B. Mann Consulting

Well, before I knew it, DrupalCamp Vancouver has snuck up on me. I mean it when I say it snuck up on me: I had pretty much zero to do with organizing it -- massive kudos have to go to Dave Olson, Dale McGladdery, and Ariane K (I know there are others, like the guys from Image X Media and jkparker on kick off party duty and and and...).

DrupalCamp Vancouver is this Friday and Saturday, May 9th and 10th, with a kick off party on Thursday night. As with all Drupal events, it's sold out (how are we ever going to fix this? more training!), and it looks like a great group of people are going to be gathering.

I spent this morning with Dale and Ariane reviewing the session submissions. We have a nice mix of newcomer, developer, and soft topics, as well as 2+ double sessions: one on organic groups, and one on design and theming. I say "2+" because we tried to schedule the talks so they "fit" together nicely -- like the back to back views + arguments segueing into panels 2, or the intro to module development that then continues with forms API advanced development. The sessions are up -- but the presenters are still "in progress" of being contacted.

I'll be doing a talk on install profiles with a couple of co-presenters, and leading a close out session on Drupal 6 and beyond. Frankly, I'm more than a little worried about Drupal 6, while at the same time so looking forward to Drupal 7, testing frameworks, and more RDF. It will be interesting to see how the discussion goes.

There are lots of talks to look forward to (I know lots of people have been asking about an intro to SVN). I've got my eye on the infamous heyrocker -- he's coming up to talk about the gnarly issue of staging Drupal between servers. It would be great if we could pool our solutions and get to more *code* in this area. I think drush is likely the proper building block.

Again, thanks so much to the organizing team that pulled this together: we're lucky to have such a great group of motivated people.

If you are missing DrupalCamp here in Vancouver, the next two I know of are DrupalCamp Toronto May 23rd - 24th and DrupalCamp Seattle June 26th - 27th.

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.

Just as spring is hitting the east coast, Mother Nature decides to play a trick on us here in Vancouver. I heard that this has been the coldest spring since sometime in the 1950s. This morning the snow is on hedges and building roofs, but has essentially all melted from the ground. But still...

To put this in perspective for how wacky the weather has been, last weekend was spent wearing short sleeved shirts, getting a sunburn on my nose, and finding a place to stop for popsicles. Check out my Pitt Lake set on Flickr to see more.

And now some quotes to think about:

James Russell Lowell - "Fate loves the fearless."

Free Will Astrology (Pisces, April 17th, 2008) - "If you don't articulate your conscious desires, your unconscious patterns will come true."

I hope your spring is going well, wherever in the world you are.

Last night I ended up staying at the Strutta offices until the wee hours of the morning, cheering the team on as they worked towards their launch today.

I worked with Jordan Behan to do a fun spoof of Michael Arrington (and yes, Strutta got a TechCrunch posting) -- I did the Fox news guy voice over. The posting from Jordan is, of course, meant to kick off a competition for the best Michael Arrington impression. Personally, I think someone should get out the sock puppets... :P

We actually ended up dragging Kevin Marks back to the Strutta HQ, in town for Open Web Vancouver. It was great catching up with him in his new role as Developer Advocate at Google -- oh, and a kick ass paper airplane folder, so I expect him and his sons to compete in the Strutta best paper airplane round. Kevin, you wanted me to complain about Google's messed up identity system -- I did this last January and some pieces are better, but the big thing is that I can't use any of my Google Apps for Domains accounts to sign into Google Groups. Since I don't want to use my personal Gmail account to be on random mailing list, this seriously hampers me pretty much every single day. Please fix :P

Congrats to the Strutta team, I know you've got some Beta Bug-lets, but looks like people are having a lot of fun. We've been amusing ourselves flipping the little Flash widgets back and forth -- there are lots of nice touches like this all over the site.

P.S. Yes, it's Drupal. And, oh, look it's multi-lingual: I predict many more interesting multi-lingual sites as people focus beyond North America.

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).

I just wrapped up my presentation at the CCI2008. Here's the slideshare for it:

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A much longer post is up at Raincity Studios.

See you all on the other side of the weekend, I'm going completely offline...

I originally blogged about the local dev center last July when I heard that Microsoft was opening it here in Vancouver.

A lot of this Vancouver / Canada startup / tech hub topics I'm now blogging about on the Bootup Labs blog, which you should follow if you're interested in those topics: Bill Gates talks on NPR about the Vancouver development center

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I'm heading over to the Northern Voice 2008 organizer's debrief.

My take on our current attendee split: edu-bloggers, industry veterans coming to connect with their members and/or promote a new social media service, and a large contingent of personal bloggers, as was our original mission. Does this seem accurate to you?

I mention Dave Olson's F*** Stats, Make Art presentation.

Next year is going to be tough (well, it feels that way for *me* who has been overly busy and didn't contribute as much to the pre-organization), but we're now a registered society in BC. What will this let us accomplish? Not sure, but certainly could be interesting. I have some ideas for the 2010 "Olympics" edition of Northern Voice....

A few highlights from posts elsewhere. Yes, I have to figure out a combined feed strategy.

I'm attending the CCI2008 conference here in Vancouver, and did a first post about it on the Raincity Studios blog. I'm speaking on Friday, covering data silos, content sharing, and open source.

Looks like I'll be on BNN tonight, with my first TV appearance representing Bootup Labs. See the BUL blog for the details, 6:45PM EST on cable.

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Rob Lewis from Techvibes and I talk about the Strutta launch. Or at least, the super sekret alpha launch. It's been fun to see the buzz build, and start to see the first initial pieces of the Strutta story come out. I'm looking forward to the whole story being revealed.

Disclaimer: I'm an advisor to Strutta