B. Mann Consulting

Well, I'm just getting home from a great night out. We polished off DemoCampVancouver03 to -- I think! -- great success.

Our second one was moved to the Irish Heather across the street, and while it was still fun and had good presentations, it's just not the same vibe as doing it at WorkSpace. Thanks again to Bill, Dane, and the crew for letting us host there.

We shook up the mix a little tonight by adding battle decks: "secret" slide decks that two volunteers have to "pitch" to the crowd, and go head to head to see who can put together the best spiel to the audience. Thanks to Megan, Kris, and Roland for pulling this off, as well as John from HandiMobility and Michael Fergusson from Kinzin / Are You Normal? for being our first contestants.

The pitches and presenters were really hard to choose from: we keep getting more people out and more great ideas. I'm not going to go into massive detail other than to point to DemoCamp Vancouver's official live blogger, Miss 604, as well as my friend Graham, who had good comments / feedback for the presenters.

Yes, I'm missing a ton of links in this post. It's getting late, so I wanted to get this up for starters. Thanks to all for attending and participating -- it was amazing to hear about all the other upcoming events. There really is a lot happening in Vancouver, and events like this just help to highlight that.

A late meeting I had last night ended early and I was at loose ends downtown, so I ended up swinging by the Third Tuesday event, since Rob Lewis' post at the TechVibes blog reminded me that there were a couple of events going on mid week.

Tonight (Wednesday) is the nPost Entrepreneur Meetup*. I'm not too sure about nPost. I mean, it's great to have more people highlight and promote tech in Vancouver, but there is such a thing as too many different events and focus at some point... The focus for nPost seems to be startups, and highlighting the people and companies in cities where they have events. Rob and the gang at TechVibes are sponsoring, so I'm sure they'll do a good job of guiding them into the Vancouver scene. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it, I've got the Granville Island Night Photowalk to attend.

Back to discussing the Third Tuesday event...this was a sort of "kick off" event, so there was no speaker or discussion, just mingling at the Soho Cafe in Yaletown. I think there were as many as 30 people through out the course of the evening. I ended up mind melding with Rob Lewis as we talked about the rebirth of TechVibes.com and tech / events in Vancouver in general. Soon the martini-wielding Jenn Lowther** from Invoke Media and Mike***, a Comp Sci / Cognitive Science student from UBC, joined us bad kids by the bar.

One of the things that we discussed is "where to post events?". Third Tuesday itself is the perfect example for this. Rob posted about it on the TechVibes blog, and linked to the listing he created on TechVibes.com. That, in turn, linked to the Meetup.com page. On the Meetup page, we find that a CollectiveX group has been created. I created an Upcoming entry for Third Tuesday, but I actually originally found out about it through the Facebook group.

Yeah. That *is* ridiculous in case you were wondering. I won't go through this time and analyze the usefulness of each of those listings, but as two data points, I believe Mike and Jenn both found out about the event through Meetup.com. Oh, and why did I create an Upcoming.org entry? Because there is a widget for Facebook, so posting to Upcoming automatically gets it into Facebook. I just did the same thing for the Granville Island Night Photowalk -- the upcoming entry can be a public Internet URL, but it shows up inside the walled garden of Facebook as well.

The ideal event listing platform would allow you to do two things:

1. aggregate event listings from all platforms in a management queue
2. publish those events you want to talk about / promote / etc. with a local permalink, which in turn would all you to cross post to those platforms that don't yet have a listing

For bonus points, aggregate back all the media that gets created to your permalinked event entry. Merging attendee listings might be fun to try and tackle, but approaching impossible until we get closer to the whole portable social network concept.

In any case, thanks to the organizers of Third Tuesday. I'm looking forward to a more structured 2nd event with a speaker. Just let me know where to look for event announcements :P

This was originally part of my BarCamp Vancouver 2007 wrap up post, but that turned into a monster and this is really about what's next.

So, you're still flying high on the good vibes from BarCamp Vancouver, and you're trying to figure out "What next?". Some things to watch for...

A DemoCamp Vancouver event some time in mid September. Need to spend some time talking to Rob Lewis / TechVibes about helping out with organizing these...I'm trying to shed as many organizing roles as I can, while still promoting / attending / etc. I love all this stuff, but it don't pay the bills...

Also on the plate....when are we going to do a Startup Weekend (once again, nod to TechVibes for kicking off discussion)? Late October, maybe right after a sort of "organizing" DemoCamp Vancouver on the Thursday before? This may ideally be the kickoff for a new take on the Innovation Commons that I hinted at in my other post.

Jenny Yang organized another get together over beer tonight – Wednesday, Nov. 29th – at Steamworks at 5pm (entry on upcoming.org).

See a previous post on how this came to be, which also talked about the potential for a Demo Camp Vancouver. Follow that link and you'll see that Megan Cole has now picked up that torch and is going to kick off a first Demo Camp in the new year.

It's snowy and cold outside, and while you might not want to venture outside, you've probably been huddling indoors for days now. Come hoist a beverage with us down at Steamworks instead...