B. Mann Consulting

First up, I'm going to do the call out of upcoming Vancouver events:

• Wednesday, April 30th (tonight!) is WordPress Camp, put on by the folks at Tazzu - I've got Dad night every other Wednesday so I won't be making it this time. Maybe someone should set up a Vancouver WordPress Users Group and do this regularly? VanWUG!
• May 9th and 10th is DrupalCamp Vancouver - I'll be talking about install profiles and likely a "getting started with Drupal" talk where I go through all the core modules; more on this in a full post
• early June date TBD DemoCampVancouver07 - back to the "regular" format of 30 second pitches and voting on stage for full talks; maybe we'll do this right after the F&F event

Check Miss 604 for another recent event round up.

In general, I'll mostly be doing full descriptions of events that I'm hosting / help organize around startups will be over at the Bootup Labs blog. Coming soon there is a Vancouver Founders and Funders in June after the Toronto event.

OK, on to the topic of "one calendar". Or rather, a consolidated calendar. There really are a lot of events going on in Vancouver, and it's hard to schedule new ones, it's hard to get a central overview of them, and it's hard / annoying to cross post Upcoming / Facebook / wikis / etc. Several people coming to DemoCampVancouver have said something along the lines of "I'm new in town, how do I find out about more events". Answers like "read these 10 peoples' blogs isn't really a solution.

I had lunch with Rob Lewis from TechVibes the other week. TechVibes continues to work on re-vamping their site (they'll be going through a major re-tooling over the summer) and we came around to the subject of events.

TechVibes has an events calendar, but it's painful. Yeah, they know it :P We talked about adding value there, specifically getting the community involved and providing something of value that the wider community could get involved with and rally around (e.g. not a TechVibes direct "property" per se).

I came up with two concepts.

One is for TechVibes to enable cross posting from TechVibes to Upcoming and other sites (Facebook? can anything post an event to Facebook using the API?). Post in one spot, get cross posting goodness "for free", which sounds like a good reason to post to TechVibes for those of us organizing and promoting events.

In general, I'm a fan of Upcoming. As Brendon said, it's great to use in San Francisco, since it's got full coverage of everything from tech events to arts. Here in Vancouver, coverage is a little spotty. I try and enter everything there because it is on the public web with a permalink (as opposed to Facebook...).

The second concept is around TechCouver. Buzz Bishop is leading the media charge to make this another Vancouver nickname - and that's great. So let's make TechCouver a local aggregator of tech-related blog posts and events.

The map is great as well, and we could use both. Basically, have tech companies and bloggers enter a listing for themselves including an RSS feed. We aggregate all the feeds, and run our own TechMeme for Vancouver. Well, minus the secret algorithm -- I'd like to do voting so we can see "best of" posts as well as the "river of news" of recent stuff.

So, one central spot for tech related postings and events, one central spot we can direct people to, to find out what's happening in TechCouver.

What do you think? Is this interesting? Useful to you? Would you visit it? Would you subscribe to it and/or use the OPML file it would generate? Let's use this TechCouver wiki page to discuss features and such, or comment here.

Have I mentioned that most of these startup / tech events I'm posting full details on at the Bootup Labs blog? For now, you'll have to suffer the cross posting:

• April 3rd: DemoCampVictoria01, with Mark Lise posting a buzz summary on his blog -- anyone else heading over to Victoria for this?
• April 10th: DemoCampVancouver06, a full posting including speaker details over on BUL
• April 14th - 15th: Open Web Vancouver, a great new event put on mainly by the Vancouver PHP crew that is expanding to cover the entire "open" web.

A bit of an embarrassment of riches, really. We've got lots of great tech related events happening here in Vancouver, and more to come.

Update: oh, yeah, and of course Bridging Media is this coming weekend, March 29th, but I think they may already be full (I'm speaking).

Having just come back from the Founders and Funders Dinner in Toronto, it's time to get ready for the big Launch Party Vancouver 3 event this Friday. Maura and crew have pulled this together in record time, and it looks like Sun is going to be doing a big kickoff. What with the purchase of MySQL and supporting local tech communities like this, I'm getting more and more interested in looking closely at Sun.

Then, in 2 weeks time, we're doing DemoCamp Vancouver 05. I'll get the Facebook event sent out today, so watch for that. We need both battledeck submissions and people to demo...fill out the wiki or get in touch.

Then it's Web Directions North next week, which I'll be speaking at.

Whew! 2008 events are off with a bang. Here's some other stuff I'm tracking -- in no way complete or comprehensive.

• Third Tuesday Vancouver is up on January 29th, starring Brian Oberkirch
• the inaugural NetSquared Net Tuesday on February 5th
• the second Ajax and Beer that krazy koder Brian Leroux is putting on February 6th (yes, that is going to be one crazy week)
• the wonderful Cinci Csere is pulling together CaseCampVancouver3 -- an unconference for marketers (aka "case studies") on February 20th
• don't forget! Northern Voice 2008 is coming at the end of February...I am *so* looking forward to this...
• Duane is thinking we should do a Startup Weekend in Vancouver -- he's thinking early April right now

I'll likely come back and update that event list in a bit...

aka the "I am so far behind that I even had to steal the title of this post from Megan"

I was joking with Meg that I was just going to cut and paste her entire blog post. It's not that far off :P We're heading into Christmas break time, but still lots and lots of stuff on the go, and good things right in the New Year.

In just 9 days, DemoCampVancouver04 takes place at the usual location - WorkSpace.

We've now grown to the point where any of the local watering holes or eating establishments in Gastown have trouble housing the hordes when we leave at the end of the evening, so we've arranged a set of sponsors to pay for some drinks and appetizers at Flux Bistro, just down the road along Water Street.

I'd like to thank Communicate.com, TechVibes, and Peer1 for sponsoring this post-DemoCamp gathering. At only our 4th event, we're already reaching out for sponsorship. In contrast, check out David Crow's update on the 2 year anniversary of DemoCampToronto -- the space alone is $2000 per event! I can only hope we can continue growing our community over the next 18 months as they have in Toronto.

I'm really looking forward to more BattleDecks (well....along with a great set of people, ideas, and companies to present!). Please do spread the word to have people attend -- especially if they haven't attended an "unconference" style event before or are outside the tech industry: connect the tribes!

Add this event on Upcoming and on Facebook.

Next Thursday, September 13th would be slightly less than 6 weeks after BarCamp Vancouver...but would keep things rolling.

What say you? Should we go ahead and roll with something ad hoc next week, or wait until October 4th? Leave a comment! Make a blog post! Suggest a topic/speaker/demo!

Update: Oct. 4th it is, check Facebook for the event listing that just got sent out, and I've just copy/pasted the wiki page: DemoCampVancouver03. Coming up right before that is Launch Party -- but I'll do a longer post on that as I get more info on it.

We're just under 2 weeks away from the second DemoCampVancouver event on July 5th. There is an event on Facebook, and you may also list yourself on the wiki, especially if you want to start socializing an idea you want to demo. The guys from EQO would like to demo their new mobile client – add yourself to the list!

Remember we are changing the format slightly, based on feedback. Everyone that comes with a demo idea will be given a 30 second pitch time at the beginning, then we'll have all the attendees vote, and the top four demo ideas will then each get 6 minutes.

I'm going to invite a bunch of extra people to stack the deck for my pick: a talk on what cohousing is, along with details of the Windsong cohousing community in Langley. 

Why yes, I am continuing the tradition of not-real-blogging-its-just-about-event-posting :P

So, the first DemoCampVancouver01, held at WorkSpace, is over. And no blog post ahead of time from me!

But that, in part, is what this post is about.

See, I procrastinated making a post. I used a bunch of channels to get the word out about this event. I added some subtle links in earlier posts to this blog, I made an entry on Upcoming.org, we made a mailing list, and then....and then I decided to experiment with Facebook.

I created a DemoCampVancouver group, and I made an event posting, and I invited all my friends. And Facebook has this built in ability to pass on these type of postings/notifications, and it spread even further. As of today, there are almost 100 members in the Facebook group.

So, Facebook works. It helped that WorkSpace promoted the event "live" to all its members, who are naturally an entrepreneurial group of people. But...well, even with the talk of Facebook as platform, it's inherently closed nature, it's non-participation in the open web...bugs me.

Isn't this why I'm working on identity? So we can build Facebook in a distributed matter, everywhere?

...but I digress. The evening was great, we had about 50 people out, way more interest in presenting that there was time for, and a really engaged/interesting/awesome group of people. Look to the various channels of the Internet universe for more info, check out the DemoCampVancouver tag, and we'll update the wiki with more information. Thanks to all for coming out, tell all your many tribes about this, and let's get prepped for some Powerpoint Karaoke for next time...

SuperHappyDevHouse - Vancouver Edition
Originally uploaded by kk+.

SHDH is coming to Vancouver...this Friday, at the Bryght offices, 1PM to 1AM. Upcoming that, bi-atch!

OK, OK -- there's a wiki page with more info on it, too. BBQ, Beer, XBox (somebody want to bring a Wii), coding, etc. etc. Maybe art? Whatever, we've got 12 hours, let's see what happens....

In other events:

• Vancouver PHP monthly event is is PHP, remote XUL, and jQuery this Thursday, also at Bryght's offices
  
• here's a DemoCampVancouver early access notification -- May 24th at Work Space!

Wasn't that a fun title? Not quite correct, of course -- but Jenny Yang who works at the Business Development Bank of Canada aka BDC did end up paying for beer at the Yaletown Brewery this afternoon. Thanks, Jenny! Other attendees were David Gratton, Michael Cole, and Sanja Khanna.

Now that I've got your attention, what am I talking about? Well, after Bryan and Stephanie Rieger of Yiibu left Vancouver (again!) to head back to Thailand, a bunch of people felt that the grassroots nature of Mobile Monday in Vancouver aka MoMoVan kind of went away. An email discussion about potentially organizing some more grass roots events in Vancouver led to this first meeting tonight.

I actually was filling in for Roland (off in Rotterdam), who's the real mobile evangelist around. As it turns out, the discussion turned to a much broader theme than just mobile. Maybe something like a DemoCamp -- regular presentations in Vancouver that bring together business, technical, academia, and content folks. Maybe this

DemoCamp Toronto is a great example, although I do think it is quite tech centric (I could be wrong). We've recently had BarCamp Vancouver (tech/entrepreneur/++), Case Camp (marketing) and Art Camp (content / media). What with great music and movie talent here in the city, plus excellent tech roots, this kind of cross disciplinary event might be just thing.

So...what's the stumbling block? When do we do the first event? Who do we invite? Well, much like the Innovation Commons, there is only so much time in the day when you're also running a business. And...what's the purpose of this thing? Is it "just another DemoCamp"? How do we attract cross disciplinary folks?

As a next step, the attendees decided on homework -- writing up a paragraph stating:

• what you would want out of such an event or what would be your interest, and how you would describe what this event should be or do?
• drivers and blockers: what drivers are there for doing such an event in Vancouver? are there any blockers?
• what is your definition of success of such an event? (e.g. number of attendees, more companies started in Vancouver, etc.) 

Rather than just for the attendees at this meeting, I'm giving this homework to everyone. Put your answer on the DemoCampVancouver page or on your blog and add a link on that page.

Even better...someone interested in organizing this? Go for it!