Entries categorized as ‘events’
I’m bad at remembering to write post-event reports. I get home, the exhaustion sets in, there’s work to catch up on, and by the time I get around to it all the interesting things have slipped my mind. So this time I’m forcing myself to get it done, tired or not.
The past breakout success of Twitter and other services at SXSW means that there’s often an anticipation that each year we’ll discover the next big new thing. I saw a bunch of commentary leading up the event trying to guess what that would be. But honestly? I think the current wave of social/mobile technology is in a middle stage of development now, where most of the groundbreaking has happened, the services are scaling out, and the surrounding environment hasn’t changed enough to cause substantially new things to emerge.
Twitter is still the clear winner for keeping in touch with people at this sort of event. I saw DMs used as a proxy for SMS, several friends CCing people to keep them in the loop, and frequent hashtagging for context (most entertaining hashtag activity: coming up with alternate, shorter hashtags for panels because the official ones were long and unwieldy).
Having to check into both Foursquare and Gowalla to find out where my friends are is not particularly efficient, but I’m not sure I want that kind of efficiency in a non-SXSW context.
I still like the gameplay in Foursquare best, of the location-tracking apps I’ve used in the last year. (But Gowalla won the party competition, with Diplo performing.)
There were a few new event-sharing sorts of things getting attention this year. I didn’t end up using Plancast at all in Austin, but I’d like to see how it could be used with Calagator for Portland events. Sitby.us had (by far) the best mobile schedule-browsing interface of the options I tried, but checking into a session room never led to a friend coming to find me and grab a seat in the same row. Again, I’m not sure there’s much new happening with these services, just different implementations trying out combinations of features, smoothing out the interface, finding out which parts are sticky enough to keep people coming back.
All this isn’t to say I didn’t see anything fun or interesting. The panel I was most looking forward to, on post-digital design, did not disappoint. I liked the session on recommendation engines (featuring wacky correlations from Hunch), and seeing crazy hackerspace projects, and Clay Shirky prodding people to think about why we share content, and what that means for those who create it.
I also had some fun music experiences, talked to people I haven’t seen in a while, met new people, and worked on ideas for a couple of new projects (keywords: party bus and “the fine line between creepy and fun”).
Oh yeah, and I took a few pictures. I’ll probably have more to say about that too.
Categories: events · travel · weekly report
Tagged: sxsw, sxswi
February 1, 2010 · Comments Off
Categories: events · portland · technology
Tagged: conference, open source, osbridge
January 25, 2010 · Comments Off
Re-entry from vacation is always a little tricky. There’s work to return to, at the same time you’re trying to sort out all of the photos and memories and ideas from the trip. After last week’s trip, I came back to a client project launch, Calagator’s birthday, rapid-fire CrisisCampPDX planning, new photo equipment to play with—just to start.
We had about fifteen people come out for Calagator‘s 2nd birthday party at Bailey’s on Friday night. Low-key, casual meetup, with brownies from Joe Cohen, lemon bars I made with the roadtrip lemons, plenty of beer, and food from the taqueria across the street. I’m sad that Igal, who has been instrumental in keeping Calagator going, was sick and couldn’t be there with us.
On Saturday, about 60 people met up at NedSpace for the first-ever CrisisCampPDX, a quickly-organized branch of a project that’s been bringing people together around the world to provide support for relief efforts in Haiti. This wasn’t just the regular Portland tech scene at work—we had a wide range of participants, from developers, to GIS specialists, to French and Creole speakers, to people who helped with data entry and sorting. I was really impressed with the energy and focus everyone brought to this work day. I helped with a hospital data project using Sahana, a disaster-management system. We hit a few bumps as people tried to get up to speed on different projects, but on the whole I was really impressed with how much we were able to do, for such a distributed set of projects.
And now for something completely different.
I have a small but growing collection of cameras, which has now expanded to include some Polaroid equipment. The middle of winter in the Pacific Northwest is not the best time to be running around shooting ISO 100 film, but I did manage to get a few shots off last week with my new SX-70 Sonar camera. (This is not the only new camera from the last couple of weeks, but you’ll have to wait to hear about the rest.)
You may be wondering, “didn’t Polaroid stop making instant film a while back? Why would you pick that up now?”. There’s a group known as The Impossible Project which has spent the last year and change developing new instant film for Polaroid camera formats, and they’re expected to release the results of that work next month. So I just have to pace myself with my existing film supply for a few weeks.
Last but not least, I updated the blog’s header with a new photo, from the road trip. Click through and have a look if you’re using an RSS reader to view this. I have a habit of leaving the header picture the same for long periods of time, but once in a while the blog design changes, and there’s often new links in the sidebar to check out, so it’s worth taking a peek.
Categories: events · photography · projects · weekly report
Tagged: calagator, camera, cchaiti, ccpdx, crisis camp, film, impossible project, open source, polaroid
January 19, 2010 · Comments Off
photo by Reid Beels, from Calagator's 1st birthday celebration
Two years later and you’re still going strong.
Join Calagator developers and users for a birthday party this Friday, 7pm, at Bailey’s Taproom. Bring a dessert to share, or just stop by for a drink. We’d love to see you there.
Categories: events · technology
Tagged: birthday, calagator, calendar, open source, party, software
December 14, 2009 · Comments Off
Last week I finished up the content for the “Life of Audrey 2009 Retrospective” magazine and uploaded it to MagCloud.
You’ll be able to buy it here after I receive the proof and approve it, probably later this week. I’ll post on Twitter when it’s ready. [Update: It's available now.]
The third annual Winter Coders’ Social was last Tuesday night. This has become a really cool year-end tradition for the local tech scene. People from a bunch of different user groups get together for a holiday potluck and board games.
My current reading interest is noir crime novels. While I love a lot of the later derivatives of these, I’d never picked up a Hammett or Chandler book until a couple of weeks ago. So far I’ve read The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. I love the writing style and rhythm. It feels like they were meant to be read out loud, like radio plays. So I recorded a bit from Maltese Falcon on AudioBoo. It’s the section where we first encounter “the fat man”, and the adjectives he uses just crack me up.
I also just finished From Hell, the Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell graphic novel. It’s a huge book, which I didn’t realize when I ordered it, but dense and engaging. They do some really interesting things with time, consciousness, and different characters’ perspectives throughout, like a section when we’re fully inside Gull’s head and everything around him seems to glow. Highly recommended.
On Saturday we had a Calagator code sprint, the first one in quite a while. Only 5 attendees, in part due to the weather (we were promised freezing rain, which turned out to be cold and damp but only a little icy). But we got through several tickets, and added a couple of small features which should improve usability. You should be on our mailing list and following Calagator on Twitter if you want to find out when the next sprint will be.
Categories: events · portland · projects · technology · weekly report
Tagged: books, calagator, code sprint, crime novels, end of the year, geeks, magazine, magcloud, noir, reading, retrospective, review, winter, winter coders social
October 5, 2009 · Comments Off
A slice of the weekend.
Everything set up for the party at Gallery Homeland.
James Fee plays with his phone.
Rafa kept the music going.
Toward the end of the night.
Rick Nixon from the City of Portland talks about the open data initiative.
In front of the schedule grid.
Preparing for the zombie apocalypse causes much laughter.
Hackity hack.
Mayor=1
Ben ponders the PacManhattan set up.
Ghosts waiting for their turn to go.
The start of the Timbers game.
Smoke after a goal.
We lose. It is sad.
Categories: events · portland
Tagged: photography, photos, soccer, unconference, weekend, wherecamppdx
September 23, 2009 · Comments Off
Photo by Paige Saez
The second annual WhereCampPDX is coming up in just a week and a half. I’m really happy to be helping plan this again. Last year’s event was a great mix of location tracking ideas, games, food system discussions, and planning for community preparedness.
What’s in store this time? Friday, October 2nd, we kick off with a party at Gallery Homeland. Come meet people, talk about session ideas, try another round of the Arrivals game we invented for last year’s event. Please RSVP (helps us plan food/drink/chairs) on Upcoming.
Then, Saturday morning, we’ll have the unconference session kickoff at the Metro Regional Center at 9am, with sessions running all day. Add yourself to the attendee list on the wiki now, and browse or add to the session idea list.
Saturday night we’ll have pizza and hacking at PIE in the Pearl District. Bring your project, or just an idea for something you’d like to try, and find other people to collaborate with. Calagator, Geomena, and maybe even Shizzow are all likely to be represented there.
On Sunday we’ll wrap up with a day of games. PacManhattan is scheduled for a repeat run. We’re also considering geocaching, a mapping walk, scavenger hunts, and other fun. Check the blog for an updated schedule closer to the event.
See you there!
Categories: events · portland · technology
Tagged: wherecamp, wherecamppdx
June 23, 2009 · Comments Off
Selena already did a great job of thanking everyone who helped put this on, so I’m going to cheat and just link to her.
Highlights for me:
* People took our directions to “go forth and talk to each other” seriously, and I heard so many good things from attendees about the conversations they were having. I hope that this will also turn into new collaborators and new projects.
* Sitting in on sessions about Couch DB, evil programming tricks, space geekery, and learning the ropes for PR. I can’t wait till we have the audio available so I can share these with people who weren’t there.
* All of the enthusiasm among my fellow organizers and volunteers for how we can make this even better next year.
Oh, and the food cart field trips.
Categories: events · technology
Tagged: osb09, osbridge
May 16, 2009 · Comments Off
Yesterday we published the Open Source Bridge schedule. There’s two days of talks and a third day of unconference goodness to check out. Now you have no excuse to not go ahead and make your plan to attend. Do you really want to miss this lineup?
Categories: events · technology
Tagged: conference, osbridge
April 23, 2009 · Comments Off
Categories: events · portland · technology
Tagged: conference, open source, osbridge
