CivicActions

Drupalcon Szeged is one week away. I am glad I am attending, and I am planning on leading a Birds of a Feather (BOF) during the conference. The focus of the BOF is creativity and programming. I want to discuss the weird mix of human behavior and code. Sounds strange I know, so let me describe in more detail.

Usability Principle #1: You can't join the party if you can't find the front door.

Monday night, after using the three-day weekend to re-landscape my front yard and launch my new un-business, I faced the reality that I had to get to San Jose for the NetSquared Mashup Conference at 8am. (The day after a three-day weekend seemed a strange scheduling choice.)

I went to the NetSquared site to find the conference location.

This proved surprisingly difficult, as I couldn't find any link referencing the logistics of the conference. After clicking back and forth through 20 other links featured above the fold, I found it discretely hidden in a side bar labeled "Hot Spot."

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What I didn't realize until later was that the address didn't identify the building number (Cisco has 2 blocks of buidlings with the same general address). None of the the employees I asked in the parking lot had any idea where the "Vineyard Conference Center" was. Should I be looking for grape vines?

Brief Update from NetSquared:

Aaron's del.icio.us links from the conference.

Leveraging Identity on the Web: http://www.identitywoman.net/?p=769

The Future of FreeCycle Cellular Osmosis

Easy-to-build widget apps: http://del.icio.us/pava/widgets

Share your PowerPoint: http://www.slideshare.net

Make easy forms: http://wufoo.com

Forum Hosting: http://www.lefora.com

Community Mapping: http://www.yourmapper.com

Purchasing Power: http://knowmore.org

Favorite Presentation: How to Use Your Community

Photo Credit

When I heard about the Social Tech Training being organized by our friends over at Web Of Change it sounded awesome. As the agenda and speakers came out, my expectations were confirmed.

CivicActions is very proud to announce that we are a Gold Sponsor for the upcoming DrupalCon in Barcelona!

DrupalCon will take place September 19th thru 22nd.

Visit http://barcelona2007.drupalcon.org for more information and to sign-up for DrupalCon.

We look forward to seeing you in Spain!

On Saturday, dozens of grassroots activists and campaigners as well as technologists and bloggers (some people fit all those labels) will be gathering for RootsCampNYC. CivicActions is a sponsor of the unconference and I'll be there to participate.

The New Organizing Institute planted the seed for this, and a series of RootsCamps around the country as a way to capture the experiences of the 2006 election cycle from the perspective of ground troops and local campaign staff.

Just learned of Confabb via TechCrunch

Confabb is a new service launching today that offers a centralized place to find information about all kinds of conferences. The site offers everything from speaker and event reviews to photos of the events after the fact through integration with Flickr. It’s an impressive full service site that could become the go-to spot for at least tech conference attendees and possibly a wider audience.

This is an exciting development, I was just thinking to myself that it is so hard to stay on top of what conferences are happening where and when. It will be interesting to see how folks react to Confabb and if it gains market share outside of teh tech world. Many conferences could use help with their web presence, and if Confabb has nailed it that's great!

This is the latest in my series of "Work From Anywhere" videos. I've been traveling a bunch, and will soon be adding some more videos. The hunt for open wifi is different wherever I go. In this video, I had just finished a training with a client over VOIP on the wifi signal provided by the Hollyhock Retreat Center at the Web Of Change conference.

In mid September nearly the entire CivicActions team will converge in Amsterdam for our fourth Quarterly “off site�. It is an anniversary of sorts, we were in Amsterdam in October of 2005 for our first offsite. As a virtual firm, distributed across the world, we make it a point of coming together on this periodic basis to meet each other, share ideas, get aligned, and do amazing things. (You can see photos from earlier offsites on our Flickr group.)

This year, as last, our retreat is times to coincide with DrupalCon, this time in Brussles. Arthur, Dan and Ethan will be staying on for DrupalCon. CivicActions is a Gold Sponsor of the conference which will play host to many wonderful discussions about nodes, permissions, relationships and other drupalish things. This will be the third DrupalCon that members of our team have participated in.

Kaliya Hamlin pointed me to this article about Mashup Camp (not to be confused with MashPit the Mashup hackathon that Chris Messina envisioned and has been involved with.)

Mashup Camp is an unconference utilizing open space strategies like the law of two feet.

Apparently unconferences are becoming so popular that "Doug Gold and David Berlind, the organizers of Mashup Camp, hope to turn unconferences into a business." Um... I guess. The business will be one the organizes unconferences. Seems a bit strange. I know it does take work to line up sponsors, locations, etc... But one of the things that really makes the unconferences i have been to so great is the "of the people, by the people, for the people" nature of them.