Mash Pit – Page 2 – Factory Joe

PBWiki hits 50,000 wikis

Hometown hero PBWiki (created by a small team of folks lead by David Weekly of SHDH 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?

Mashpit Dallas II & Mashpit San Francisco II

Brian Oberkirch has announced Mashpit Dallas II taking place… today! He writes:

Several Dallas Barcampers are getting back together to kick off what (I hope) becomes a routine thang: a jam session of folks interested in social media. Tomorrow night we can talk a bit about what we each want to get out of such a working group. But, in the spirit of factoryjoe’s Mashpits , I also have an idea we can all work on.

Tim Williamson is the founder of The Idea Village, an entreprenuer bootstrapping/launching pad in New Orleans. The devastation all these months later isn’t just physical — ‘our social networks are destroyed,’ he says.

He did a triage grant program. Now wants to move it to the next level, making Idea Village the place people can go to get or contribute information & expertise so badly needed in the community. Idea Village, 2.0.

Our mission, should we choose to accept, is to whiteboard up some ideas for how the Idea Village can leverage social media to aggregate, plus up, and spread info around NOLA.

Tell anyone who might be interested. RSVP at the Upcoming page. We can order in some Gloria’s.

Don’t forget, we’ve got out own Mashpit II coming up on April 15 in South San Francisco at France Telecom’s offices. We’re looking for 30-40 folks who want to hack, smash and build cool stuff — and no, you don’t have to be a developer to contribute! Trust me, we need designers, thinkers, idea people, marketers and folks of all stripes to make these projects as good as possible. After all, they’re only as good as what goes into them.

So if you’re looking for something fun to do on tax day, definitely sign up. I hear there might be work on that nifty Mapendar idea…

Mashpit II coming to South San Francisco

Mashpit II will take place on April 15 at France Telecom’s South San Francisco offices (thanks, Sean!). I’m hoping to see a lot of microformats mashing and extension building, though obviously working on previous and new projects is encouraged as well.

So let me backup and explain a little about Mashpit and how it works (you can also read up on the first one):

First, Mashpit is unrelated to Mashup Camp. David Berlind and Doug Gold organized the first one not long ago and will be holding a second soon. Mashpit’s off on its own. 😉
Second, our focus is to stay modest and nimble — the first Mashpit had around 12 participants. Mashpit Dallas I had a similarly small number. We like small teams and keeping ‘pits manageable and high productivity is paramount to running a successful event.
Third, we focus on human problems. Though the context is certainly high tech geekery, we spec out our work as it relates to some human difficulty (i.e. sharing video with a wide audience or sending someone a message over multiple mediums) rather than expressing a problem in tech terms (i.e. “let’s improve the AJAX performance in the Rails stack”). This enables other ‘pits to carry forward the work begun at our event later on, regardless of technology. We want solutions, after all, to be effective in many circumastances. When you’re mashing, it matters less what tools you use than with the quality and how well your solution works for people.

For Mashpit II (II as in the second ‘pit in San Francisco), we’re hoping to get between 12-44 folks (kind of random, but based on space).

Here’s how I’m thinking it should work:

Sign yourself up on the wiki and then add yourself to the Upcoming page (yes, we need a mashup for that!).
Propose human problems that you’d like to work on on the wiki (and yes, you can be thinking about a particular mashup that you want to work on — just don’t describe it from a technology-centric perspective)
Depending on your interest and availability, get yourself to South San Francisco April 15!
We’ll convene, review our options, break out into teams and hack the whole day, reporting back on our progress some time in the evening — documenting everything on the wiki.
…Plan the next event?

Food and other good stuff will be provided — and we’d love to have some sponsors who want to pitch in and maybe provide a meal or snacks or coffee or take care of one of our other needs — drop me email at barcamp -at- gmail dot com and we’ll hook something up. It’s totally great to have a partner like France Telecom R&D supporting us — and it’d be great to have other passionate folks getting behind this too (wherever you are — like Barcamp, Mashpit is free to be copied, immitated and spread far and wide!).