Blogging Roller

BarCampRDU 2009 was a great success, if I don't say so myself. Here's my brief review. We had excellent turn-out, lots of great session pitches and lots of great sessions. Everything went very smoothly and our estimates for meals, t-shirts and party-budget were spot on. We received lots of positive feedback on Twitter and blogs and at the event. We did have some difficulties with the PA system and a couple of projectors, but we got past them with a little help from our friends.

Here are the links I've rounded up since the event. If you want a taste of BarCampRDU 2009 then check Robert Fischer's excellent podcast and Tanner Lovelace's very-cool time-lapse set to spooky music.

• Robert Fischer: "What's A BarCamp" Featuring BarCampRDU 2009
  Excellent podcast that explains BarCampRDU and includes all session pitches
• Tanner Lovelace: BarCampRDU 2009 Session Grid Timelapse:
  3 minute time-lapse of session grid build, change and tear-down
• eTechSuccess: BarCamp 2009
  "BarCamp was well worth the time" plus a list of the sessions
• Joe Gregorio | BitWorking | BarCamp RDU
  "a well run event that was a lot of fun to attend"
• Best Thing Ever: Getting Involved - NCSU Web Developers
  "I got to meet a lot of really great folks"
• Digital Papercuts: Triangle Tech Week Wrap-Up
  "A big shoutout to [all] the organizers and volunteers for a great unconference"
• Matthew Bass - BarCampRDU was a rousing success
  "I heard several attendees comment that the presentations outdid last year's camp"
• BarCampRDU weekend is here!
  Thanks to host Red Hat all the BarCampRDU 2009 sponsors!

We might have to do it again next year

• Your blog still loves you
  "it's time to use the web again to store our ideas, and instead of relying on Silicon Valley companies to link our stuff together, let's just use the Internet."
• ZDNet Asia: 'Ferociously loyal' users to stand by Sun
  "47,000 enterprise customers and a ferociously loyal customer base"
• The Connections Blog: Full house! Lotus Connections 2.5 video demos
  screen-casts for 8 of the Lotus Connections components
• Chromium Blog: Google Chrome Developer Tools for Eclipse Users
  "Set breakpoints, inspect variables and evaluate expressions from within Eclipse"
• First impressions of Google Wave | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com
  "won't be ejecting existing enterprise collab tools from the workplace any time soon"
• Shindig-based OpenSocial Container from Lockheed Martin
  "written in Java and is based on open source projects such as GWT, Hibernate..."

The early-bird special ends on August 14, so you'd better get moving.

Sign up for ApacheCon US by 14 August and save up to $500!

This year's ApacheCon US promises to deliver our most extensive program to date, and largest anticipated gathering of the global Apache community to celebrate the ASF's milestone 10th Anniversary. The San Francisco Bay Area is where the very first ASF official user conference was held, and we hope that you will join us in celebrating the ASF's success!

Apache members, code contributors, users, developers, system administrators, business managers, service providers, and vendors will convene 2-6 November in Oakland, California, for a week of training, presentations, sharing and hacking. ApacheCon US 2009 features new content tracks, MeetUps, and GetTogethers, as well as a number of events open to the public free of charge, such as the Hackathon and 2-day BarCampApache, in appreciation of their support over the past decade.

Be sure to register by 14 August to save up to $500! To sign up, visit http://www.us.apachecon.com

I'll be there and speaking on the topic of What's New in Roller 5.0. I also plan to attend the Social and Widgets Meetup with folks from Shindig, SocialSite and Wookie. I hope to see you there.

Every time I find something that I want to share with others online, I have to think about how I want to share and whom I want to share it with. Perhaps I've created too much complexity for myself. This diagram below illustrates the situation. It's my social data flow diagram. [Read More]

As you might know, I'm involved with organizing BarCampRDU again this year, doing the sponsor-wrangling and attendee registration duties. It's been a lot easier and stress-free than last year because I've been through it once before and so has most of the committee. No matter the stress-level, the end-result is well worth the effort.

Wrangling sponsors was surprisingly easy, even with a bad economy. Basically, all I have to do is chase 'em down, convince them to sponsor, make sure they pay and then ensure that they're recognized on the blog, t-shirt, signage and during the event. Event registration was easy too as we used Eventbrite, which is free for free events like BarCampRDU. My only complaint is there's no automated way for an attendee to cancel a ticket and no automated way to do a waiting-list.

Most of the remaining work was done by my wife Andi and our friend Alicia Weller. Andi took care of vendor selection and coordination and Alicia took up volunteer coordination and t-shirts. I think you're going to like what Alicia did with the t-shorts; very nice colors this time.

What's a little nerve-wracking about running a BarCamp is the estimations you have to make. Once it's time to order t-shirts, food and drink we have a fixed budget but the number of attendees can vary wildly. Last year, we had 250 registered attendees and only 140 showed up. We can't assume we'll have the same registered/attended ratio this year because we've been sending out a lot more email reminders. Anyhow, long story short: we did our best but if everybody currently registered shows up, some folks are not going to get a t-shirt and a lunch.

At this point, all we can really do is enjoy the show and I'm really looking forward to it. This year, I'm going to pitch a session on OpenSocial. Here's the write-up from the proposed session page:

A quick intro to OpenSocial explaining what it is, how it works and why it matters using these What's up with OpenSocial slides. Then a group discussion.on.

It's just about time to head down to the pre-party at Flying Saucer. I hope to see you there.

Crammed into one post...

After a month of blog neglect, my automatic Latest Links from my Delicious.com account started to pile up. Back in the glory days of this blog, I blogged about things instead just saving links or tweeting about them. I realized that, by adding some commentary/opinion for each, I could turn a month's worth of links into a month's worth of blog posts and thus gain total absolution for my sin of going a full month without a post. So that's what I did.  [Read More]

I think can stand behind a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of one blog post per month. Oh look, it's August 1st. I'm done for the month.