Social Tech

GiveCamps: Geeks Giving Back

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:24:59 GMT

Overview: A Give Camp is a gathering of professionals (developers, graphic designers, database ninjas) that volunteer their time and resources to design and implement solutions (websites, applications, content-management systems, etc) for various charities and non-profit groups. Proposals can be submitted by non-profit groups and charities before the camp, and they are reviewed and selected, and teams of volunteers are organized to represent a project, create a plan and execute it, all over the period of a single weekend.

Projects / Features:
Web sites, new sections
Access Databases
Mobility Projects
New Content Management System (Graftiti, DotNetNuke, Sharepoint)
Intranet
Membership Tracking App
Paypal integration
Hosting
Training
Social Media Presence & Advocacy

Volunteer Qualifications:
Most importantly: A desire to contribute
Development experience (any level of expertise)
Sharepoint
Database Administrators
Developers! (.Net, Java, C++, PHP, Excel, Html)
Flash Developers & Designers
Photography
Social Media

Other GiveCamps:
Upcoming:
- Indianapolis, Indiana, January 23-25, 2009
- Milwaukee, WI, TBD (Nov-Dec, 2008?), Scott's announcement
- Northwest Arkansas .Net UG, TBD, Jay's announcement

Past:
- Dallas, Texas, January 18-20, 2008
- Kansas City, April 25-27, 2008
- Ann Arbor, Michigan, July 11-13, 2008

Important URLs:
- Givecamp.org
- We Are Microsoft: 18 projects for charities (brief case studies! - click links to see project details)
- Jennifer Marsman's review of the Ann Arbor Give Camp
- Twitter chatter "givecamp"
- GiveCamp Facebook Group

People:
- Chris Koenig, Dev Evangelist @ Microsoft, Founder of first GiveCamp
- Jennifer Marsman, Dev Evangelist @ Microsoft
- Dave Bost, Dev Evangelist @ Microsoft
- Larry Clarkin, Architect Evangelist @ Microsoft
- Scott Isaacs, President of WI .Net Users Group, leading up GiveCamp MKE
- Paul Hacker, leading up Indianapolis GiveCamp
- Jay Smith, President, Northwest Arkansas .Net User's Group

Accomplishments to date:
- GiveCamp #1: "We Are Microsoft" 18 projects from the first GiveCamp in Dallas, TX
- GiveCamp #2: "Coders For Charities", Kansas City, Missouri (overview)
- - Boy Scouts Troop 813
- - Berean Bible Church
- - Task Force Omega of MO
- - Missouri Pit Bull Rescue
- - Metropolitan Org to Counter Sexual Assault
- GiveCamp #3: Ann Arbor, Michigan (15 projects, charity names only, no details found)

Getting Started:
The GiveCamp cookbook

Media Coverage, spreading the word:
- Local news (Kansas City Fox 4)
- Press Release (Kansas City)
- Radio (Kansas City, Dick Dale Morning Show)
- Twitter
- Blogs
- Camp homepages
- GiveCamp.org

This post will be updated as I find more info for each section, and I will have a series of posts on our Milwaukee GiveCamp as it comes together. I am sure I have missed people and news, but this should serve as a good start to encapsulate the GiveCamp movement as it takes off.

If The John Galts Spoke Like Steve Jobs

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:21:32 GMT

1. I would buy into Brandstreaming (uhhh... if they let the JG-types out of their caves to do some streaming). [Pheedo coins the term] [RWW gives it some love] [Twitter chatter]

2. Mesh [clients/"platform experiences"] could see some serious adoption among regular people, many of which have more than 1 pc, iPhones, Blackberries, Windows Mobiles, and Macs in the family. [Mesh blog] [LiveSide.net blog]

3. Atlas Shrugged would only be 1140 pages and we would all be objectivists. [Amazon, highly recommended] [Objectivism wikipedia]

My initial thoughts about Mesh...

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:18:58 GMT

Update 7/28/08: LiveSide (http://www.liveside.net/, or Twitter @liveside) posted that Mobile Mesh is out in a limited capacity (no folder IO sync yet), http://m.mesh.com from your Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone, or Symbian.

Update #2 7/29/28: Mac client was out briefly today, but was quickly brought offline. Screenshots for this & mobile are at http://www.liveside.net.

First and foremost:The platform sells itself: The key is getting people to install the client, add something to their Mesh from one device, and 'consume' it from another. Nevermind the details, they complicate things. Erick at TechCrunch stated in April that Mesh is 'aimed at developers'. What? Why are they aiming? Throw it out there with some simple user stories and see what happens. Share photos, back-up your important stuff, access your favorites from any computer, write your own news stream. It could be compared to the functionality of many social apps: flickr, google docs, twitter, all the recent sync/backup services (that's the trend lately I guess)...

Wish my Blackberry had a Mesh client. I would love to sync images/videos taken with my camera, view files from my laptop, home pcs, work pc, from my blackberry... Mobile clients are due in late '08.

Wish Mac had a Mesh client. My boss has shifted to the Mac camp, and I don't really blame him. Ours isn't the only enterprise with a chance to convert from MSFT to Mac/Linux in the next 3-5 years. Non-windows clients for the Mesh platform won't keep this from happening, but it will reduce the growing 'painting myself into the corner' feeling that MSFT technologies tend to have. Mac clients are supposedly due for release late this year.

Source control??? Sharing of files & folders, reporting, versioning, syncing, and for extra credit: realtime collaborative authoring (at the very least, via remoting)??? Still unsure about how many requirements Mesh meets here, still playing around with it.

Smaller bits from the blog team: This is probably rediculous, but Twitter is ruining my taste for verbosity. I guess there should be some detailed anchor content that is thorough, and it's as good a place as any. I have to wonder though: If the Mesh team posted more frequently on much smaller stories and concepts, Mesh adoption may increase, and the details would flesh themselves out via posts from the developers they're targeting (like me).

Public Mesh: It may not be practical in a Mesh topology, but it would be cool to be able to watch how other people are using Mesh, and it may create opportunities to broaden networks.

Competing with Google: MSFT needs to go live with a model that makes me feel like they're giving it away. I am sure they will have priced tiers for their services, but the 'free' service should be generous enough that I don't feel like I get more from Google. Let people appreciate the value of the cloud before they are even asked to pay for it in any way.

Hotkey: I love notifyicons, but I love hotkeys more. I don't like to have to hunt for my icon to view remote documents or interact with my colleagues. It needs to become a natural extension of my Windows experience, like OS X's F12

Social net awareness: Import my friends from {twitter, gmail, facebook, linkedin}. Mesh should give me as many opportunities as possible to bridge my social nets together - this complements its goals of bridging apps and devices. Friendfeed does an amazing job at this, but will probably always be just a social net.

Depot, an exercise in Community-Sourcing

Gerry Heidenreich — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 04:43:59 GMT

No downloads or pics, just a quick rundown of a very cool app idea while it's in my head.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a small winforms app. It's stayed very rough around the edges and hasn't gone anywhere from the original prototype. This prototype (I called it Depot) was written as a proof-of-concept of the simplest possible community-sourced bookmarking / tagging / searching tool that could possibly exist. A self-organizing business-specific link / text library could provide immense value to a company.

Depot hinges on 4 basic features common with collaborative apps:

1. Producing: Adding content in the form of URLS and/or text (2 different fields that can be used individually or combined)

2. Tagging

3. Searching for any item by any combination of title words or tag

4. Sharing: All content is automatically shared, and open to edit & extend, by anyone within the network

The search is an autocomplete textbox, that works with any combination of title words and tags. Typing 'catering' displays all catering items, but as you start to type 'catering madison', the suggestions filter appropriately. As you would expect, changing the text over to 'thai madison' updates to items tagged or titled with thai and madison.

The url + text fields is an interesting feature - a user may want to toss in a quick note for a catering url someone else added, like "Beware the red curry!!!".

The app seemed to work beautifully, but the algorithm is not built to scale up yet. Everything is cached heavily on the client-side. There are no concurrency checks. Also, to be fit for production, it will need some kind of user-auditing, history, and probably some kind of browser integration (or at least bookmark / favorites sync).

I don't know yet what will become of Depot. I hope to find the time and motivation soon to dust it off and start polishing it up for a pilot group. If nothing else, I got an ornery hog of a tag-search algorithm that may come in useful someday.

Shrinking the 'App Surface' - Microsoft Mesh

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:58:30 GMT

I have lost track of how many social networks I'm involved with. The 'app-surface' is too huge to manage.

In my work, we struggle with a problem of custom development: another system means another place for the lawyers to worry about their data.

We are maintaining apps that were designed for a specific purpose but are being used by 25% of the organization.

Occasionally, I will bang out a new prototype app that may or may not take off. It helps keep the innovation conversation going, but it broadens the surface of possible apps to work in. This is a problem. The solution is buried somewhere within the combination of service-enabling application data, creating dashboards and pluggable architectures, notification systems, unified communication, etc... Lately we have been talking about Sharepoint as the ultimate solution because you can wire all of your enterprise libraries into web parts and slap it all onto a single webpage. What about mobile data then? What about non-web types of collaboration? What about persisting a conversation between meetings, email, and phone? The problem too big to solve with a website. It may be too big to solve with a platform, but it sounds like Microsoft is having a go at it with Mesh.

The Mesh is composed of 'mesh objects', which are standardized feeds (SSE, which is now FeedSync) of data. Mike Zintel from the Live Mesh Team talks about Mesh in his "Live Mesh As A Platform" post:

... a customer’s mesh, or collection of devices, applications and data that an individual owns or regularly uses...
... one instantiation of a mesh object is as a local (shared, aka Live) folder on a PC. This same mesh object might be instantiated as a slideshow on a web site, and as preview and upload UX on a mobile device with a built-in camera. A Live Folder is but one specialization of a mesh object. A mesh object could also represent a range of cells in Excel or a To Do list that can be accessed from anywhere...

I want this so bad... My collaboration post here shows where my head is at when it comes to communication channels and their disconnectedness from each other. I think speech-to-text and text-to-speech, combined with data-to-feed and feed-to-data (bidirectional feeds especially, with FeedSync!) are going to tie things together and shrink our app-surface to a managable level. The Mesh, as far as I understand it, is the first technology that makes this seem possible.

In the meantime we will keep juggling (and forgetting about) our socnets along with our various calendars, emails, meetings, and apps...

What may have been http://ep.iphano.us

Gerry Heidenreich — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:40:14 GMT

Still on the subject of Atwood (3rd post in a row) & stackoverflow.com (2nd in a row)... this is it though...

In Jan 07 I jotted some stuff down, called it ep.iphano.us (don't know if the domain was available then, it isn't now). I wonder how close the stackoverflow.com vision is to what I had in mind? I invisioned urls as answers, but it seems like Jeff & Joel want their own knowledge base of fresh answers. Pasted notes from my tiddlywiki:

Overview
Digg-like community where users submit ideas or questions, and other users submit URLs as answers to them. Users can endorse questions, as well as responses. Each user has 2 scores: QEndorsements, and AEndorsements. The front-page effect is used for 2 lists, both chronological: Left lists requests (ideas/questions) that have passed some threshold of endorsements, and Right shows Responses that have exceeded some threshold of answer endorsements. Users can subscribe to filtered sets of questions and/or answers. Submissions (requests or responses) can be categorized, described, discussed, and tagged. Users can subscribe to their own sets, which may be as simple as all requests that are either tagged 'movie' or categorized as 'movie'.

Use Cases
- Submit new Idea or Question (request submission type)
- Submit new response (as url, to a request)
- Create filtered set for request- Create filtered set for response
- Grab feed url for filtered set
- View set
- View front page (requests, and responses)
- Endorse request
- Endorse response

Db Tables
- SubmissionType {Request, Response}
- FilterType {EndorsementCount, CategoryType, SubCategory, Tags, UserEndorsements, UserEndorsements, User, Filter}
- CategoryType {Technology, Science, World & Business, Sports, Entertainment, Gaming}
- User
- Submission
- UserEndorsement
- UserFilter (UserSet)
- SubmissionTag
- SubmissionSubCategory
- UserSubmissionTypeScore

Community-Sourcing

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:10:06 GMT

I have been a HUGE fan of Digg.com for years. The content is generally good, the community is fun and (again, generally) intelligent, but the model: Submit/Vote/Discuss/Report... brilliant.

MyStarbucksIdea.com, and Dell's IdeaStorm.com follow the Digg.com model, but in the context of innovation focused on a business. They are crowdsourcing their innovation to the world, and their future offerings are going to be more organic than ever before. The new tool on their belt gives them a clearer idea of their actual customers' wishes. Minimize the assumptions. Outsource your innovation to the one group the really cares about your product, and spend next to nothing for the data you get from it... brilliant.

Wikipedia (currently) defines Crowdsourcing as "... the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call."

I am in the habit of repurposing (or desigining my own) social-network ideas as internal solutions, and along the way I have occasionally had my share of failage/lesson-learnage, but I've also scored some wins. Like everybody else that thinks they have a new idea worthy of its own name, I have started calling it 'community sourcing'.

I reformed the definition above to fit my needs:

Community Sourcing
The act of taking a task traditionally performed by a specific member of the group, or consultant and exposing it to a controlled, generally large group of people who share the same interest as the group, in the form of an open call.

The term seems to be out there (google 2080 hits), and the purpose looks similar.

As far as walking-the-walk goes, we have working 'community sourced' systems used every day for content-management, marketing, and project management. Newer and (therefore, I hope) less-used solutions include link-tracking (think del.icio.us), and yes, a submit/vote/discuss/report app, which, in my humble opinion, is... brilliant.

MIX, TED - there goes your day...

Gerry Heidenreich — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:01:41 GMT

MIX Session videos: http://sessions.visitmix.com/

Follow-up email from TED conference:

And now, when you're ready, take 18 minutes to watch this astonishing talk from Harvard-trained brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor. It drew a huge standing ovation in the first session of the conference and, by general consensus, counts as one of the most memorable TED talks of all time.

We also had a chance to hear details from Craig Venter of just how close he now is to creating synthetic life -- for example, bacteria designed from scratch to gobble CO2 and generate advanced fuels. This could be one of the biggest scientific stories of our lifetimes. It will either thrill you or scare you -- or both.

The astronomer Roy Gould ended weeks of blogosphere speculation by unveiling a beautiful new product created by Microsoft's Curtis Wong: the WorldWide Telescope. Here's the hi-res version of this talk. It's spectacular.

Ballmer on Yahoo!: "we will be a PHP shop"

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:02:31 GMT

I hadn't even thought about it...

MIX '08 keynote with Guy Kawasaki, about 43:28 into the interview. Also, I noticed Rob Zelt got to ask a question during the Q/A afterwards...

The interview covered Yahoo, as well as MacBook Air, Google, Apple, Firefox, and some Monkeyboy love for web developers.

Collaboration Katamari: Brainstorming for the ultimate collaboration app

Gerry Heidenreich — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:16:00 GMT

Communication mediums are everywhere - each has it's benefits and drawbacks. Ward Cunningham once asked “What is the simplest online database that could possibly work?”, hit a few keys, then the wiki was born. I've always been facinated by the consistent emergence and evolution of collaborative mediums...

Every once in awhile, things like BBS, IRC, ICQ, Usenet, telephones, and water coolers fall into the hands of users that use it, extend it, and make it perpetual. New technologies like Google Gears and Yahoo Pipes, and the .Net 3 stack are appearing that give us the power to wire up some killer-features into our existing frameworks & apps.

I just tripped across a small feature list of what I would consider the ultimate collaboration app. I wrote this months ago, when my site was offline (I've got a lot of written stuff still sitting around, gotta get it up here)... When I wrote it, I was reflecting on what communication channels we use every day, and what makes them important to us:

Common communication channels:

- Phone call
- Conference call
- Meeting
- Static website (managed by IT)
- Dynamic website (managed by Knowledge Owners as Content Managers)
- Wiki
- Email
- Blog
- Instant messaging (IM)
- Walk-in / informal discussions

What's the perfect all-purpose collaboration app? Here's my feature-list for the Killer Collaboration Application

Ease of use - You can quickly and naturally provide information without stepping out of the flow of your work

Email and IM feel natural, and if users are able to disable the interruptive aspects of them, they provide a great environment for informal and quick group discussion. Websites (Content Management Systems) require some knowledge, and usually the user needs to open a browser to access/change information, and are therefore more disruptive.

Timeliness - How up-to-date is the information? Is it stale by the time it's needed by others?

Many mediums use a chronological format. Email (in particular, the inbox) is a chronological list of correspondence that is easy and natural to use. Using Re: and some clever UI tweaks, 'threads' of discussion can continue on, keeping a discussion and information timely. IM is the poster-child of timeliness, to the extreme that lighthearted conversation is one click away. Copy and paste a news hyperlink directly to friends in your IM network and they immediately get notified.

Applicable - Does this information apply only to current circumstances, or is it applicable outside these circumstances, even to other parties? How does this information apply to others?

Phone calls or IMs may used for be personal, circumstancial purposes. Meetings include those 'in context' to the purpose of the meeting.

Accessible - Is this information available to others outside the exchange? Over what channels? Is the information 'pushed' out to users, or do they have to actively pursue it?

Websites and wikis are used to be accessible to larger audiences.

Accurate - Is the information being exchanged conclusive, substantive, concrete, of good quality, objective? Or is it informal, ad-hoc, subjective, inconclusive?

Persistent - Is the information available after the exchange? Is it recorded somehow, or does it exist on a persistent platform like within a database?

Meetings and phone calls do not persist without the help of minutes or recording equipment. Most other mediums persist chronologically, in a proprietary format. Custom, database applications and service-oriented architectures provide flexible persistence solutions.

Stable - Is the information backed-up, are updates audited? Or is it volatile, where random updates can occur and remove or irreparably change data?

Wiki content, though it is open and easily editable by anyone, has full auditing (who done it?) and versioning (roll it back!) to enforce stability. Email threads can easily lose focus or change topics entirely over a series of correspondence, and are therefore more volatile (yet more conversational).

Reusable - Does the information exist in a standard, open fashion that enables others to access it for their own needs?

RSS, Web services, and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) provide standard channels for outside applications to repurpose data. Extracting data from an outside source can literally be as easy as writing a url and picking through the resulting XML response.