[The OpenSourceBridge folks have given us a free conference membership to raffle off. I'm sure I'll come up with some frighteningly ingenious mechanism for deciding on the winner. Must be present to win!]
The `M' Word for Geeks -- Colleen Dick 6:30pm Tuesday, Apr 21st Eugene City Brewery (downstairs) The silver lining of hard times is that people tend to go back to basics: one important basic is one's human networks. 'Social networks' can either support one's real networks or just be massive time sinks. IT pros tend to focus on network plumbing and assume that the data flowing through the pipes does not meet our signal to noise threshhold. We have plenty of 'interesting' challenges and as a group tend not to be particularly social anyway. The fact is that no one is immune from layoffs and cutbacks and we all need people whether we think we do or not. This talk focuses on some techniques I've been experimenting with to build professional and quasi-professional connections via online social networks. My hope is that the ideas I throw out will generate a lot of discussion. Colleen Dick started her professional life as a bleeding edge he-man bare-metal embedded system and driver designer, but opted to move to Corvallis (with its limited serious software engineering opportunities) to raise a family. Not one to let the brain stagnate, Colleen owned Platypus Software in the early 90's. Platypus used the then-nascent shareware model to distribute a suite of game-like educational software for young children that sat on top of Hypercard, Bill Atkinson's hyperlinked system that predated the WWW by nearly a decade. After Apple both completely dropped the ball with Hypercard and blew their early advantage on the web in an unbelievably stupid way in the mid 90's, Colleen closed Platypus, switched to the web, and has created several large dynamic web apps both on her own and for employers. The latest and greatest of those is TixRUs, an authorized online event ticket selling business that went down in a blaze of drama in April of 2008. Business failures are a learning experience like no other. Scarred but not defeated, Colleen is working to resurrect TixRUs. Pressure to restore positive cash flow ASAP not withstanding, she plans to open the doors again only when certain criteria for success have been satisfied. _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
