Ignite Portland 2 Rocked the Bagdad

February 6, 2008 Dawn

Wow! We had 750 people show up for Ignite Portland 2 at the Bagdad Theater last night. This is about 150 people more than the 600 or so who RSVP’ed on Upcoming. We were amazed and thrilled with the response.

We had some incredible presentations. We’re posting them as they get uploaded on the Ignite Portland site. I also had really interesting conversations with people, and I personally had a great time.

We also had some interesting challenges mostly associated with having way more people than anticipated. We even gave up on having people register in order to just get people in the door. Despite the challenges, people seemed to enjoy themselves.

There were so many great volunteers who helped make Ignite Portland 2 a success; we could never have pulled it off without their help. The sponsors also made this possible by providing the funds required to buy food, the use of the Bagdad Theater, insurance, etc. A huge thank you to everyone who helped, sponsored, took pictures / video, and more to make this event so much fun to attend.

Rick has (as usual) done an amazing job of summarizing the blog coverage of the event on Silicon Florist, so please visit his page to hear what other people are saying about the event.

If you attended Ignite Portland 2, please visit the Ignite Portland blog post “What did *you* think of Ignite Portland“. Drop your thoughts in the comments to let us know what you like and areas where we could make Ignite Portland 3 even better.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

barcampportland

BarCampPortland: May 2, 3, and 4

February 2, 2008 Dawn

OK, I think we’ve settled on a date and location for BarCampPortland 2, Portland’s second annual BarCamp event. It will be held at CubeSpace on May 2, 3, and 4.

At this point, we are in the initial planning stages, so you can expect many more details to trickle out over the next couple of months.

What can you do now?

RSVP for the event on Upcoming; edit the BarCampPortland wiki and add yourself to the “Campers” section to help us learn more about you
Sponsor! These events can’t be successful without our sponsors. Contact me if you would like to sponsor a portion of the event.
Join our Mailing List: Sign up for our Google Group to get email announcements about future meetups and events.
Tell your friends: Don’t forget to use the BarCampPortland tag when blogging, posting pictures, etc.

What is BarCampPortland?

BarCampPortland is an unconference for the Portland tech community, produced BY the Portland tech community. Interesting topics, cool people, great networking opportunities, wifi, and more! Building an active tech community in Portland, Oregon.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. You never quite know what to expect at BarCamp. When you arrive on Friday, there will be an agenda framework (times / rooms), but the content for the sessions will be decided by the participants.

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shared links

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

January 30, 2008 Dawn

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:

barcamp

Beaver BarCamp in Corvallis on March 1

January 28, 2008 Dawn

Don’t miss BeaverBarCamp in Corvallis, Oregon (about 85 miles south of Portland) on March 1st. It will be held at Oregon State University in the Kelly Engineering Center. There are a bunch of really smart, geeky people in Corvallis, and I am looking forward to attending!

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blogging

Finally, A Fast Wonder Redesign

January 26, 2008 Dawn

Ahhhh, I have finally finished my redesign of Fast Wonder. Same logo, but with a different look and feel.

Have a look, let me know what you think, and be sure to let me know if you see anything wonky.

Special thanks to:

Todd Kenefsky for sitting through many rounds of eye exam type feedback of the “which is better: this or that” variety as I tested various colors, sizes, and shapes.
Justin Kistner for convincing me that K2 rocks, providing various bits of advice, and letting me steal his rounded corner graphic 🙂

As a part of the redesign, I’ve also obsoleted fastwonder.com for major pages and moved them into WordPress to make template changes easier. I still use that site for presentations, data files, or other stuff not requiring stylesheets. The what I’m reading and about Fast Wonder pages fall into this category.

community, ignite, ignite portland, legion of tech, news, portland

Ignite Portland Featured in the Oregonian!

January 26, 2008 Dawn

w00t! We made the front page of the living section in the Oregonian with a really nice write-up about Ignite Portland. You have to buy the Saturday paper edition to get the full write-up. I’m curious what this will do for RSVPs?

Thanks to Scott Kveton for the pics:

Update 1/26/08 9:10am PST:

You can now find the Ignite Portland write up online, too (minus the pictures). Thanks to @kveton & @mfriesen via twitter for the link.

Join Us for the First Lunch 2.0 in Portland!

January 25, 2008 Dawn

I hope to see everyone at the first Lunch 2.0 held in Portland! Lunch 2.0 is a an excuse to eat lunch with other people (instead of at our desks) and to meet other interesting technology types around Portland. If you have never heard of Lunch 2.0 and want to learn more, you can visit the main Lunch 2.0 site.

You can get all of the details and RSVP on Upcoming for the Portland Lunch 2.0.

The Details:

Wednesday, February 27, 2008
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
AboutUs.org
107 SE Washington Street, Suite 520
Portland, Oregon 97214

A huge thank you to Jake Kuramoto for reminding us that we needed to do one of these in Portland and then for working with AboutUs to actually make it happen!

ignite, ignite realtime

How XMPP (Jabber) Can Do So Much More Than IM

January 24, 2008 Dawn

Matt Tucker (XMPP guru at Jive, one of the XMPP Standards Foundation members involved in setting the standards for XMPP, and my boss 🙂 ) has been spending a lot of time thinking about how the technology industry can benefit from XMPP beyond just as an instant messaging protocol. XMPP is the protocol used by Google’s GTalk IM and most recently AOL has been experimenting with XMPP. Matt’s post on Jive Talks today about how XMPP is the future for cloud services starts to outline some of his thoughts about how XMPP can be used in many other areas:

There’s a new firestorm brewing in web services architectures. Cloud services are being talked up as a fundamental shift in web architecture that promises to move us from interconnected silos to a collaborative network of services whose sum is greater than its parts. The problem is that the protocols powering current cloud services; SOAP and a few other assorted HTTP-based protocols are all one way information exchanges. Therefore cloud services aren’t real-time, won’t scale, and often can’t clear the firewall. So, it’s time we blow up those barriers and come to Jesus about the protocol that will fuel the SaaS models of tomorrow–that solution is XMPP (also called Jabber) . Never heard of it? In just a couple of years Google, Apple, AOL, IBM, Livejournal and Jive have all jumped on board.

…

Fixing the polling and scaling problems with XMPP as Tivo has done is compelling, but the built-in presence functionality also offers tantalizing possibilities. Presence includes basic availability information, but is extensible and can also include things like geo-location. Imagine cloud services taking different actions based on where the client is connecting from.

More people, us included, will make the shift to XMPP, which will provide the missing evidence to create momentum toward a tipping point. In fact, I’m happy to announce that Clearspace 2.0 will include a feature that’s powered by an XMPP-based cloud service. We’ll be publishing a series of blog entries in the near future to discuss how we built it.

Quoted from Jive Talks

I think it is about time we moved beyond the old model of polling and into new, more efficient paradigms. As we come to expect real time, always available tools on the web, we should be thinking about using real time collaboration technologies (like XMPP).

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Fast Wonder

Ignite Portland 2 Rocked the Bagdad

BarCampPortland: May 2, 3, and 4

Recent Links on Ma.gnolia

BarCampTexas – Awesome Photo Shoot

Ignite Portland :: The Oregonian – Special Coverage – OregonLive.com

SproutBuilder: You’ve Got to See This Drag and Drop Widget Maker – ReadWriteWeb

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How to Successfully Moderate a Conference Panel, A Comprehensive Guide

The DataPortability Report: January 2008 – DataPortability.Action.Evangelism | Google Groups

How to Develop a Community Strategy – Online Community Report

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

Beaver BarCamp in Corvallis on March 1

Finally, A Fast Wonder Redesign

Ignite Portland Featured in the Oregonian!

Recent Links on Ma.gnolia

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Doc Searls Weblog · When social media are neither

Viral + Monetizable = StartUp Magic Quadrant – ReadWriteWeb

Microsoft to join DataPortability – Where’s the beef? « Paying Attention

Desperately Seeking Better Collaboration Tools – GigaOM

Booksthatmakeyoudumb

Jive Talks: XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services

Open source, research, and other stuff I'm interested in posting.