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.

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.

Last night saw the first Launch Party event here in Vancouver (background write up by Rob Lewis of TechVibes here). Maura Rodgers, Danny Robinson, and Dimitri Sirota joined forces to put on what I can best summarize as being a social gathering for Vancouver's tech community, from entrepreneurs to marketers to interested potential investors.

I've come to know Maura and Danny quite well. They've come back up from the Valley and have now settled back here in Vancouver, with a commitment to make Vancouver's tech community -- including a healthy ecosystem of investment -- really shine. Conveniently, that's completely in line with what I want to accomplish as well. I quizzed Maura ahead of time to compare/contrast Launch Party with DemoCampVancouver. Here's what she had to say:

Moving here from the Valley, where there is no shortage of fun events for people to attend, I thought an event like LP for entrepreneurs, techies, marketers was missing here. There are lots of great events like democamp, barcamp, VEF, and they fill a need too. After work, I am just looking for good mingling and want to bring the people together in and around this city, who are sitting on great ideas but not everyone knows about them. Every month, we hope to showcase about 4-5 cool, early stage companies in the city. It will be very informal and fun and give the people, who are not competing in the decibel competition ;), a chance to warm up and be involved.

We have connections to Silicon Valley. We know investors, marketers, companys there and want to make them aware of the Vancouver scene. Our next LP will most likely be in November. I will be collaborating with the people of the very popular event Twiistup of CA, who are interested in the scene up here to put on a bigger, more involved event than our first called Launch Party with a Twiist. We hope to get more people from South of the Border up for that one.

So, there you have it. Launch Party fills a more casual, social role to meet and catch up with what folks are doing. I think the attendees had a good time networking with each other as well as sitting in on demos/pitches on the startups that attended. It was great to see everyone out, meet some new faces, and get to learn more about some of the great companies and products that folks are working on. I wanted to especially send some congrats to Sun, who stepped up as one of the main sponsors. I just got back from DrupalCon Barcelona, where I met Scott Matoon from Sun -- I'm impressed to see Sun stepping up to different communities, from local ones like Launch Party, to global communities like Drupal. Other than that...go Maura Go!

And now that you're all partied out, head on over to WorkSpace next Thursday, October 4th, for DemoCampVancouver03.

(Photo by Roland Tanglao, of Victoria Revay and Dave Olson)

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.