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)!

ALE: Ajax linking and embedding

Those Zimbra guys are so clever. Via O’Reilly, AJAX Linking and Embedding (ALE) “provides the ability to embed rich content into an editable document and to then interact with and edit that content in much the same way as it is done with traditional office suites and applications in a desktop environment. A key difference is that … the embedded objects are AJAX components that are embedded into an editable HTML document.” Download the 0.2 spec and check out the hosted demo.

PBWiki hits 50,000 wikis

50K Wikis!Hometown hero (created by a small team of folks lead by David Weekly of fame) has hit 50,000 PBWikis (what’s a PBwiki?).

You’ll note that almost all the wikis that I use today are PBWikis: Barcamp, Munified, Coworking, CivicForge, Mash Pit and the new Micro Microformats wiki.

Why? Ease of use, simplicity, speed… and the right subset of features and a simple interaction model. It feels solid. It looks good. It does what I want it to do (I’m also watching Stikipad as it offers Textile).

And now it looks like I’ll even be getting to do some work for the team on some upcoming usability and design tasks. Not to mention microformats integration. Nice.

Bonus: So I’m curious — what features do you look for in a wiki? What’s missing from your experience? Essentially, if you ever had a wiki feature request that you’re dying for (or something you never want to see in a wiki again), what would you say?

You work for me, now shut the fuck up

Via Zak Greant, Tim Bray lays it down: “As a thought experiment, replace the word ‘blogging’ with ‘email’ or ‘conference presentation’ or ‘teleconference’ or ‘sales presentation’. Or ‘barroom conversation’ for that matter. Quick, quick, you wanna be safe, you better lock all your employees up and never let ’em say anything to anyone!” … “If your employees are going to say stupid things in public, you’ve got a management problem and a policy problem, not a blogging problem.”

News from the Net Squared

From the Net Squared news machine:

Next Tuesday, April 11th, Zack Rosen of CivicSpace, Adam Frey of WikiSpaces, and Tara Hunt, of Riya.com & Horsepigcow, will gather at Varnish for Net Tuesday San Francisco. The focus is community engagement & community tools, so come, engage your NetSquared community.

On that same day, NetSquared community members will gather at the Stag’s Head Pub in Houston, TX for their second NetSquared meetup.

The next day, April 12th, NetSquared builders in Washington, DC will re-convene at Buffalo Billiards

Soon, Net Tuesday will be coming to LA. Tell your SoCal friends to join the Net Tuesday LA group

Don’t live in one of these locations? Answer the Net2Builders Call to Action & Host a Meetup in Your Town!