Had a great breakfast at the Great George Hotel. You sit in armchairs and sofas in the lobby and have little tray tables in front of them. Standard "continental" breakfast - toast, yogurt, and some hot quiches.

As I sat down, I walked into the middle of a discussion by two women about different types of careers that you can "go to school for", and pick directly (vs. ending up in a job/career through circumstance). They talked about engineering and becoming a lawyer and mentioned computer science, but then also talked about how artists and musicians often end up in computer science.

Turns out they were visiting as part of a group getaway from Silicon Valley. Mainly for golfing, but they were part of the "non golfing" spouses. I told them about some of the speaking I would be doing while I was here, and quizzed them a bit about Yelp and so on.

I'm going to try and keep a few short notes in my asides section on this trip to PEI.

This was my first "red eye" traveling in North America. That is, I intentionally chose an overnight flight as opposed to Europe, where you're usually losing a day in some way because of the time change.

I'm going to be heading to PEI for the week of July 19th.

I'll be speaking to local small businesses at the Charlottetown Chamber of Commerce. My working title and summary are as follows:

The Web, Open Source & Your Business: Leveraging digital to meet your business goals

We are in the middle of the hype cycle of social media -- everyone is talking about tools from Facebook to Twitter. While these can potentially help with marketing, the average widget manufacturer that sells to other businesses has trouble understanding what they mean to their business. Which tools are important? Which aren't?

Local communities, including their business ecosystem, need to work together to use digital tools and build knowledge worker economies through sharing, education, and experimentation.

Open source and related concepts like Creative Commons licensing for content and open data can help with this.

We'll explore some digital tools, and discuss which ones can help meet your business goals.

Update: this talk has now been scheduled with the Charlottetown Chamber of Commerce for Friday morning at 8am (also here on Plancast)

I'll also be addressing the UPEI community, where the focus will be more on my Drupal community experiences, open source, and innovation. The Islandora team have built a digital repository stack that includes Drupal on the front end for web integration. This will also build on my talk at the ACCT Canada 2009 conference.

I know (through the Internet) lots of great digital thinkers in the area like Rob Paterson, Peter Rukavina, the team at Silver Orange, and I recently met Dave Cormier at this year's Northern Voice. During my time, I hope at the very least to organize a geek dinner, if not a half day unconference to meet with these folks and others in person. I'm still finalizing my schedule, but it looks like Saturday, July 24th would be a completely open day. 

Perhaps PEI ex-pats Will Pate and Daniel Burkha would be interested in coordinating trip timing to join in?

In any case, if you're interested in meeting up while I'm in PEI, leave a comment below or track the PEI Unconference on Plancast.

I'll be at the press announcement tomorrow where the BC Apps for Climate Change contest is announced. From the invite:

Join Minister of State for Climate Action John Yap to see how the Province is challenging the software community to find new ways to tackle climate change using the world of online and mobile apps.

David Eaves has some more background information available.

Interestingly, Microsoft is also running an apps contest as part of their "For the Web" FTW coding competition. For that contest, the terms and conditions include requirements to host on some form of Windows or Azure hosting, but they are also trying to push some open government data.

I have hopes that the province contest uses some standard app contest platform (the one I've seen recently is ChallengePost), but somehow I doubt it.

I'll be posting updates as I get them. Not sure if I'll be able to ask questions, but leave comments if there is anything particular you're interested in and I'll see what info I can get.

Some of you may have heard that Twitter was down the week before last. This kicked out all sorts of thinking and discussion that, perhaps, one company shouldn't be a single point of failure.

The other item that has been coming up again and again is a request that the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society run a "social network" of some kind. People really enjoy Launch Party and other events, and have found them a great place to network.

More specifically, running Co-Founder Speed Dating, we set up Crowdvine as a mini social network. What we found is that it was heavily used - lots of people used it to check out the backgrounds of other people and it continued to be used after the fact. People who couldn't make it to the event checked in and contacted people, some of which actually resulted in companies being founded.