Moving … Sort of (Update RSS)

I am moving off of hosted WordPress and onto my own hosted server this weekend.  If you come to FastWonderBlog.com directly to read this blog or subscribe to the Feedburner feed, you won’t notice a difference (hopefully). If you happen to be using the WordPress Feed, you will want to update it to the Feedburner feed.

Otherwise, expect a few hiccups. It is likely that something will go wrong, and the site will look strange for a while 🙂 Rest assured that I know about it and am working on it!

Technology Community Leader Meetup in PDX

We had so much fun at the Technology Community Leader Meetup in SF before OSBC that I thought we should have another one around OSCON / Ubuntu Live in PDX on July 24th from 6-7:30pm.

Anyone currently leading, managing, or otherwise involved in technology communities (open source, web 2.0, wikis, etc.) is welcome to attend. Feel free to forward this invite on to others. It should be fun!

Location is TBD until I have an idea of how many people plan to attend. It will be somewhere in or near the Portland Convention center. If you would like to attend, please RSVP on upcoming.

What are Your Favorite Podcasts

I admit it, I am a podcast addict. I listen to podcasts whenever can: while driving, grocery shopping, doing laundry, washing dishes, walking, working out … you get the idea. I thought it would be interesting to share my favorite podcasts and encourage a few others to do the same:

Tech Podcasts:

• Buzz Out Loud
• CNET Daily Tech News Podcast
• Cranky Geeks (when I can find time)
• Digital Planet (BBC)
• InfoWorld Daily Podcast
• Net@Nite
• PRI’s The World: Technology (when I can find time)
• Redmonk Radio Podcast (depending on the topic)
• TWIT
• Wall Street Journal Tech news Briefing
• Occasional conference podcasts (sxsw, etc.)

Business / News:

• Business Week Cover Stories
• Business Week Technology & You
• New York Times Front Page
• HBR IdeaCast
• NPR Business Story of the Day
• Science Friday – Making Science Radioactive

I’m officially tagging a few people with the challenge: What are Your Favorite Podcasts?

Marshall Kirkpatrick, Josh Bancroft, Coté, Audrey Eschright, and Chris Brentano – blog about your favorite podcasts and tag 5 other people.

Others – please jump in, blog, and tag another 5 people.

Community Building and Free Documentation

Andy Oram conducted an interesting survey to answer the question, “Why Do People Write Free Documentation?” I was a bit surprised by the top result: community building.

As a community manager, I love to see that people are contributing documentation to projects as a way to help build the community. This also emphasizes a point that I have made several times during speaking engagements when people ask about motivation for contributing to communities or open source projects. My answer is always something like this, “Like any diverse groups of individuals, motivations for contributing will vary widely depending on the individual. Some people use it as a learning experience, some want fame (rockstar mentality) or other reputation building, some do it to help others, …” While community building is at the top of the list, the other motivations follow very closely behind: personal growth, mutual aid, gratitude, support, reputation, and more. Although this survey is focused on documentation, it still helps validate the idea that the motivations of individual community members are diverse.

As a community manager, I almost wish that there was a clear winner in the survey with one motivation standing out high above the others. It would make my job easier. Since no one way of encouraging people to participate within a community will work for every member, we sometimes have to get creative.

The survey is a great read for anyone interested in motivation within communities.

BarCamp Portland Informal Tech Meetup May 24th

Our next informal Portland BarCamp Meetup will be on May 24th! We have also settled on the fourth Thursday of every month as a regular date for the event. Any local techies are welcome to attend.

When: Thursday, May 24th
Time: 5:30pm – 8:00 pm
Where: Jive Software Office (317 SW Alder St Ste 500)
Sponsored by: Jive Software

Jive Software is located on Alder near 3rd. Parking is available in a nearby parking garage, and it is short walk from the Max / Bus (directions to Jive Software).

If you plan to attend, please RSVP on the Portland BarCamp Meetup wiki (RSVP required):

The meetup will be very informal and similar in format to previous meetings. We’ll do a few introductions, talk for a few minutes about organizing the BarCamp, and then see where the discussion goes.

If you would like to receive notifications about any last minute changes, future meetups, and other PortlandBarCamp communications, please join our Google Group to receive email announcements.

Subscribe to BarCampPortland
Email:Browse Archives at groups.google.com

 

 

We have also created a BarCamp Portland Google Calendar for upcoming events and posted the event to Upcoming.org.We are also trying to gain support for a real BarCamp event in Portland. We will start the planning process when we get enough people signed up on the Wiki, so please add yourself to the wiki if you want to attend a Portland BarCamp event!

BarCamp Portland was Awesome

OK, as an organizer of the event, I am probably not the most neutral party; however, I do think the we managed to pull of a great BarCamp here in Portland. First of all, a huge thank you to Eva, David, and the rest of the crew at CubeSpace who generously gave us the run of the facility, were an amazing help, let us stay until 11pm both nights, and were extremely flexible when the registrations soared out of control the 3 days leading up to the event from our expected attendance of 125 to a final count of about 250 attendees. Also a huge thank you to Raven Zachary, co-organizer and partner in crime for the event, and the rest of the planning team: Carl Johnson, LaVonne Reimer, Audrey Eschright, Patrick Sullivan, Sioux Fleming, Kelly Mackin, and Rashid Ahmed. Each person on this list was a tremendous help. Todd was also an enormous help: staying up late to help draw the grid; bringing me bubble tea; getting last minute materials cut at Kinkos, putting up with my crap as my grouchiness escalated during final preparations, and much more.

During the initial planning of BarCamp Portland, we thought that would be really cool if we could get maybe 75-100 people at Portland’s first BarCamp. As people began signing up, we thought that 125 was a pretty realistic number (this is what we budgeted for). A week or two before the event, we had 125-150 people signed up, and we felt really good about that number. As we moved closer to the Friday start of BarCamp, the numbers escalated rapidly to 274. Based on signups at the registration desks, we think we had about 250 people physically present at the event. Our sponsors were very generous in making last minute increases in sponsorship funding to provide additional food for the extra people.

A few neat things about BarCamp Portland:

• Our volunteer planning committee had more women than men, which we think helped us to have a better gender balance in overall attendance than most technology events.
• We think we were the first BarCamp ever to have free Bubble tea.
• Sessions varied widely including: theories about the TV show Lost, Open Source Business models, songwriting for geeks, community collaboration, MythTV, OpenID, WiFi disaster recovery and much more.
• We had a Nintendo Wii party, which included a boxing showdown between Chris Messina, one of the founders of the BarCamp Concept, and me (I kicked his ass) 🙂
• We had a Bucket of Voodoo Donuts.
• We had several OLPCs there for people to play with, and they even got some use from kids at the event.
• Ward Cunninham brought his flag waving robot.
• I did a session on collaboration in communities, which seemed to go really well.
• People started to get really creative about using the space at the event.
• We had knitting.
• We played a bunch of werewolf games thanks to Victor and others from the Portland Werewolf group (we even have our own cards for it!) I am an innocent villager.
• Notes from sessions are still emerging as people recover enough to blog, but I’ve found a few notes from Donnie Berkholz, and in the PDXBarCamp channel on Pibb (the official event back channel)
• And much, much, more.

Thanks to everyone who attended. A BarCamp event is only successful if the people who attend make it successful. We had an amazing, geeky, smart, and fun crowd leading to an amazing, geeky, smart, and fun event!

Welcome to the Fast Wonder Blog

I finally made the leap off of Blogger and onto WordPress with the launch of my new Fast Wonder blog. Fast Wonder is an evolution of the Open Culture blog originally started in November 2005, so this is more of a re-branding than a change in direction. Like the Open Culture blog, Fast Wonder is focused on open technologies, open source, web 2.0, social media, online communities, and innovation. I was even able to import all of the original Open Culture posts (with comments)!

A number of other “Open Culture” blogs gradually appeared over the years, and the time came to come up with a more original name and a real logo for this blog. A big thank you to Stephen Way for designing the Fast Wonder logo.

Chaos

Expect fewer and erratic posts from me in the next couple of months. I am selling my house in Hillsboro and moving to the east side of Portland. Moving is always a chaotic process. In other words, I will be kicked out of my house at random times of the day so that strange people can wander through, then I get to put everything I own into little boxes only to take them back out inevitably losing certain items for an indefinite period of time.

Despite the less than fun moving process, I am excited about moving to the east side of Portland. We are looking forward to living within walking distance of coffee shops, vegetarian restaurants, grocery stores, and more. It will also be nice to live closer to downtown.

If anyone is looking for a great house with good schools, a quiet neighborhood and suburban living, I have a great house in Hillsboro! Information about my Realtor and the house can be found here and you can visit my Flickr account to see way too many pictures of the house.

Growth of Social Networking

According to compete, 2 out of every 3 people online visited a social networking site in June, and the number of people visiting a social networking site has grown 109% since January 2004 (driven mostly by MySpace).

Nielson//NetRatings claims that MySpace has achieved year-over-year growth (July 2005 – July 2006) of 183% compared to 23% for Google and 13% for eBay. MySpace also hit the 100 million account mark on August 9, 2006 at around 7:41 am EST. As I mentioned earlier today, del.icio.us is also showing tremendous growth with Hitwise claiming that Del.icio.us traffic has doubled since January.

The point of this post is not to obsess over exact numbers, many of which tend to contradict each other; however, it does show that social networking sites are continuing to grow at incredible rates. As markets mature, the growth tends to eventually level off as the market becomes more saturated. For example, when DVD players were new, the growth was rapid as people bought their first DVD player, but the growth has leveled off now that everyone owns a player and sales continue mostly in the slower growth replacement / upgrade market. I would expect social networking to level off as social networking moves from the early adopters into the masses; however, it is also possible that it will continue to grow at a rapid pace if early adopters keep moving to the next hot site bring the masses along behind them.

World Wide Web 2.0

Business 2.0 just released a map of web 2.0 companies located outside of the United States, including one of my latest favorites Netvibes.

It would be interesting to see a similar map of web 2.0 companies within the United States. I am curious how many are located outside of the valley.