Category Archives: General

General

Submit an Ignite Proposal & Complete the LoT Survey Now!

Ignite proposals are due on May 28th! That means you have only 10 days to come up with an awesome, killer idea for the Ignite Portland event in June. We don’t have very many submissions so far, so
your chances are good!

Legion of Tech is also doing a survey to find out more about Portland’s technology community. We’d like to know about your demographics and activities for event planning and as a resource for the rest of the
community. Please go to http://moourl.com/lotsurvey and fill it out now (< 5 min), then spread the word to your friends and coworkers.

We also have a bunch of great events coming up in Portland this month:

General

Don't Miss Any Important sxsw Tweets this week!

I was a little bored sitting in the airport at 5am, so I thought that it would be fun to use Yahoo Pipes to help make sure that I didn’t miss any important sxsw tweets during my trip. I thought that other people might be interested in using it, too, so I built my Twitter Filter for sxsw using a user input field. You just enter your “with friends” Twitter feed URL, grab the RSS feed output, and put the feed in your favorite mobile RSS reader. Now you can make sure you don’t miss anything!

How it works:

  • You enter your Twitter “with friends” feed (it defaults to mine).
  • It searches the feed for these 2 keywords “sxsw” and “austin”
  • It outputs only the tweets with one of those keywords

Keep in mind that you can clone this pipe and add some extra keywords. Good candidates might be “party” or “werewolf” 🙂

For those sxsw’ers on Twitter, a bunch of us are writing similar filters, so you might want to make sure you include the text or hash tag “sxsw” in your Tweets.

Related Fast Wonder blog posts:

General

The DataPortability Report for January: Good, Bad, and Ugly

The DataPortability initiative just released their report for the month of January. I love the open approach the group has embraced to share the issues, highlights, and progress with the community.

The Good:

The work is being broken down into a bunch of action groups to help get the teams organized and break the work into manageable chunks.

The Bad:

Like many similar efforts, the big vendors agree to participate and make a lot of noise about it, but they haven’t all been doing the real work necessary to make it succeed. With any luck, this open approach will convince some of the vendors that they need to participate and contribute if they want to be part of the initiative.

The Ugly:

There has been quite a bit of criticism of the DataPortability group about the slogan, naming names, vendor hype, and more. The good part is that the group is responding to the criticism in an open and honest manner and making changes to address the issues.

This is just a really quick summary, but you should read the rest of the report for more details.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

General

Off the Grid

I will be mostly off the grid as of this evening and not returning to the wired world until the 27th. Instead, I will be hanging out with family in a very rural area of Ohio for the holidays.

My internet access will be limited to what I can get on my cell phone.

If you need something related to Legion of Tech, Ignite, or other community tech event stuff, Todd will be around during the holidays.  When he isn’t visiting his family here in Portland, he’ll probably be spending time watching violent (non-Dawn approved) movies and eating lots of meat 🙂

General

Moving … Sort of (Update RSS)

I am moving off of hosted WordPress and onto my own hosted server this weekend. If you come to FastWonderBlog.com directly to read this blog or subscribe to the Feedburner feed, you won’t notice a difference (hopefully). If you happen to be using the WordPress Feed, you will want to update it to the Feedburner feed.

Otherwise, expect a few hiccups. It is likely that something will go wrong, and the site will look strange for a while 🙂 Rest assured that I know about it and am working on it!

General

Technology Community Leader Meetup in PDX

We had so much fun at the Technology Community Leader Meetup in SF before OSBC that I thought we should have another one around OSCON / Ubuntu Live in PDX on July 24th from 6-7:30pm.

Anyone currently leading, managing, or otherwise involved in technology communities (open source, web 2.0, wikis, etc.) is welcome to attend. Feel free to forward this invite on to others. It should be fun!

Location is TBD until I have an idea of how many people plan to attend. It will be somewhere in or near the Portland Convention center. If you would like to attend, please RSVP on upcoming.

General, podcast

What are Your Favorite Podcasts

I admit it, I am a podcast addict. I listen to podcasts whenever can: while driving, grocery shopping, doing laundry, washing dishes, walking, working out … you get the idea. I thought it would be interesting to share my favorite podcasts and encourage a few others to do the same:

Tech Podcasts:

  • Buzz Out Loud
  • CNET Daily Tech News Podcast
  • Cranky Geeks (when I can find time)
  • Digital Planet (BBC)
  • InfoWorld Daily Podcast
  • Net@Nite
  • PRI’s The World: Technology (when I can find time)
  • Redmonk Radio Podcast (depending on the topic)
  • TWIT
  • Wall Street Journal Tech news Briefing
  • Occasional conference podcasts (sxsw, etc.)

Business / News:

  • Business Week Cover Stories
  • Business Week Technology & You
  • New York Times Front Page
  • HBR IdeaCast
  • NPR Business Story of the Day
  • Science Friday – Making Science Radioactive

I’m officially tagging a few people with the challenge: What are Your Favorite Podcasts?

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Josh Bancroft, Coté, Audrey Eschright, and Chris Brentano – blog about your favorite podcasts and tag 5 other people.

Others – please jump in, blog, and tag another 5 people.

art of community, collaboration, community, General, O'Reilly, open source

Community Building and Free Documentation

Andy Oram conducted an interesting survey to answer the question, “Why Do People Write Free Documentation?” I was a bit surprised by the top result: community building.

As a community manager, I love to see that people are contributing documentation to projects as a way to help build the community. This also emphasizes a point that I have made several times during speaking engagements when people ask about motivation for contributing to communities or open source projects. My answer is always something like this, “Like any diverse groups of individuals, motivations for contributing will vary widely depending on the individual. Some people use it as a learning experience, some want fame (rockstar mentality) or other reputation building, some do it to help others, …” While community building is at the top of the list, the other motivations follow very closely behind: personal growth, mutual aid, gratitude, support, reputation, and more. Although this survey is focused on documentation, it still helps validate the idea that the motivations of individual community members are diverse.

As a community manager, I almost wish that there was a clear winner in the survey with one motivation standing out high above the others. It would make my job easier. Since no one way of encouraging people to participate within a community will work for every member, we sometimes have to get creative.

The survey is a great read for anyone interested in motivation within communities.

barcamp, barcampportland, General, portland, portland barcamp meetup

BarCamp Portland Informal Tech Meetup May 24th

Our next informal Portland BarCamp Meetup will be on May 24th! We have also settled on the fourth Thursday of every month as a regular date for the event. Any local techies are welcome to attend.

When: Thursday, May 24th
Time: 5:30pm – 8:00 pm
Where: Jive Software Office (317 SW Alder St Ste 500)
Sponsored by: Jive Software

Jive Software

Jive Software is located on Alder near 3rd. Parking is available in a nearby parking garage, and it is short walk from the Max / Bus (directions to Jive Software).

If you plan to attend, please RSVP on the Portland BarCamp Meetup wiki (RSVP required):

The meetup will be very informal and similar in format to previous meetings. We’ll do a few introductions, talk for a few minutes about organizing the BarCamp, and then see where the discussion goes.

If you would like to receive notifications about any last minute changes, future meetups, and other PortlandBarCamp communications, please join our Google Group to receive email announcements.

Google Groups

Subscribe to BarCampPortland
Email:Browse Archives at groups.google.com

 

 

We have also created a BarCamp Portland Google Calendar for upcoming events and posted the event to Upcoming.org.We are also trying to gain support for a real BarCamp event in Portland. We will start the planning process when we get enough people signed up on the Wiki, so please add yourself to the wiki if you want to attend a Portland BarCamp event!