On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Dan Coutu <[email protected]> wrote: > Marc Farnum Rendino wrote: > > I'd like to expand on this concept further. One of the most critical > problems Vermont faces with regard to ease in growing any business is our > geography. In a word, mountains. > > As has been pointed out earlier Flint hates traveling in the winter because > he's experienced a rollover. He's not the only one and it is indeed a > life-changing experience. Unless you're lucky enough to have direct > interstate access to your destination anywhere you go in the state is a long > trip. > > So to take off on the multiple sites idea I'd propose that if it is worth > pursuing this idea then it is worth pursuing the concept of multiple small > locations scattered around the state rather than only two. Then of course > the next step to make them viable as a collective entity is that we need to > setup the proper collaboration tools and infrastructure. > > If people are willing to expand this beyond the scope of Burlington and > Montpelier then I'd be willing to help out with providing a place to host a > set of web-based software tools. For me this is critical to the things that > I'd like to achieve. I'm too far away from almost everyone for it to be > practical to physically show up in most places in the state but I have no > shortage of project ideas and business connections that could be used to > provide some focused creative direction that could actually result in the > participants making a buck. I figure that's not a bad thing...
Dan, You bring up an interesting and important point. For software projects and presentations (on any subject), I think we could do a lot for people that aren't located in Burlington/Montpelier. From a software perspective we could enable access to source repositories (I assume we'd do this anyways so you can work on projects remotes) and to project servers (this may be a little more complicated, depending on the type of access needed. Maybe a VPN? SSH tunnel?). For presentations we can strive to make all presentations available both as audio (for dial-in participants) and audio/video or desktop sharing. I have started working on the audio (dial-in) portion for the VAGUE meetings, and am very close to having this up and running. Doing the same for the project space would be a requirement, IMO. However, one aspect of the project space is non-software projects. In some cases, this can be done remotely as well, with people in different areas collaborating using some of the tools mentioned above. Of course, I am interested to hear other ideas on the subject as well. Kevin
