B. Mann Consulting

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.

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! 

I had lunch the other day with Aaron Gladders from 2Paths. He bumped into me when we were doing a final walkthrough of our new 1 Alexander offices, and recognized me from the picture here on my blog.

2Paths is a company filled with biologists turned programmers. They started out as a PHP shop, but since they provide full ongoing 24/7 support, hosting, and ongoing maintenance to most of their customers, they found that straight PHP code had a tendency to get very spaghetti-like. They switched to doing Java development and have been building expertise. Aaron confidently says that 2Paths is likely the best lightweight Java web application developer in Vancouver.

In fact, Aaron says they started to look at Ruby on Rails as it began to gain hype -- perhaps they would use it for prototyping. But they weren't happy with some aspects of it, although in favour of many of its lightweight aspects. So, they looked around for a Rails-like framework for Java. Ultimately, they rejected existing solutions for a number of architectural reasons and ended up creating their own. I'll leave it up to 2Paths to talk about its cool factor -- they'll be open sourcing it and releasing it to the world sometime real soon now (there might be a presentation at BarCamp Vancouver about it).

Congrats to Avi and Andrew for getting funded. I'm saying congrats to Vancouver's innovation with this post as well, and it's great to see that local Vancouver VC firm Ventures West did this deal.

Paul Kedrosky points to Om's scoop, and calls DabbleDB the first Enterprise 2.0 company. I suspect Paul's position at VenturesWest had a thing or two with making this deal happen.

I planned to post on this tomorrow, but I see the news is already breaking, and Om has the scoop: the venture firm Ventures West in Vancouver has closed a Series A financing round of Dabble DB. He has it mostly right, including the huge opportunity for Andrew Catton's and Avi Bryant's startup. Let's call this the first truly "Enterprise 2.0" company.

One small correction/comment: The investment size is only Om's guess, and the actual dollars will not be announced -- whether larger or smaller. 

Can the local venture and innovation communities continue to churn out winners? I hope so :P

This post was jogged by two things. One was seeing the post by Harold Jarche, who is moving ahead with putting together a Commons as well. The second was experiencing the fantastic space of the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto (thanks, Philip for getting us this space for DrupalCamp).

So, the Innovation Commons concept has to get built. Bill's Workspace shared office concept is a great solution as a business. But, the Innovation Commons needs to be a mix of businesses, non profits, and perhaps even public-private funding sources. I think the Centre for Social Innovation is a good model, but actually less of a focus on exclusively non-profit businesses. Creative, tech, non profit.

On to action items.

The SFU students that worked on an Innovation Commons business model did produce some good, lengthy documents, Excel spreadsheets, and presentations which really need to be posted in friendly non-proprietary formats and distributed under a Creative Commons license. Nik, I'm looking at you here.

The New Enterprise Development team from UBC is nearing the end of their class, and are about to do a final presentation. They're asking for people to submit video clips explaining why they want something like the Innovation Commons to exist. Of course, my interest is seeing this actually happen here in Vancouver, but I think the model would work well in any city in the world: throw a bunch of smart, independent, motivated people together in one space and let collaboration and innovation blossom. Hmmm...too schmalzy? Perhaps, but tell us why you want something like this in your own city -- the students are going to put together a video montage. Time is short: their presentation is on Thursday morning, so your post pretty much needs to be up by tomorrow. A podcast would probably work, too.

-- I'll be updating this post later with my own video clip --

Update: Aargh. The video is sitting at home in draft mode. I'm uploading a video filled with a high number of "ums" per minute that I took with my cameraphone just now. Here's the 3gp file.

The New Enterprise Development team have done a great job in designing a survey to gather some more information for the Vancouver Innovation Commons location. Please head over to the wiki and take the survey.

The team has also put together some preliminary numbers on what is needed to make this a reality, but there are definitely some more rounds of feedback needed. I can report that I had a great meeting the other day with Charles Holmes of SFU's Learning Strategies group, who is involved in too many cool local projects to grasp -- everything from a project with the Dalai Lama to an upcoming "30 Days of Sustainability" in March. I bring it up because especially the latter project, which focuses on sustainability, could certainly see some tie-ins to potential evolutions of the Innovation Commons. At the very least, I hope that Vancouver's tech/entreprenuer community can be a part of the event here in Vancouver.

Probably another get together in a couple of weeks to share findings and brainstorm some next steps.

The second Innovation Commons meeting is tonight, Wednesday, October 26th, at 6:30pm, at Take 5 Cafe.

Bill MacEwen is going to present the work he's done over the past couple of months to develop a business oriented around the same concept, which he calls "WorkSpace".

We can kick around some of the names and maybe take a straw poll on it, get a list of services that people would potentially be interested in, and then start working on a survey that can be posted for others to fill out. As always, add other ideas to the wiki -- hope to see you tonight.

Here's an iCal feed if you want to subscribe to these events, BTW. 

[Cross-posted from the wiki]

Well, things are well and truly moving. I didn't get around to posting a wrap up of the October 5th meeting -- Roland made a post and also took a bunch of pictures on Flickr -- just check the innovation commons tag.

Suffice it to say, we had about 20 plus people show up, Take 5 stayed open late to let us hang out, and there was a great discussion on what people wanted out of this here in Vancouver. The main take away: let's do this thing, and what can we do to make it happen.

The first meeting about building a local, physical space for entreprenuers, as part of the Innovation Commons (see my previous post announcing this, as well as check out the wiki) takes place on Wednesday, October 5, 2005, at Take 5 Cafe space that is being donated after hours by the owner, Dean Punzo.

There is already an impressive list of supporters -- please add your name even if you can't make it to Wednesday's meeting.

We'll be brainstorming on how to move this project forward, and the New Enterprise Development team will ask for feedback on a survey, as well as help in promoting the survey.

Event details:

• on the wiki
• at Upcoming.org

Subscribe to future Innovation Commons events via the wiki's iCal: