Category: I care about…

Dries takes on the old guard

Dries, on meeting with the Flemish Radio- and Television Network (VRT), who will be using Drupal:

I’m going to tell them that traditional media has no choice but to move forward. I spent the last 5 years of my life developing software that enables individuals to publish and share content on the internet. Soon, amateur content providers will have very powerful tools to compete with traditional media. I’m going to tell them that we are reshaping the future of news, information and journalism, and that, if they want to avoid getting left behind, they have to position themselves at the forefront of citizen journalism, take part in it, and embrace new internet technologies.

Brad Neuberg tackles offline access and permanent, client-side storage for AJAX apps

The man‘s a madman. I can’t even keep up with him. Oh, a snippet from his thorough explanation:

I’ve finally finished; dojo.storage is now done, in beta, and fully open source under a business-friendly BSD license.

…

The offline and dojo.storage work together, because whether you are offline or online you can access the same persistent storage, saving data while offline then syncing when online. Expect a dojo.offline and dojo.sync in the future that will provide abstractions for common operations like this. I’m looking for financial sponsors on this if you are interested.

(Emphasis mine).

Announcing: Barcamp San Francisco

Barcamp San Francisco

Couldn’t wait any longer to get this one outta the bag… but based on some prodding from Kevin Burton at ETech and Paul D Smith on the Barcamp wiki, I’d like to announce that Barcamp is coming to San Francisco June 24-25, to coincide with Kevin Werbach’s Supernova.

Now, there a coupla cool bonuses I want to mention. First, the Tuesday before Supernova we’ll be having another Mash Pit in San Francisco. Venue TBD, but I’ll be looking into France Telecom’s space again or possibly prodding Adaptive Path.

The night of the Mash Pit we’ll be having some kind of geektacular Microformats 1-year Anniversary party. Dunno about where, but following Mash Pit, that’s what we’ll be doin’. Ask Tantek.

On Wednesday, Supernova starts and goes through Friday. At the close of Kevin’s event, we’ll have the traditional Barcamp Social Kick-off party somewhere in the city… figure around 8pm — with everyone from ‘nova invited.

Saturday we kick it off around 10am, doin’ the whole Barcamp thing, finishing out sometime around 4pm on Sunday. Phew!

Now I should make it clear that the primary instigators of this weeklong fete include both me and Tantek… with the full support of the Supernova crew. We’re looking to make these events as complementary and mutually supportive as possible and to that end, will be working together tightly to make sure that as many folks as possible get a chance to participate one way or another. Mash Pit and Barcamp will remain free as always (donations welcome!) and if you’re in town for Supernova anyway, well, you now have any excuse to come a little early and stay a bit longer.

Definitely; this is gunna be fun.

Where it’s at

Pinko Desktop Wallpaper

Or perhaps where I’ll be at… specifically, tomorrow night. Namely, at Net Squared‘s Net Tuesday event at Varnish Fine Arts. And who will be speaking? Well, my PiC for one… and my ex-boss Zack Rosen of CivicSpace and Adam Frey of Wikispaces (whom I’ve not met but heard great things about).

Not sure about the others, but Tara says she’ll be speaking about:

[convincing] non-profits to Go Pink(o) at Varnish Fine Arts. I’m going to go through some of what you’ve already read here and on the wiki and then apply the theory to non-profit marketing. Personally, I think it’s even more applicable for a not for profit campaign. When you already have an engaged sponsor-base and an enthusiastic army of volunteers, all sorts of beautiful Pinko community messaging can and will happen.

So there ya go. Your Tuesday is now apportioned!

Need a final count on Mash Pit II

The Mash Pit

Mash Pit (color)Ok, it’s time to get some final numbers here. So far we’ve got 16 attending on Upcoming, 28 watching and 11 on the wiki (nearly all of which are already on the Upcoming page).

But I need to know if you’re really going to come. You lurkers — time to pony up.

Or else ya don’t eat!

See, France Telecom R&D has pitched in big time to help make this event a success and to create an environment conducive to collaboration and conversation… but needs to know how many mouths we’re going to need to feed. …That and we’ve got limited space. 40 to be exact.

So, we’ve got a week to go. And you’ve got a week to make up your mind. If you’re really going to be coming, mark yourself as attending on Upcoming. I’m not saying that we’re going to necessarily turn away anyone — I know a few folks who are only coming for a half day — but getting a solid count would be really helpful so that we can plan food.

And, if you’re curious about how it’s going to go down, here’s the current itinerary:

  • Doors open around 9. Coffee, tea, the typical breakfast fixin’s available at 801 Gateway Boulevard Suite 500. Mingling commences.
  • 9:45am I’ll introduce the event, talk about what the big plan for the day is (similar to what I’m outlining here).
  • 10am we start brainstorming projects to work on. After 15 minutes, we’ll have final candidates, and depending on how many people are attending, we’ll vote on the number of people divided by 3, 4 or 5 depending on how large we want the work groups to be.
  • By 10:30am we’ll have broken up into teams and will begin brainstorming, gelling, getting into the nitty gritty of whatever project each group decided to take on.
  • Break around 12:15 for lunch, socializing. We’ll reconvene at 1:30pm, take our collective pulse and get back into it.
  • 4:45pm — or as teams dictate — the groups convenes in the Jardin (pictured above) to give 5 minute report backs /demos of what they created and worked on. This will take us to around 5:30pm when we’ll do an event breakdown and talkback.
  • Drinks somewhere following up in the city — anyone care to buy a round? 😉

So, like I said before, pretty much an all day hackfest. I’m taking lessons from the other ‘Pits and trying to get us into teamworking as fast as possible — not taking time to review APIs or process quite as much this time and letting folks figure it out for themselves. I am hoping that presentations go pretty well — and that we spend some time documenting our projects on the wiki.

One last thing… getting there isn’t totally straight-forward, but it’s not impossible. You have a couple options. For one, I’d encourage folks to rideshare — feel free to use the comments of this post or the wiki to organize. You can take BART, but it’s a little difficult — the best possibility is to go to the airport and then hop on an Embassy Shuttle which’ll drop you off across from France Telecom’s offices… Lastly, you can take Caltrain to the South San Francisco stop and walk a little less than a mile over 101 and up Gateway Blvd. It’s a pleasant walk and easy enough to navigate. Finally — when you arrive, the front door may be locked, so just call the number on the door (it’ll be one of our cell phones) or wait for the guard to come around. He or she’ll be expecting you.

Any questions, feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment. Looking forward to seeing how this event plays out given our incredible venue..!

Rashmi Sinha announces D Camp

dcamp v4Last week Rashmi announced D Camp — a Barcamp-styled ad hoc gathering of folks to be held at Ross Mayfield‘s SocialText HQ in Palo Alto May 12 and 13. The event is dedicated to discussing and presenting on design and development:

D is for designers and D is for developers. We hope that this event will attract both designers, developers and anyone else who cares about the user experience. We hope that we will address issues of mutual concern together under the same roof and help build connections between the various communities that care about User Experience.

Scoble also name-dropped… literally — forgetting to mention Rashmi. Ah well — missed a perfectly good opportunity to give props to, as Tara put it, “the brilliant, young woman who is actually putting this together” (emphasis mine).
Hop on the mailing list or wiki if you want to pitch in. As usual, sign up on Upcoming. And — Rashmi’s also look for sponsors and a decent logo (mine’s only a placeholder)!