First off, you should know about a blog that was started during BlogPhiladelphia. Literally, in the 30 minutes of me running an open grid session, a blog was created from scratch (domain purchase to live) as a response to Scott McNulty‘s “Group Blogging” session. You can keep an eye on it’s evolution at PhillyGeeks.net. The most recent post by Viddler’s Colin Devroe, has elicited the following response from me. It’s sort of to Colin, sort of to myself, and sort of to you, the reader. Some of it requires reading his post first, which I suggest doing. In the end, I’ll likely end up taking it elsewhere, since this is effectively a brain dump.

So I apologize for any confusing direction of a message, or the language used. This is direct from my brain to your screen.

Here goes. I’m happy with the fact that I can be glad that I DIDN’T end up moving to San Fran 6 months ago. Staying in Philadelphia and resolving to uncover this culture…not dormant, simply hidden…has proven to be inspiring, to myself and hopefully to other cities going through a same self-discovery.

Colin talked about this city’s history. It’s a history of innovation. Of revolution. Of energy and inquiry. For some reason…the visibility of this kind of activity has decreased. But I don’t think it ever went away.

I’ve got a lot going on in my head right now about the value of being anywhere BUT the west coast. Not to diss the west coast, of course.

They set the bar. They run the show. If it weren’t for their inspiration and support where would I/we be right now?

And heck, I’ve never even been to San Francisco (yet) but some of my best friends are there. And they support everything we’re doing.

I realize that the biggest reason I wanted to leave this city was because I thought that the grass was greener. “San Fran has the community I’m looking for…so I’ll just go there”.

That would have been the easy way out. Instead, I scratched. I searched. I talked.

I talked a lot.

Some people might say I’ve been a broken record for the last several months. I’m always yammering on about community. Sometimes to people who might not give a shit. But you know what? Most of them did. Or at least they put up with me.

In 9 months, a completely organic community has formed from the people that put up with me. They come from all walks of Philly life. All different jobs. Talents. Aspirations.

But we share one important thing, a passion for what we do, and an interest in sharing that passion. But that’s not unique to our community…everyone wants to love what they do and to be around people who also love what they do. That’s why people in my industry move to San Francisco. They set the bar with culture…most importantly the community side of things.

I think I used to scan event calendars and get jealous that I couldn’t go to all of the meetups and events in Silicon Valley. Then I realized…why be jealous? I’ve got some kind of social prowess (or maybe, like i said before, I’ll really just talk to ANYONE about something that I think is important). Either way. What’s stopping me from pushing people here.

So that’s what I did. I started by coming in to an existing community, PANMA. I’d been lurking on their listserv for some time, contributed when it was appropriate. But this was definitively the largest gathering of industry folk we had, so it was the obvious place to start.

I’m going to go on the record to say that I quickly learned that it was going to be a difficult place to achieve my goals. I’ve heard some WONDERFUL things about PANMA in it’s heyday. Like any community though, it grew up. Its members got into a groove. They started companies. Families. It’s not unreasonable to think that those people didn’t have the same amount of time for the community that they started when they started it.

Not to say PANMA isn’t an incredible community in itself. Lots of people helping each other all the time with anything from technical problems to job postings to business best practices. It suffered from apathy, though, and a seeming lack of desire to evolve. It got into a groove, and was going to be tough to jostle out.

That didn’t stop me from trying, though. I came in and stirred the pot. Good thing I did, too, because I found some of our most dedicated members to date in that pot. And it’s never been my goal to pull people away from PANMA. We serve a different purpose than PANMA, and it serves a different purpose than our group. Like a Venn Diagram, there’s overlap, and I’m so glad that there is because I don’t think one group stands to last without the other.

Along the time I started stirring, Johnny Bilotta came along and started doing the same. At some point, it became clear that Johnny and I needed to go out for drinks. His talent as a designer was astounding, and his interest in my vision was an easy thing to detect. I don’t remember what I said to him, but it was the right thing, because since that first day he’s been all in. I’d venture to say that Johnny was our first member.

Also, getting involved with Geoff DiMasi was a pivotal moment. Geoff contacted me when Johnny and I started making noise on the PANMA list. Geoff was a Multimedia professor at UArts, a business owner in my industry, and had experience establishing a civic association in his community. He had a knack for interactive, business, and community. My hero.

Geoff got involved with Independents Hall as a partner and an adviser. He’s kept me grounded and inspired me at the same time. We clicked on ideas and execution. It was a lot of “hey i was thinking….” followed by “that’s a good/bad idea…” followed by “hey, i did that thing we talked about…”. It was natural, easy, and worked. We set goals. We made them happen. It was almost too easy.

Independents Hall evolved into a larger community, both functional and social. As an extension of business, partnerships of talent formed. Projects seemingly materialized. More and more people just “clicked”. Socializing continued, the mixing continued, and the group grew.

We started thinking about sharing space, coworking style, but we were still finding stability and purpose. The next progression was a series of events where we worked together…instead of from our homes or cafes by ourselves, we regularly started working together. Inspired by Amit Gupta’s Jelly in NYC, we moved our group around the city on a bi-weekly basis. This was another opportunity for us to find out if we could spend entire days together without killing each other, among many other positive outcomes.

We’ve been doing these sessions, dubbed the “Cream Cheese Sessions”, for about 3 months and the attendance grows each time. Until we get our own space (and likely afterwards), these events will continue, and hopefully so will their growth.

Oh, and that PANMA group? 4 of their board members frequent our circle of events, and I hope to have a good showing of IndyHall members at their summer social this week. Remember, we need to support each other.

In the beginning of May, I got an email from Brian Oberkirch tipping me off to the impending unconference that we recently experienced in the form of BlogPhiladelphia. It seems like this event, and its planner Annie Heckenberger, were a gift from some greater being that had been watching our activity. One of the goals that Geoff and I had set early on was some sort of conference, and right around the time that we were gaining momentum with our own initiatives, Annie and BlogPhiladelphia came along.

And it rocketed to the forefront of mainstream media exactly what we’d been saying for months: amazing stuff is happening in Philadelphia every day, but there’s no visibility for it, inside of the city or out.

The number one comment to me during and after BlogPhiladelphia was: “Wow, I had no idea that my neighbor was building this, or working on that”.

Whitney Hoffman, a planner for PodCamp Philly, said to me early in our conversations, “we shouldn’t need to leave the city/state/country to find out who our neighbors are and what they are doing”. And the same goes for the fact that we shouldn’t need to throw a gigantic conference to find out the same information.

I don’t have a single source of information. I search and scrape and somehow bring as much as I can together.

We need a mechanism to get out the “What’s going on” buzz, out. In my head, it’s no good. Distributed across meetup.com, upcoming.org, various blogs and forums, it’s worthless. I’m currently brainstorming a convergence of this information. To be involved, drop me a comment/email.

Ultimately the goal is to create a go-to place for all information within the industry, and an opportunity for conversations and groups to converge. More on that in another post to come.

Fingers are cramping, brain is slowing down.

What’s the point of all of this, you may be asking, if you even got this far in my rambling.

Well the lessons I’ve learned are large, but consistent. The biggest one has to do with consistency, as it were.

1) Ritual events are critical. Having events “when it’s convenient” is good, having them regularly is better. They’re easier to plan (set a repeating event in your calendar). There is less guilt when you miss one (there will always be next time). There is more opportunity to take advantage of the event. Ritual events make it easy to go, “oh, look, it’s friday, time to go cowork!”. It’s easy, it’s fun, and its advantageous.

2) You can’t do it alone. And even if you can, you can do it BETTER with support. Support networks are critical to the sustainability of ANY initiative, too, so doing it yourself is just silly if you have a long term vision. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Just be clear of what you need, and what the return will be. ROI isn’t just a business term.

3) If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you aren’t looking hard enough. It’s ok to talk to everyone. It’s ok to be a broken record. If what you’re looking for is really, really important, you will likely have to work for it. But that goes back to #2…just because you have to do it, doesn’t mean you should do it yourself.

4) Don’t ever get to one goal without setting another one first. That’s a recipe for stagnation.

5) Write down everything. Everything. Blog it. Twitter it. Email it to yourself. Scribble it in a moleskine (thanks Josh).

Where do we go from here?
Up. Onward. Just, for the love of god, don’t stop.

A couple of afterthoughts:
First, I know I said you can’t do it alone, and neither can I. The series of events I’ve scribbled down here for you wouldn’t be ANYTHING if it weren’t for the awesome teams that helped organize them, and just as importantly, the participants.

Independents Hall is a helluva group. Coworkers. Friends.

How often are the majority of your coworkers your friends. Not as often as me, I bet, and for that I’m blessed.

Also, I started this off talking about how I almost left for San Francisco. I almost left for an opportunity to work with two of my mentors, Chris Messina and Tara Hunt. Finding them, and interacting with them, was one of the most inspiring moments (or series of moments, as it would be) in my life. When I realized that some people were just meant to work together, I felt the need to be around them. And to date, I still love any time that I can find to work with them, face to face or online. Luckily, they helped me see that what I was looking for was already all around me. Chris and Tara, thank you for sending me on this incredible journey, and congratulations on affecting so many things that I needed to dump as many as I could muster into this post.

And finally, if I didn’t thank you specifically, it doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate something you’ve done for us. There are simply too many people TO thank, to get to them all. So globally: “Thank you”.

[tags]brain dump, Philadelphia, coworking, community, goals, messages[/tags]

Well, I’ve decided to take a plunge into ultimate transparency. I’ve decided to feed by personal google calendar over the web, and it’s now available to be viewed and subscribed to at http://www.dangerouslyawesome.com/calendar/.

I haven’t gone back and set visiblity permissions on past events because, well, they’re in the past. But moving forward you may see “busy” blocks on my calendar. Those are things that I’m decidedly keeping private…whether to protect other parties involved, or for safety of my own sanity .

In general though, all of the groups, meetups, and events that I attend, plan to attend, or hear about that I think are worth attending (even if I can’t make it) will go into this calendar.

If anyone has a particularly handy way of projecting this information better, please speak up in the comments, I’m open to suggestions. The benefit to google calendar is it’s portable and subscribeable, as far as I can tell. And doing this doesn’t disrupt me existing workflow while it (I hope) adds value to some of my readership, especially the Philly folks.

[tags]calendar, shared, transparency, public, events, meetup groups, philadelphia, independents hall[/tags]

I’m scanning my “friends timeline” and noticing a clear division.

My geek friends are adding Facebook apps left and right.

My school friends (current undergrads and recent grads) have ALMOST no app usage, with the exception of the most popular app on facebook, iLike.

What does this mean? Well, at this stage in the game it means that geeks are bleeding edge and the rest of my friends aren’t as tech savvy. Fine. But long term, will the adoption rise? Depends on the app. I see things like last.fm getting a lot of traction. Music listening habits are always popular conversation on college campuses, and that data will become increasingly valuable to record companies and the artists, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the next step was INCENTIVES from the labels and artists to share your listening habits. Just my own speculation.

But beyond that, I’m having a hard time seeing F8 apps take facebook by storm. Even though facebook has opened beyond the “University Only” model, they have a stigma. In time, that stigma will likely go away, and if F8 is Facebook’s team being forward thinking enough to prepare for it, that’s interesting and awesome in itself. But I think that the Facebook audience at large (the large concentric circle of a large percentage of students in the US) compared to the rest of us who are really excited about F8 (a.k.a. “social networking geeks of the world”) still has huge opportunity for market penetration, like the Last.FM example above.

App developers: try thinking like a student. What do students need and use? I can easily answer the question because I was an on-campus undergrad very recently. Here’s a short list:

• Take-out Food
• Textbooks
• Music
• Nightlife
• Discount ANYTHING

This is hardly the end of the list, but a couple of quick, easy to illustrate examples. I’ll hit them one at a time, and how I think integration with Facebook would boost usership of Facebook AND the service being provided.

When I lived on campus I had little interest in walking to the dining hall to get lousy food that was going to eat a hole in my stomach. Cheap pizza places (2 large pies for <$10) and hot wings (40+ wings for $12) were all over campus, and they all delivered. And the best part? When CampusFood.com came out, I could browse a menu, and then with saved credit card information, click “order”. Cheap food delivered to my door with minimal human contact, and no cash transaction, every college student’s dream. Campusfood (or someone else) needs to integrate this into Facebook. They already claim to support transactions, so that part should be easy.

Scenario: I come home from a party, a few beers in, browse facebook to add my new party friends, poke a couple of the girls that I think are cute, and order a pizza, all in one workflow. And best of all? In the morning I can browse the public timeline to see what all of my OTHER friends have ordered…maybe there’s a new spot on campus that I haven’t tried yet, and Johnny’s sandwich order sounds really tasty…boom. You have personal recommendations without people even needing to talk to each other.

This one’s easy. Facilitating a textbook exchange on Facebook is easier than ever. Someone should do this RIGHT for a change. I’d love to see a Netflix for textbooks, though I understand the challenges of varying versions/editions of textbooks. Still, seems possible. The ability to announce when I’m done with a book via the public timeline and have someone come along and snatch it up seems pretty plausable.

Music

The success of the Last.FM plugin is encouraging, and I already mentioned my thoughts on incentive-based scrobbling. If nothing else, the publicity of “I’m listening to…” being announced on the “News Feed” is free publicity. I’m not looking to get paid for my data in cash, but something from the label to say “thanks for providing us with some of the most valuable market research info we’ve had in years” would be nice. Maybe an album or two of mainstream music that doesn’t blow? Discounts on itunes, etc seems to make the most sense, but again…I’m open to suggestions.

Nightlife

One of the most successful features of Facebook, in my observation, has been the party planning tools. Set a time, place, and invite a pile of people. RSVPs. Privacy from the guest of honor, if you need. Conversation about what to bring. Etc. College kids love to party, but once they grow up past the legal age to drink, many of them move form house parties (where they sit around and drink apple juice, i promise) to the local bar scene. These bars need to be taking advantage of Facebooks new open-ness. Promotions and event invitations with incentives like drink specials, guest list only open bars, theme parties…etc.

I’ve been using Philly2Nite.com regularly (and recently had the pleasure of lunch with one of the co-creators Chris Nagele, who has an awesome eye for the kinds of strategy I’m describing), and think that other city-based niche nightlife sites could benefit from Facebook’s new open platform. Philly2nite has it’s own social network and has come up with some cool ways of leveraging it, but tying the two together seems like a match made in heaven. PLUS, that network extends past graduation because we all know that people don’t stop having social lives when they graduate (at least, I hope they don’t stop). Announcements of friends attending a particular event is easy incentive to get someone to come out to a party that they might not have otherwise, and the Facebook mechanisms are perfect for that.

Discounts/Bargain Shopping

Slickdeals, Restaurant Coupons, FatWallet(and other cash-back deal sites) all NEED to recognize the opportunity to hit a target audience of kids who want to have the hippest, coolest, trendiest WHATEVER but are on a tight budget. Cash back and discounts are quick wins in the eyes of a college student. Take advantage of that, and work it right into my facebook account.

I could go on and on with this list, and if I had more time myself I’d build every single one of these apps, or pursue the means to make them exist. But I’d love to see the mechanisms provided by F8 really recognized better by the greater part of the social economy that comprises Facebook. Let’s see where this goes, and if anyone sees any of my app ideas (or anything similar) please let me know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: campusfood, discounts, F8, Facebook, music, nightlife, opportunities, students, textbook

Dave Rappo, a good friend of mine, has a project which has the primary objective of taking some of the strain off open source project managers as well as developers who wish to contribute to open source initiatives. This initiative uses monetary incentives in the form of “bounties”, placed on tasks and feature requests, by the users who request them. Essentially, he’s created a streamlined workflow for the concept of “put your money where your mouth is”.

This project is appropriately named Bounty Source.

Bountysource itself is a Ruby on Rails application, coded by co-founder Warren Konkel (in his free time no less…he’s a full time contractor for the famed Revolution Health Group). Another very interesting part of the model is that Bounty Source, which acts as an integrated project management and source control tool (similar to Trac and SourceForge), is itself driven by the BountySource incentive model, and portions of it are open source (the SVN browser, for example). That is to say, the tools used to make BountySource what it is are available to have bounties and feature requests placed on them. Then, like any of the projects that they host, a developer can come through, choose a task, complete it and submit it for review. Upon approval, the bounty is released to the developer.

Bounties vary in size because they are created by users who want to see a feature included. If they want to see the feature really really bad, and can afford it, they could place a rather sizable bounty on it. Also utilizing the power of strength in numbers, multiple people can contribute to the same bounty. So if someone else wants the same feature you do, they can chip in (less, same, or more than you) towards the total value of the task.

This realistic monetization of tasks takes away a large amount of the dissent in the OS community, where projects stagnate due to a lack of resources, or developers and project managers get frustrated about the number of feature requests with no “contribute back” factor. Many open source USERS forget that OS is a two way street. Bountysource goes out of its way to remind people, and lets them contribute in a real tangible way.

One of the latest bounties posted to BountySource actually stemmed form a conversation Dave and I had in the car yesterday, regarding the lack of Firefox extension support in Camino. Evidently, someone had just posted a ~$200 bounty on creating a fork of the Camino project that had a single customization: enable middle-clicking on tabs to close them. THAT WAS IT. Someone wanted this feature SO BADLY that they were willing to pony up 200 bucks. Dave and I weren’t ready to drop $200 on a single feature, but we agreed that we’d switch to Camino for speed and stability if it supported XUL/Extensions.

So Dave created a bounty for Firefox extensions and addons for Camino within the same project, dubbed “Alternative Camino“. This bounty calls for Firefox 2.0 Extension support (at a minimum) in Camino. I’ve dropped $10 of my own money (as did Warren) on this feature request, and if you’re a mac user frustrated with the general instability of Firefox (not unusable instability…its just not Camino) but stick with Firefox for plugins…drop a couple of bucks and see if we can’t get this bounty fulfilled.

And while you’re at BountySource, check out some of the many (372) projects that they do host, and see if you want to ask for anything, or take on a challenge to collect a bounty yourself.

[tags]whurley, david rappo, warren konkel, opensville, bounty source, communities, opensource, incentive, camino, camino + firefox[/tags]

While my weight loss has been highly “unofficial”, I’ve lost 20 lbs since December 1st-ish.

I actually lost 15 of it during the month of december, but new years festivities put it right back on, and I’ve struggled to drop back down to that near-200lbs-point since. SXSW actually helped a lot, i dropped about 12lbs during those 5 days. I suppose no eating, lots of drinking, walking everywhere, and an hour of sleep a night will do that for you.

AAAnyway, my point was. I’m 199lbs as of 5 minutes ago. I havent been below 200 in a good year and a half or more. I was stable at 220, though everyone said I “wore it well”. But now that I’ve ducked back into the 100s, I’m pretty motivated to keep up the high stress/health-ish eating diet that’s succeeded for me this far.

[tags]weight loss, fatblogger[/tags]