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 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’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.

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.

Wednesday I attended the inaugural Portland Lunch 2.0. Jake Kuramoto had the idea to try this locally, and AboutUs hosted. I really enjoy how each new event seems to bring out a slightly different group of people, which got me wondering: why don’t we have more daytime events? Obviously, most people have to work, but usually we get some kind of lunch break, and it seems easier than evenings for people with kids.

Coincidently enough, earlier in the week I had an interesting conversation with Jeff Schwaber about the function that Friday symposiums serve for academic communities, and how something like that might work for our local user groups. Linux groups have traditionally been the one place people working with different open source technologies all come together, but these days we’re as likely to be using Macs, and the LUG just isn’t our starting point anymore. So what about some kind of brown bag lunch symposium? User groups could take turns presenting their best talks from past meetings, and we’d all learn something.

Another type of daytime event I’m interested in are the Jelly-style rotating coworking meetups. I’d love to spend half a day every couple of weeks working from the same space with other local geeks. It would not be a bad thing for me to get out of my apartment while it’s light out.

Portland has a lot of cool things going on right now, and I’m eager for even more. But we shouldn’t wait for a good idea to import from San Francisco or Seattle. This is a place with it’s own unique characteristics, and most of the time no one worries about whether we’re as cool as Location X. In the tech sphere we can fall into that trap because there’s just so much noise coming from other geek hubs. Ask “what would help me get my work done or meet interesting people or have more fun?”—that’s the important part.

Over the last few weeks a group of Portland tech community members have started work on a project to create a single community-wide calendar site. It’s just in the initial stages, but we have a site up, and a project blog where you can learn more. Most of the development will happen at bi-weekly Code Sprint meetings, with the next one on February 2nd. These are open to not just developers, but any interested community member who would like to attend. People can help by writing code, working on the user interface, planning, research, or even just blogging and otherwise documenting our work.

If you’d like to participate, sign up for the discussion group and introduce yourself. Hope to see you there.

Since January, Raven Zachary has been posting daily profiles of Portlanders at Portland on Fire. I was featured on January 8, and I really enjoy reading each profile as it’s posted. It’s neat seeing what other people are interested in and working on. If you live here, you can submit a profile too.

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.

Portland Art Center, one of my favorite First Thursday stops, has been going through difficult financial times. This fall they invited interested local artists to decorate a square wood panel for a December fundraiser show. A piece of my own textile experimentation will be on display, along with ~300 other works. It should be really interesting to see what everyone created.

They’re having an opening reception tomorrow from 6-10PM, in the main gallery at NW 5th & Couch. Panels sell for $300. 75% of that goes directly to PAC, and the Henry Hillman, Jr. Foundation is providing a matching grant up to $20,000. This fundraiser will determine whether PAC can continue to operate into the new year, so I really encourage everyone to go look, and tell your friends.