B. Mann Consulting

In just 9 days, DemoCampVancouver04 takes place at the usual location - WorkSpace.

We've now grown to the point where any of the local watering holes or eating establishments in Gastown have trouble housing the hordes when we leave at the end of the evening, so we've arranged a set of sponsors to pay for some drinks and appetizers at Flux Bistro, just down the road along Water Street.

I'd like to thank Communicate.com, TechVibes, and Peer1 for sponsoring this post-DemoCamp gathering. At only our 4th event, we're already reaching out for sponsorship. In contrast, check out David Crow's update on the 2 year anniversary of DemoCampToronto -- the space alone is $2000 per event! I can only hope we can continue growing our community over the next 18 months as they have in Toronto.

I'm really looking forward to more BattleDecks (well....along with a great set of people, ideas, and companies to present!). Please do spread the word to have people attend -- especially if they haven't attended an "unconference" style event before or are outside the tech industry: connect the tribes!

Add this event on Upcoming and on Facebook.

Well, I'm just getting home from a great night out. We polished off DemoCampVancouver03 to -- I think! -- great success.

Our second one was moved to the Irish Heather across the street, and while it was still fun and had good presentations, it's just not the same vibe as doing it at WorkSpace. Thanks again to Bill, Dane, and the crew for letting us host there.

We shook up the mix a little tonight by adding battle decks: "secret" slide decks that two volunteers have to "pitch" to the crowd, and go head to head to see who can put together the best spiel to the audience. Thanks to Megan, Kris, and Roland for pulling this off, as well as John from HandiMobility and Michael Fergusson from Kinzin / Are You Normal? for being our first contestants.

The pitches and presenters were really hard to choose from: we keep getting more people out and more great ideas. I'm not going to go into massive detail other than to point to DemoCamp Vancouver's official live blogger, Miss 604, as well as my friend Graham, who had good comments / feedback for the presenters.

Yes, I'm missing a ton of links in this post. It's getting late, so I wanted to get this up for starters. Thanks to all for attending and participating -- it was amazing to hear about all the other upcoming events. There really is a lot happening in Vancouver, and events like this just help to highlight that.

I had an interesting experience on Wednesday night. The guys at WorkSpace called around some local Gastown businesses to fund a pizza delivery to Pigeon Park, and I stopped in to help hand out the pizzas. Here's a short video that I did with Bill MacEwen talking about why:

Uncle Fatih'z Pizza was the project we took on during BarCamp Vancouver where we built DIY video advertising in 60 minutes. It was some of the most fun, intense, creative time I had and I would do it again in a second. Here's the video that my team did:

We're just under 2 weeks away from the second DemoCampVancouver event on July 5th. There is an event on Facebook, and you may also list yourself on the wiki, especially if you want to start socializing an idea you want to demo. The guys from EQO would like to demo their new mobile client – add yourself to the list!

Remember we are changing the format slightly, based on feedback. Everyone that comes with a demo idea will be given a 30 second pitch time at the beginning, then we'll have all the attendees vote, and the top four demo ideas will then each get 6 minutes.

I'm going to invite a bunch of extra people to stack the deck for my pick: a talk on what cohousing is, along with details of the Windsong cohousing community in Langley. 

I just got back from Galiano Island, one of the Southern Gulf Islands between Vancouver and Victoria/Vancouver Island. Theoretically it was a Drupal geek thing hosted by Christian Nally, and we did spend a fair amount of time thinking about install profiles for Drupal 6 core.

But really, it was a chance to get out of the city, and it ended up being a great place to connect with a lot of people. Did you know, for instance, that Avi Bryant has bought a place there? I've been doing my own thinking about how to get over Vancouver housing crisis/prices pain without doing a suburb, and Galiano is not a bad compromise.

I was lucky enough to get a ride from Bill of WorkSpace, and it turns out Josli is actually from Galiano. I'm an islander myself, having grown up on Bowen Island.

Actually, the Bill / WorkSpace connection is interesting, since Nally would really like to have a "WorkSpace Galiano". So, how do you grow/spread/franchise the concept/name and have it continue to succeed? Do alternate systems a la OpenCoffee plug into this? I have more on this rolling around, and I hope that something real/with money behind it comes of it. More soon.

P.S. Dear blogosphere: what's happening in Facebook is very important. More of the bits over there need to be dragged out here...and a lot of it is about this identity layer that's just not quite built yet out here.

P.P.S. Another great find over the weekend was Unfuddle. Raincity Studios have been using it for a while and have found it good (we use Trac, which is a lot like it only...harder for humans). I'm still kicking tires, AND I wish the codebase was open (just do the hosted service thing, guys....) but it seems very good. I still need to write up and/or do a training course on "Best Practices for Drupal Development using Subversion", and Unfuddle would be a good part of it. 

I had lunch the other day with Aaron Gladders from 2Paths. He bumped into me when we were doing a final walkthrough of our new 1 Alexander offices, and recognized me from the picture here on my blog.

2Paths is a company filled with biologists turned programmers. They started out as a PHP shop, but since they provide full ongoing 24/7 support, hosting, and ongoing maintenance to most of their customers, they found that straight PHP code had a tendency to get very spaghetti-like. They switched to doing Java development and have been building expertise. Aaron confidently says that 2Paths is likely the best lightweight Java web application developer in Vancouver.

In fact, Aaron says they started to look at Ruby on Rails as it began to gain hype -- perhaps they would use it for prototyping. But they weren't happy with some aspects of it, although in favour of many of its lightweight aspects. So, they looked around for a Rails-like framework for Java. Ultimately, they rejected existing solutions for a number of architectural reasons and ended up creating their own. I'll leave it up to 2Paths to talk about its cool factor -- they'll be open sourcing it and releasing it to the world sometime real soon now (there might be a presentation at BarCamp Vancouver about it).

This post was jogged by two things. One was seeing the post by Harold Jarche, who is moving ahead with putting together a Commons as well. The second was experiencing the fantastic space of the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto (thanks, Philip for getting us this space for DrupalCamp).

So, the Innovation Commons concept has to get built. Bill's Workspace shared office concept is a great solution as a business. But, the Innovation Commons needs to be a mix of businesses, non profits, and perhaps even public-private funding sources. I think the Centre for Social Innovation is a good model, but actually less of a focus on exclusively non-profit businesses. Creative, tech, non profit.

On to action items.

The SFU students that worked on an Innovation Commons business model did produce some good, lengthy documents, Excel spreadsheets, and presentations which really need to be posted in friendly non-proprietary formats and distributed under a Creative Commons license. Nik, I'm looking at you here.