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Tom Serres bootstrapped Piryx with his partners Naveed Lalani and Brian Upton — launching the company with $1k made while waiting tables 3 years ago as a college sophomore. |
Flash forward to today, and Piryx already been seed funded, and is currently in talks to close their first series A investment round. Although we’d been communicating online for a while, I finally meet Tom for coffee at Blu a few weeks ago. Tom told me the incredible story of Piryx, and agreed to be our co-host for the GeekAustin E-nauguration Party.
Lynn Bender: Tom, tell me about Piryx.
Tom Serres: First off, Piryx is a non-partisan suite of web tools, offered in a self serve environment. Think Google or Facebook, but designed around the political process. The idea is to offer a portal that empowers citizen candidates, political entities, and social activists with a combination of web tools and social media services to affect change in public policy.
Lynn Bender: What are the specific tools?
Tom Serres: The tools are built around our four pillar strategy – the four basic needs of any political entrepreneur.
1) Government Compliance - Every political entity has to be in compliance with law.
2) Fundraising - Every political entity has to generate revenue, just like a business needs to generate revenue to cover expenses.
3) Constituent management - Every political entity has to manage people, just like any business would manage its customers.
4) Virtual Identity Management - Every political entity has to manage the virtual representation of oneself. Aka, Facebook Fan Page, Website CMS, YouTube, Twitter…in this case these virtual outlets are like television channels on a cable network. You have to distribute the appropriate messages to the right networks.
Read the rest of the interview
In the BoomBoom room, GeekAustin fave Dubnautica will be laying down a soundtrack for the evening:
| Later on in the evening, we’ll be joined by Happy Panjoma: |
| and we’ll cap off the evening with Le Ren. Pace yourself on the drinks, and hang around to see them! |
| Le Ren - I Love You Everyday |
I hope you can join us!
Geekaustin 2009 E-nauguration Party
co-hosted by Piryx and the Austin Electronic Music Grid.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009, 6:00pm - ??
Location: Union Park Austin - 612 W. 6th St.
Valet parking will be available.
RSVP at Facebook
With all the uncertainty surrounding the upcoming year, many folks are updating their resumes. Why not get a new head-shot as well? Even if you are not in job seeking mode, you can use it for your LinkedIn profile.
To help you out, crack event/portrait photographer Michael Cummings, of The Creative Space, will be offering free head-shots during the GeekAustin E-nauguration Party. Normally, you would pay for a sitting with Michael. However, E-nauguration Party co-host, Piryx, will be picking up the tab. All you need to do is show up and smile for the camera.
Free Head-Shots by Michael Cummings, courtesy of Piryx
at the Geekaustin 2009 E-nauguration Party
co-hosted by Piryx and the Austin Electronic Music Grid.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009, 6:00pm - ??
Location: Union Park Austin - 612 W. 6th St.
Valet parking will be available.
RSVP at Facebook
For the first time, we’ll have a president who has used a blackberry, a laptop, and is personally conversant in new technology. This is significant. The tools that we, the geeks, have been creating — to help facilitate communication and consensus — are making their way into government. Indeed, MIT’s Technology Review argues that it was the Obama campaign’s use of technology that helped seal the campaign. Following the election, the appearance of change.gov suggests that the incoming administration intends to use social networks not only to secure and retain the office, but also to facilitate the process of governing. Can there be any turning back now?
To celebrate this change, GeekAustin is hosting an E-nauguration Party.
This is not a partisan affair. All you folks who used Twitter, Meetup, Facebook, Myspace, and similar tools to mobilize and communicate with your fellow voters, and to help educate your candidates, this party is for you.
Our co-host for the E-nauguration Party will be hometown startup, Piryx. When I read their corporate philosophy and manifesto, I thought: “These guys would be the perfect co-hosts”. Fortunately, they agreed.
We’ll be announcing more details in the days to come, but for now,
here is the date to put on your calendar.
Geekaustin 2009 E-nauguration Party
co-hosted by Piryx and the Austin Electronic Music Grid.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009, 6:00pm - ??
Location: Union Park Austin - 612 W. 6th St.
Valet parking will be available.
RSVP at Facebook
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When I found out that Product Camp Austin Winter 09 was on the calendar, I immediately sent a note to the organizer, Paul Young, asking for the details. Take the day off for this event. This is going to be a good one. |
Lynn Bender: The first Product Camp Austin was a huge success. You had a good crowd, and folks came away raving about how useful the event was. Given the word of mouth, I expect that you are going to have a bigger crowd for Product Camp Austin Winter 09. Will the venue be larger? Do you anticipate having to cap attendance?
Paul Young: We had a great time with the first ProductCamp. Over 130 people signed up and about 90 came back in June. We do expect a larger crowd for ProductCamp Winter, and are planning on about 150 people from Austin’s marketing and product management community showing up! We were able to work with the University of Texas and get a great venue at the College of Communications, in the TV production studios - we’ll have plenty of room for everyone and don’t expect to have to cap participation.
Lynn: What things did you learn the first event that you will implement or change for PCA 2?
Paul: We learned a lot about the logistics of running a barcamp-like event for marketing people. 99% of the people that came to ProductCamp the first time had never had an experience like we provided, so it was new and fresh for everyone - that meant we made up a lot of what we did on-the-fly. Now we know where we need help in planning, volunteering, marketing, and so on. Thankfully, this time I had a very strong team step up to help with the planning and execution.
The first PCA was spread by word-of-mouth and a few blogs. After seeing how much our ProductCampers used social networking, this time we are heavily promoting on Facebook, Twitter, via our great sponsors, as well as word-of-mouth.
The biggest lesson learned was what worked and what didn’t work for our participants. Because ProductCamp attracts smart, driven people in marketing and product management, there was a strong apetite for discussion and debate over slideware and presentations. So this time we are going to skew the sessions more strongly in favor of encouraging that kind of interaction. Since ProductCamp is completely participant driven, this is a great way for people to step up and be part of the PCA process - and we’ve seen a lot of validation, as of today there are about 80 people registered for PCA Winter with very little marketing.
Lynn: While the session topics at the first Product Camp Austin covered the spectrum of product management, they remained pretty much within the domain of product management. Even the sessions on usability and public relations were PM centric. Did you have to exercise any executive authority to reign the topics in?
Paul: Early on, I made the decision not to influence the sessions offered or chosen. Part of this was pragmatic - we needed sessions - and part of this was dogmatic - the spirit of ProductCamp is bottoms-up, not top-down driven. Product managers also made up the majority of the participants at the first PCA, so they offered sessions relevant to their peers. One suprise was that ProductCamp attracted such a diverse crowd outside of product management - we had marketers, operations, developers, lawyers, consultants, startup generalists, and so on.
I believe that at PCA Winter we will get a more diverse set of sessions catering to a wider audience. ProductCamp is committed to its core of marketing and product management, but we welcome anyone, and anyone is welcome to offer a session. However it is always up to the participants to choose which sessions they attend. For PCA Winter, Colleen Heubaum from Winnow Consulting has stepped up as our “Sessions Leader.” She is focused on recruiting sessions and making them successful. She also has some great ideas we gathered from last time for some new kinds of sessions beyond the presentation/discussion and roundtable formats we used in June.
Lynn:The success of this first event shows that there is a huge demand for product management knowledge. Other than events like these, where can individuals go to specifically learn about product management? Are there degree programs? What did folks do before product camp Austin?
Paul: Product Management is still relatively new as a discipline for most companies. Technology and Biotech have adopted PM the most quickly, and there are vendors who support growing PM and Product Marketing (PMM). One of the oldest is a ProductCamp sponsor, Pragmatic Marketing. They offer an extensive training program for product managers, and have a certification program as well. Austin is also home to the Austin PMM forum, a user group for product management and marketing that helps ProductCamp with publicity and participants. Finally, people who are interested in product management have lots of blog options to read, and several are based in Austin, such as Scott Sehlhorst’s Tyner Blain, Roger Cauvin, and my own Product Beautiful.
Lynn:: Barcamp was loosely based on foocamp, which was a designed to be a small somewhat intimate event.. How closely do you follow the original barcamp model? It seems like many *camp type events are actually a hybrid of a barcamp and a traditional conference? Do you think that there is an upper attendance limit beyond which the barcamp model doesn’t scale?
Paul: The great thing about *camps is that they are very flexible. If you ask 10 people to describe them you’ll probably get 10 different answers. Rather than focus on trying to replicate the exact or “right” experience from barcamp, we’ve tried to create a unique event in ProductCamp that works for our participants. We borrowed heavily from barcamp’s central ideas such as “allow the event to self-organize,” “impose as little structure as possible,” “no ‘attendees’ only ‘participants,’” “discussion and debate = good,” and so on. Some things worked well, other areas we are improving for this round.
I’m honestly not sure what an original barcamper or foocamper would have to say about ProductCamp - they might be horrified that their concept had been adopted/co-opted by the darkside a.k.a. marketing. Or maybe they would think it was cool - either way, 100% of the ProductCampers from the first event said that they got value and would come again in our post-camp survey, so I’m very happy with the direction we’ve chosen.
There may be an upper limit on participants, but we’re nowhere near hitting it in my opinion. Other barcamps have had hundreds or thousands of participants and we’re nowhere near those kinds of numbers. The key will be retaining the spirit of the event, and that means small sessions with good debate, smart people, and relevant topics.
Lynn:: What kind of sponsorship opportunities will you have for PCA2?
Paul: We have several sponsorship options available for ProductCamp. This was one key lesson learned from the first event, we’ve split our levels of sponsorship available to create options at all levels.
When you think about an event with the quality and credibility of ProductCamp, it’s pretty astounding that we’re going to host 150+ people for a day, feed them, give them some goodies, amazing networking, super-relevant topics and discussion, at an event that is free to them - all for less than $10K total. Our sponsors love ProductCamp because everyone who comes does so because they really want to be there. No one participates to check a box or burn up budget - everyone is engaged and excited.
ProductCamp Winter has six sponsors already, and more are welcome. Potential sponsors can contact our budget and sponsorship lead, Bertrand Hazard for more info.
Lynn: What else do GeekAustin readers to know about PCA2?
Paul:: Yes.
* Anyone can register for ProductCamp - and anyone can offer a session.
* ProductCamp isn’t just for Austinites - last time we had participants from San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas as well!
* All the talking points about ProductCamp being an opportunity to teach, learn, and network are true, but the #1 thing I want people to know about PCA is that it is fun. People don’t get out of bed at 8 AM on a Saturday for an optional event that they aren’t excited about. That excitement is infectious and when you come you will be a ProductCamp convert too :)
* I have a story up detailing the ProductCamp experience.
Lynn: Paul, thanks for the time. I’ll be there, but hope to run into you sooner.
Who said this?
a) Steve Ballmer
b) an AISD middle school teacher
(BoingBoing - 12/10/2008) A teacher in Austin sent an angry, accusatory email to a local Linux collective (”HeliOS Project, which builds and provides Linux computers to disadvantaged or ‘exceptionally promising’ students”) accusing them of piracy for distributing the free operating system and excoriating them for encouraging her students to do the same. She threatened to have the group’s organizer investigated by the police, too.
For the full story, see Slashdot (ouch), Boing Boing, the Austinst, and the original post at the HeliOS Project blog.
I was disappointed, but not surprised, when I read the story. I had a similar experience earlier this year when I attempted to donate a truckload of Linux-based computers to a few large charitable organizations who purport to help the less advantaged. After an afternoon of phone calls, the first organization told me that couldn’t accept the free computers without discussing it at their board of directors meeting. I went to the next group on the list. The 2nd organization told me that they were trying to teach useful job skills to their students — and that meant teaching them Windows. While this made sense, their follow up didn’t. They went on to inform me that they didn’t even want the computers for free.
If it weren’t for Linux, Perl, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other free open-source tools, there would be no Geekaustin. Nor would I be able to host the few dozen local websites that I host free of charge. Nor would Daniel and I be able to teach the free database classes downtown, because you can’t have truly free classes without free software.
Expect to see some Linux/open-source initiatives from GeekAustin in 2009.
-Lynn
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For the last few months, during my morning walk, I have been watching Blu emerge at the foot of the 360 Towers. Blu finally opened last weekend. Blu is a beautiful space. In the morning, it is a cafe. In the evenings, it is a lounge. Blu is located at 360 Nueces (corner of 3rd and Nueces). |
This Saturday, GeekAustin be hosting an open house at Blu from 9AM-Noon. Daniel will be on hand, and if Michelle gets back from Paris, we’ll drag her jet-lagged body in as well. If you’re in the neighborhood, please join us for coffee/espresso, or if you’ve been up all night, a Grand Marnier. The bar will be open too. You can rsvp on Facebook.
For more details on blu, visit www.bluaustin.com or the blu Facebook group.
Daniel and I have been busily working on the curricula and materials for the upcoming GeekAustin classes. Tentatively, these are the free classes we will be offering in 2009:
1) MySQL Associate Certification Prep
2) MySQL Administrator Certification Prep
3) Introduction to PL/SQL
4) Basic Unix/Linux for DBAs
5) Intermediate topics in SQL
6) Basic SQL Performance Tuning.
The classes vary from 3-10 sessions. We will be offering each of these free classes only one time in 2009. We are considering offering the basic SQL class one more time right after the beginning of the new year. We will only offer it once on 2009. We limit the class size, and despite the fact that we haven’t yet made a formal announcement, most of the classes are already half full. If you are interested in any of the above classes and would like to get on the list, send me a note at linearb@gmail.com. The free classes are taught downtown on weekday evenings.
We also offer the basic SQL class on-site for local companies. For rates, contact me at lynn.bender@gmail.com.
Jason Cohen, of SmartBear software, recently mentioned to me that Austin Ultimate frisbee was looking for a sponsor for their upcoming winter league, and this led to a larger discussion about techies and frisbee.
I first became aware of the link back in the 90s, when I was managing the computer/tech book store (RIP) at the University Co-op. It was quite common to see students walking in with frisbees, grabbing a couple of books on Perl or TCP/IP, and heading off to lunch. I got a kick out of the look: Jeff Spicoli with flip-flips, frisbee, and……Knuth’s Semi-numerical Algorithms — or something like that. Not wanting to let on that I wasn’t part of this elite club, I never asked: Hey, what’s up with the frisbee?
Although Ultimate Frisbee started in New Jersey, it caught on big in the Valley around the mid 80s. Tandem employees regularly played by the Cupertino Library on their lunchbreak in the mid 1980s. This being Cupertino, the notoriously competitive Apple employees were soon joining in. Because many of these folks worked 12 hour plus days, a two hour lunchbreak for a pick-up game of Ultimate could be considered as physical therapy.
It wasn’t long before the game spread among the tech community. Greer Park in Palo Alto become well known as a good place for a pickup game of Ultimate. Flash forward to 2008, and the sport shows no signs of decline. In fact, if you want to see Google, Apple, and Yahoo employees square off on a field and throw things at one another, visit one of their Ultimate tournaments. It’s not just a West cost thing. The young Harvard engineers from Facebook beat Google their first year. Ouch.
The tradition extends to Austin. Want to meet UT CS Prof Calvin Lin? Don’t try his office hours. Instead, catch him on the field at Texas Ultimate. He’s one of the coaches.
This brings me back to Jason’s suggestion. If you’re looking to meet a bunch of chronically overachieving techies, you might consider being a sponsor for the upcoming Austin Ultimate tournament. It’s going to be way cheaper than buying a round of drinks at the next techie happy hour. The organizer Gary Breaux is really good about promoting the sponsors, both at the top of all-hands meetings and during game days. For details, ping him at breauxgary@aol.com. Don’t wait too long. Austin Winter League begins in less than two weeks.
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For the last few years, I have seen a tremendous growth of interest in User Experience, or as it is more commonly called UX. Unfortunately, there were few opportunities for local UX pros to gather to discuss their craft. Last last week, Tori Breitling, of Launchpad Coworking, announced the formation of a local UX reading group. I suspect that this is going to be the beginning of all kinds of good stuff. |
Lynn Bender: I was excited to see your formation of a local UX book club. Where did you get the idea?
Tori Breitling: i saw Steve Baty from Sydney twitter about forming the uxbookclub, and encouraging other interested folks to start groups in their own area.
Lynn: There seems to be a huge amount of interest in UX in Austin. It this the case everywhere, or in select cities, or..?
Tori: From what i can tell, the UX community is getting more and more connected… i’d attribute a lot of it to the effort of Interaction Design Organization (IXDA.org) (linkedin group).
Lynn: Does IXDA have chapters? I know that there are many Austinites in the IXDA.
Tori: Theoretically, yes. In practice, for Austin, not so much.
Lynn: From the initial response on http://uxbookclub.org/doku.php?id=austin it looks like you will have quite a local group. In fact, I plan on following along. Will you have face to face meetings?
Tori: of course! I was a bit surprised at the response, but i also have noticed that there’s a pent up demand for UX activities in austin. At the few UX events in the last year or so the numbers attending were huge - 60 or more. i really want to see the Austin UX community be more active, and the book club seemed a manageable place to start.
Lynn: I usually think of a book group as comprising 5-15 people. Any ideas yet how to format the group to accommodate the large number of folks who are interested?
Tori: I’ll have to see what happens. I think the numbers in the book club group is indicative of the fact that it’s the only UX activity in Austin being offered. If there were other events, my guess is that the book club numbers would normalize and many would opt for other types of UX events. I am worried about huge groups - and as of yet, don’t have any ideas how to manage it other that splitting up into smaller groups. My plan now is to see how many of those people interested really end up participating.
Lynn: With larger numbers, venue becomes a consideration. Will you be accepting offers of corporate sponsorship to help facilitate the meetings?
Tori: Sure! Actually, I’d love to see some local UX shops like Adaptive get involved, like HUGE in NYC does.
Lynn: Other than the page at uxbookclub.org, is there an online forum/group for the local community? Like a Google group?
Tori: There’s the uxbookclub local page, the uxbookclub Google group, and the Austin UX community Google group.
Lynn: Thanks for the time. I look forward to seeing you at the first meeting.
The 1st meeting of the Austin UX bookclub will be mid-January, exact location and time TBD. For more details, follow these links:
http://uxbookclub.org/doku.php?id=austin
http://groups.google.com/group/austin-ux-book-club
http://groups.google.com/group/austin-ux-community
http://twitter.com/atxuxbookclub
The current GeekAustin free SQL class is about midway to completion. These are the upcoming free classes we are considering: 1) MySQL certification prep class, 2) SQL 102 (advanced joins and subqueries), 3) SQL performance tuning, and 4) Basic Unix/Linux skills. If you are interested in any of the above, send me a note at linearb@gmail.com.
Feels like 2001! Remember the last dip? I do. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t hear about a round of tech layoffs. Friends all over town are reporting hiring freezes and layoffs at their companies. Although Dell is asking employees to “take unpaid leave”, and offering severance packages to “those who qualify”, their goal of reducing operations costs almost certainly points to significant layoffs in the near future. What a bad time to be smacked with a discrimination lawsuit.
On a brighter note, whurley just confirmed BarCampAustin4. Don’t count on battlebots. Expect whurley to outdo himself yet again.
Finally, GeekAustin now hosts several “recruiter free” special interest groups on LinkedIn:
Austin Database Pros
Austin Electrical Engineers
Austin IT Security Pros
Austin Java Developers
Austin Linux Users
Austin QA Professionals
Have a good weekend!
-Lynn
It was Paco Xander Nathan (blog), mad genius of Fringeware, who back in the early 90s first told me about Vernor Vinge and The Singularity. For the next decade, I heard it referred to only rarely. Then in 2005, about the time Ray Kurzweil released his book: The Singularity is Coming, I began to hear the term used with some frequency. That same year, Vernor Vinge gave the keynote to an all-star crowd at the Accelerating Change 2005 conference. A year later, in 2006, the first Singularity Summit was held at Stanford, Ray Kurzweil being one of the organizers.
Whether it is the result of the general hoo haa regarding the Semantic Web or some other factor, in the last few months, I’ve been hearing the term ’singularity’ pop up quite a bit in local conversations. Thankfully, the word has five syllables.
Since no one has time to read any more, I decided to assemble a collection of mp3s on The Singularity for Mopac University. Right click, burn them, and listen to them on your way to the office.
Accelerating Change 2005
Vernor Vinge Keynote Presentation recorded 2005-09-17 (listen to the mp3)
“The singularity is not a given, nor is it necessarily a positive event. Many factors could arise that prevent the singularity from occurring and there is a potential for it to be a catastrophic event rather than a positive revolution.”
Ray Kurzweil When Humans Transcend Biology recorded 2005-09-17 (listen to the mp3)
(an abbreviated version appeared on Tech Nation with Moira Gunn - listen to the mp3)
John Smart How to be a Tech Futurist -recorded 2005-09-17 (listen to the mp3)
An extended list of presentations from Accelerating Change can be found at ITConversations.
The Singularity Summit 2007
Barney Pell - Powerset Co-Founder & CEO - Singularity Summit 2007 - Pathways to Advanced General Intelligence - recorded 2007-09-08 (listen to the mp3)
Ben Goertzel - Nine Years to a Positive Singularity - recorded 2007-09-08 (listen to the mp3)
An extended list of presentations from the Singularity Summit 2007 can be found at ITConversations.
The Singularity Institute, which organizes the Singularity Summit, has a series of interviews. Some of them are quite good. They also have videos of the 2006 presentations and 2007 presentations. Please don’t watch the videos while driving.
See you on Mopac. Remember, no need to rush. We’re already in Austin.
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whurley, Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy, BMC Software, Inc. discusses The Collaborator’s Paradox followed by an interview with Gary Beach, Publisher Emeritus of CIO Magazine 3:30 PM, October 16th at Innotech Austin. Registration required. Use WHURLEY88 code for free admission. |
I’ve been waiting nearly a year now to hear whurley speak about this.
Collaboration is easy, right?
Wikinomics. Crowdsourcing. Groundswells, Innovation Networks. Around the world more and more visionary leaders are bestowing the benefits of working hand in hand with customers, partners, and even competitors. You can’t start a conversation about technology without ‘open source’, ‘community’, or ‘user driven innovation’ quickly becoming the focal point. Customers are back and in unprecedented numbers, they are using previously unavailable technology to dramatically change the technology landscape. Many are taking a ‘just open it and they will come’ approach to what is arguably the greatest shift in business since the dawn of the industrial age. However, the truth is that collaboration is hard.
In this presentation and interview with Gary Beach, Publisher Emeritus of CIO Magazine, whurley explores the challenges of opening your business to collaborate with the world — the realities of collaboration, the metrics with which to measure success, and the factors that inevitably doom almost every collaborative project.
For the last year or so, as whurley advised me on various projects, I’ve been exposed to various melodies and motifs of the Collaborator’s Paradox. I am eager to hear the complete work. Please join me at Innotech Austin for The Collaborator’s Paradox. If you use the following code: WHURLEY88, you can attend Innotech, and this session, for free. You can register for InnoTech here.
-An accidental series of discoveries-
I have found that one of the biggest hurdles in hosting an event is to find the right venue — one that people feel comfortable at, one that is suitable for the type of event you are hosting, and one that doesn’t require me to break the budget. Any decent venue up in North Austin — like Cool River, NXNW, etc — already does a booming business during the week. They don’t need the 200+ people I’ll bring. In fact, they’ll most likely want me to sign a contract guaranteeing that a certain amount of money will be spent. After 8 years of GeekAustin events, I have a pretty good idea of how much folks drink at an event — and it’s generally it’s 3-7 dollars less per person than what I’ll need to guarantee for x amount of space up North.
Contrast this with downtown. I can walk into pretty much any club downtown on a weeknight, saying : “Can I bring 200 of my friends here next Tuesday?”, and immediately I’ve got a new friend. No contracts. No guarantees. Just “thanks.” There are clubs of all sizes downtown. One can find multiple venues for groups of 20 to 600. Bear in mind, I am not talking about getting a venue during a club’s bread and butter nights — Friday and Saturday. I am talking about Monday through Wednesday, and for some venues, Thursday as well. This is why GeekAustin events are almost always downtown. I try to never displace a club’s regular customers. I simply bring them additional business they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
This is the same reason why so many of the BarCamp and BarCamp type events are held downtown. During the week, and during the day, there are a multitude of spaces available for little or no cost.
-From BarCamp to BarCollege-
When Daniel and I announced that we would be offering free SQL classes to individuals, an interesting but not unexpected thing happened. In addition to 100+ folks who asked to be included in the SQL classes, we had folks sending queries like “Will you be teaching JavaScript classes?“, “Do you know where I can get Python classes?“, etc. The following idea hit us over the head like a two by four:
With all the the available space during the day and during the week, we could easily turn 6th street and the warehouse district into a campus, where the tuition is a two drink minimum!
Imagine what a cool thing this will be for Austin. Instead of following the valley, here’s something we can take the lead on. I don’t know a city that has done this. Do you? Imagine downtown clubs filled during weeknights with people learning JavaScript, CSS, Linux, system administration, shell scripting, Cisco IOS, SharePoint, Java — whatever someone is willing to teach and share.
This whole idea is too big for Daniel and I alone. We decided to offer the classes because we like meeting new people, sharing our skills, and love talking about SQL. We don’t want to become coordinators for some massive enterprise. Fortunately, this does not need to be a massive enterprise. It does not need to have a organization to make it happen. For all the folks who use every opportunity to make themselves the hub of all things high tech Austin, your Grand Marshall services will not be required at this time. All that is needed are folks who are willing to share their skills.
There are already examples in Austin of similar skill sharing going on. Damon Clinkscales has done a tremendous amount to educate folks about Rails and build a strong Rails community in Austin. Scott Killen, Boris Portman, and all the folks at Agile Austin are doing the same to build a community focused on good programming practice. RefreshAustin does a great job of keeping members abreast of best practices in design and usability. I’m am merely suggesting that we take this a step further. In addition to presenting topics for those who have already acquired sufficient skills to be included in a particular tech community, let’s offer basic instruction so that new folks can hop on board.
You might be asking yourself: “What will I get out of it?”. Here are a few thoughts. Most computer book authors wrote their first book not because they hoped to make money off it, but rather because the recognition would allow them to increase their hourly rate. Similarly, as soon as Daniel and I announced the free SQL classes, we gained several new corporate clients. Everyone wins. You help strengthen the downtown economy, you help folks acquire new skills, and you expand and grow your community.
Thinking of stealing this idea? Please do. I want you to steal this idea. If you have a skill that everyone wants, share it. With LinkedIn, Facebook, and all the other tools at your disposal, you won’t have any problem finding takers. Want to teach in Austin but don’t know how to go about finding a venue? I’ll be posting more about that soon. Until then, feel free to send me an email at linearb@gmail.com.
For those don’t live in Austin, go ahead. Copy us. Steal this idea.
-Linear
As many of you know, because we have some new things coming up, the 8th Anniversary Bash was to be our last party for a while. I want to give a special thanks to RefreshAustin and the Austin Electronic Music Grid for co-hosting the party. Extra special thanks to Michelle Greer for introducing me to Union Park. This club keeps getting better and better.
Tech Diva Kimberlie Dykeman and Paul Walhus were doing interviews on the roof in between musical acts. Among the folks interviewed were Michael Witbrock of Cycorp (interview), Chris Lamprecht, Lead Architect of Indeed.com (interview), and Mauricio Piña of tseg.com (interview)
Watch GeekAustin 07 - Michael Witbrock - Cycorp in News Online
De facto chronicler of Austin tech events, Eugene Hsu, dropped by to photograph the party. You can see his photo sets on facebook (photo set 1, photo set 2). I have been hosting parties for about 17 years now, and I have to tell you Eugene is one of the best. The Austin tech scene is fortunate to have this guy shooting the parties. When you see him, buy him a drink.
Kristen Sobieray, April Kyle, Eugene Hsu
Erica O’Grady, Michelle Greer, and Sara Dornsife are here. Now the party can get started!
One of my favorite parts of the party was the music provided by the artists of the Austin Electronic Music Grid. At several points later in the evening, we had 3 different artists in three different rooms. (I hope you knew that the party was going on in 4 spaces.) Dubnautica started at 7:30 in the BoomBoom Room Refresh Lounge.
At 8:30, Carbon Theory played in the main room.
At 10:00, Happy Panjoma did a great set on the roof, followed by Rage Ranger.
I hope to do more things with the Grid in the future. These are really a great bunch of folks.
How many of you new about the new bed on the back upstairs patio? What a perfect place to cap off the evening!
After a few last glances at the skyline from the Union Park patio, it’s time to go home. Thanks to everyone for a great party.
