one of the big things we need to think about is how different kinds of events and activities meet the needs and interests of different technology users in Portland. It’s not enough to just get the word out.
* Talking to all sorts of interesting people. I hope I’ll see some of them at the next BarCamp meetup.

In all, it was an immensely successful event. We had far more attendees than we expected, and there were more women that I would have guessed would show up (or even be interested, compared to what I’ve seen at other local tech events). I had a really great time.

I made it through a week of self/un-employment without freaking out. (Regular paychecks? What’s that?) The first two days were taken up just kind of getting comfortable, getting the right software on the MacBook, handling a couple zine orders, etc.

Tuesday I went to a Social Media Club meeting at Someday Lounge (a little dark in there, but a nice space):

Dan Harbison, Internet Marketing Manager for the Trailblazers, talked about the ways they’re using blogging and podcasts and social networking to connect with fans. They have a site called I Am a Trailblazers Fan, billed as the “official online community” of the Portland Trailblazers.

The part I found most interesting is that Dan said that even when fans are negative or critical of the team, they’d rather have them giving that commentary within the sphere of the team’s blogs and networking site. Even angry fans are still important to the organization. Apparently they only take down posts if the language is abusive or not PG, and even then the person will get an explanation and be asked to play nice, instead of being automatically kicked off the site.

Afterward, I talked with someone involved with the Platform International Animation Festival, which is happening this summer in downtown Portland (June 25-30). They’re going to have a really incredible lineup of work there (the schedule isn’t on the website yet, but the person I talked to mentioned John K. and Scott McCloud as participants), and they really want to connect with fan communities like anime clubs, as well as bloggers/podcasters/etc. If you’d like more info, let me know.

Wednesday I had two things on my calendar: a booksigning by the lovely authors of Mason Dixon Knitting, and the Dorkbot meetup.

Totally different venues and crowds. Both fun.

Yesterday, pretty quiet. Worked on some code for a blog aggregation project. Had lunch with Dawn at Cup & Saucer.

My plan for today was more code, but I woke up feeling kinda tired, so instead I’m putting together flyers for BarCamp.

Logo by Patrick Sullivan of Lov.li.

If you’re even slightly interested in tech, the internet, geek stuff, etc. you should consider coming to BarCamp. I think it’ll be a really interesting event. It’s May 11-12 at CubeSpace (that’s another neat thing I keep meaning to talk about. It’s a workspace for the self-employed, with meeting rooms and desks. The place reminds me of the grad student research cubbies in university libraries.)

Tonight Lucas and I will be at a Timbers pre-season event at the Bitter End. The $6 cover goes toward a Timbers documentary a friend of ours has been working on, and they’ve lined up three bands, a bagpiper, a raffle, plus a sneak preview of the documentary. We’ll have copies of Yog’s Notebook for sale, too.

Busy busy.