Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

a2b3 non-summary for 17 April 2008

26 people for lunch today, plus 3 who weren't at the introductions. Thanks to everyone for coming.

I'm resuming a previous effort to do post-event "non-summaries", just a few words about what everyone was up to. Even a non-summary with links takes a little time.

Helene Gidley is organizing an Agile Groupies meeting Apr 30 5-7pm at Spark. (UPDATED)

Phil Barr has a new job at Thomson Healthcare.

Spencer Thomas has photos up at Sweetwaters from Festifools.

Mike Gould showed his Ann Arbor Ad Club photography portfolio.

Winston Tsang showed hahlo, a twitter client for the iPhone.

Joe Minock announced Digital Edge Michigan. (UPDATED)

Tom Brandt brought a forms ruler from his tenure at Burroughs.

Henry Velick is a software guy, but he carries a Leatherman.

Archie Cowan is at JSTOR; his Blackberry is paged when something is wrong. (UPDATED)

David Bloom is a coach at SPARK and a connector for Factotem.

John Paul Naroski brought Chad Wiebesick to lunch.

Chad Wiebesick is new to town and newly married.

Susan Harris knows more about Juniper routers than anyone in the room.

John Weise has been chronicling the appearance of a floor on the Diag.

Steve Colson is one of the sponsors of the Ann Arbor Drupal Users Group.

Karen Moorhead (@a2karen) waved at me, but we didn't get a chance to talk much.

Pat Adams stays in touch with his daughter in Asia via Skype.

Emily Webster handed out Ann Arbor Radio business cards.

Matt Souden builds web sites.

Sunny Beach brought a loupe for examining the quality of print.

Lance Carlson doesn't need to carry fake id any more.

Larry Kestenbaum is interested in the architecture of the ragtime era.

Patricia Anderson is teaching a course on how to search Pubmed using Twitter.

Doug Dormer grew up in my home town and was wearing shorts.

Edward Vielmetti organizes lunch and showed his "Not An Employee" stickers.

Larry Siden has an LED flashlight that sends Morse code.

Dan Cooney arrived early and headed off to lunch elsewhere.

Jose Nazario arrived late and doesn't always get enough sleep.

Ron Suarez put together podcasts for the visit of the Dalai Lama.

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Arbcamp planning session at the lofty loft

Arbcamp is this coming weekend at WCC. Here's notes from a planning session (raw unedited mostly to share)

attendees: @logista @vaguery @ingenexgroup @bkerr @dunrie @hsgidley @edwardvielmetti @3point7ross

How do we tell people what is going to happen? (Both then and now).

Free t-shirts from Retro Duck, East Lansing
Barrel of cocktail monkeys from Archie McPhee to go to ABC
Cash bar at ABC - a little before 6 to setup - event 6-10pm.
"A night at the tap room"

schedule
9am schedule
1230-100 schedule

Pecha Kucha - David Bloom
autotimer for slides

Charlie Penner, Washtenaw Community College

Demo session - speed geeking

What is this for?

Anyone can talk
The people who are here are the best people who can be here
Law of personal mobility

Before hand:
- Office max trip
- Name badges
- Photography
- Video
- Open wifi
- Whiteboards, easels

Bring in lanyards from past conferences

What will the School of Information bring?

Presence at open space meetings - twitter flickr etc etc

arbcamp IRC chat room, web client for IRC so that people can chat.

Post party scanning bee to collect and document artifacts

Recent Changes Camp experience: after the first one, having the artifacts in place from the last one makes planning the next one easier.

Betsy Weber as a connection to bring folks?
Quicken Loans?
Genecodes?
Detroit News

Public registration list? So you can see who has registered.

Outside.in geoaggregation - tag aggregation for arbcamp tag

(Note to self add an arbcamp category)

Facebook strategy for the event - tag peoples names in the middle of sessions.

Ping Ashwin re the group 500 UM Engine student list

Jaffe 1230-930pm

Child care?

Logistics for the books

Cloth bags?

Setup, cleanup?

Technorati Tags: arbcamp, not-barcamp, nosirree-absolutely-not-barcamp, openspace

a2b3 meeting non-summary 8/23/07

Thanks to everyone for coming.

I circulated blank 4x6 cards at the meeting, and encouraged people to write something on them. This turns out to be a good way to write up a meeting summary, and so I'm going to be ultra-lazy and just transcribe the interesting bits from them rather than describe what actually happened.

If you want something in next week's non-summary, make
sure you write it on a card. thanks!

Ed

notes:

Welcome new lunch member Joel Vergun, who among other things
is a pilot for Spirit Airlines.

"I didn't expect a quiz" - Jose

How do I get Google Earth free?
free download at http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html

"Norp snadt queednop!
Goobnatz fracknyerp?
Spliz grobnitzger." - dcb

"I've never gotten a job thru any way but my personal network. I got my last job thru emailing Ed. (While that's not scalable for Ed, it worked great for me.) - dunrie

New project for Ann Arbor: Turn 415 West Washington into a "Neutral Zone for Grownups" - drron

Arborwiki has a new, stable home at the Ann Arbor District Library. A great second birthday present. It means a shiny future, as long as Merit stays up. - mahatm

"I want to help keep our students current in the area of technology. Visions in education, trends to pass on". - susette

---

By my guess the cards were a success, and I'll repeat that next week. The next iteration on that is to provide something that's not blank, and for that I'll be looking for inspiration from the Hipster PDA:

http://www.diyplanner.com/templates/official/hpda/

if you have any favorite, appropriate, or fun templates from that do let me know and we'll try to get some more cognitive artifacts for use then.

The missing link for the cards was something to write on them with. If your organization produces promotional pens, pencils, or other logo-inscribed writing materials, bring two or three dozen of them to the meeting and we'll
expand our inventory of user-generated media data capture devices.

thanks

Ed

Technorati Tags: 48104, warning:indirect-selflink, a2b3, annarbor, jobs, indexcards, hipster-pda, meetings, kids

a2b3 lunch non-summary August 16, 2007

We had about 35 people for lunch at Eastern Accents. The question of the day way "what event is on your calendar" - here's the results in the simplest most basic format w/links to Arborwiki for detail pages.

in the rough order of the events

tomorrow procrastination

every Thursday a2b3 lunch at Eastern Accents (arrive early to avoid a line)
every Friday coworking at Pure Visibility in the a.m.
Saturday music event at Great Oak Cohousing starts 11am
Saturday Facebook event in Chicago
this weekend Ypsilanti Heritage Festival
Monday deadline for "stick around Ann Arbor" story
Tues UPA Generational Design in Livonia (carpool available)

Aug 24 Dexter Cider Mill opens. Fresh, hot donuts.

Aug 28 Leaders Connect / Connect Ann Arbor event
Aug 30 Lansing-Mackinaw City bike ride

After Labor Day back to school, 1st day kindergarten
1st weekend September AAUW book sale at WCC

Oct 13, 20 Ruby conference sponsored by Ruby user group
mid Oct MyReggae launches

Oct 27 ArbCamp - Bar Camp Ann Arbor at WCC Morris Lawrence building

Nov 30, 31 NSFNET Legacy 20th reunion in DC area

when this note shows up on Facebook I'll tag it with some people and we can generate the corresponding events there.

thanks all for an awesome lunch.

Ten ways to market your new organization's events

I'm giving a talk on May 22 (today!) at the Ann Arbor IT Zone (Ann Arbor SPARK) on "New marketing". Here are some notes from that talk, which I'm sharing here in advance of actually writing it.

So here are ten ways to market your new organization's events; or, how to grow a group one person at a time, with examples from how the a2b3 weekly bi bim bop lunch group has evolved over two years. More to the point these are mostly quotes that I hope to work in along the way.

UPDATE: here's the presentation as I gave it:

1. Start small.

Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

2. Establish a theme

If you are interested in a weekly bi bim bop tour of Ann Arbor, join the Yahoo group a2b3 at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/a2b3 . The idea is to get a group together who would hit one B^3 place each week until the tour was complete. I'm pretty sure it would take a whole semester to make one round.

3. Build a rhythm

February is the season of small sorrows when everyone feels middle-aged even if you are 16, but there are cures for this. One is skating and another is the convivial lunch. (Garrison Keillor)

4. Start a mailing list

Welcome to an example of ridiculously easy group forming. I wanted to give a quick overview of ridiculously easy group forming. The Internet enables a relatively new thing, group forming. We're defining groups loosely as a number of people who get together persistently. That doesn't mean it's persistent over the years. A group of people might be defined by common interest. Working with groups, you might also find people that just like to hang out together. (Peter Kaminski)

5. Write about what you do

Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mentalregisters. (Cory Doctorow)

6. Collect and keep supporters

My file is quite long now. Every time I think of somebody who has done something that I might need at some point, they’re written in. And that means most people I know (and I don’t necessarily have to know them well to add them - just well enough to be able to contact them). I can add “works in an office” because I might need to know about the latest gadgetry one’s likely to find in a modern office, or “is a single mum” because I might need to know how a woman with young children would go about making ends meet these days, what with nursery fees and everything. In other words, no matter how trivial something may seem, it could well be useful. In fact, it’s the trivialities that are more likely to be useful because how often am I really going to need to know what it was like to sail across the Atlantic? (Sharon Jacobsen)

7. Automate everything

I'm particularly interested in innovative, non-traditional, obscure, or weird ways to keep yourself in sync. Is it all scribbled down on a three for a dollar pocket notebook from the dollar store? Is your life planning tracked in a set of wiki pages? Does your iPod whisper soothing reminders to you in the morning as you go to work? Is your next car maintenance date encoded in intricately beaded knotwork that you carry with you? I'm sure there are more. (vacuum)

8. Keep a calendar

I know this sounds highly improbable to many, however Yahoo always
has difficulties as Mercury approaches retrograde, it usually settles
down again during the retrograde period, and then turns sour again
just before it goes direct.

I'm not pretending that there is a scientific explanation for this,
but it is surprising how often that it is the case.

For those who may be interested, Mercury turns retrograde on the 22nd.

(Rodney Smith)

9. Whatever happens is the only thing that could happen

The other story is about Harrison Owen, who spent a year producing a technical conference with keynotes, panels, white papers and poster sessions, only to fall into a funk after it was over, when he realized that the coffee breaks had been more stimulating than the structured sessions. Taking that instinct seriously, Owen designed a conference format that self-organizes, called Open Space.

Open Space sometimes freaks people out a bit, because it trusts participants so much. What do you mean, you're running a conference and you haven't laid out who is going to say what? You haven't put the leading experts on a dais? (Jerry Michalski)

10. Let the group divide to grow

"The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it's the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar." Robin Dunbar, quoted in Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point

Technorati Tags: 48109

a2b3 in the Ann Arbor Observer, May 2007

a little bit of the lunch series made it into print. Deb Merion writes:

I was surprised and delighted to find a nice little story about A2B3
and Ed on p. 9 of the May 2007 Ann Arbor Observer.
Excerpt: "Attendees generally belong to the city's technorati--
computer programmers, project managers, grad students, and even a
couple of tech-minded politicians. But the key common denominator is
that they all know Ed Vielmetti."

Definitive answer from the Swedish Chef: what is a bumbershoot?

Dan Cooney had a question at the last a2b3 - "what is a bumbershoot?" Here's a definitive answer from the Swedish Chef on that topic:

More on "bumbershoot" from World Wide Words:

It seems to have been yet another of those gloriously facetious bits of wordplay so characteristic of America in the nineteenth century. Quite how it came about is a matter of some guesswork, but it looks moderately certain that the first part derives from the beginning of umbrella, with a b put in front so that it makes the evocative and forceful first syllable bum; the second half, as you surmise, is a respelling of the final syllable of parachute, presumably because of the similar shape.

No need for your bumbershoot today, though a parasol would do you nicely.

Credit to Al Abut for snagging the Chef from YouTube.

Splitting a single blog into multiple streams

There are a lot of reasons to keep a single blog together - you have a single web presence, everyone can find you in one place, and you can point everyone at one URL and they mostly can see who you are.

That said, there's a lot of reasons to pull your net presence apart into fragment, especially if you have interests that diverge. The network likes to see things that have focus, and if your category list is anything like the category list on this blog (with 1000 posts and easily 100 different clumps of articles that could be extended out into their own) it can be hard to be notable for anything except eclecticism. Pull things apart, and each of the sections get their own chance to grow.

When I pulled out Superpatron into its own stream I almost immediately doubled the number of people who could follow it, since it wasn't mixed in with recipes and Ann Arbor news and so on. I'm thinking about more low volume pieces of this blog to pull out into their own worlds, with the first one in mind being a2b3 since that weekly Thursday lunch group already has enough going on in the real world that it doesn't need to be mushed in here.

Jaiku - constructing a consolidated view of your activity online

I joined Jaiku - see http://edwardvielmetti.jaiku.com . It's a handy way to wrap together blog and presence streams from a lot of different services into one stream.

Notably this tool now lets me get some better handle on how and why to post to some old dormant blogs - as long as I can aggregate them somewhere, it doesn't matter that they're not linked six ways from Sunday to this main one. It's nice to write in relative obscurity at times.

I like the lightweight approach to connecting your stuff together. It's not as real time as Twitter - feeds have a noticable lag - so you can't chase your pals around from cafe to cafe with it accurately. That's OK. I also haven't figured out how to post to it directly from Jabber, so it's not as mobile as Twitter on my Blackberry.

With all these things the origin story is more important than the feature set. Jaiku is from Finland via mobile phones; Twitter is from SOMA via blogs and geek spring break at SXSW. Other relevant similar services betray their origins, whether it be Plazes roots in Berlin or Dodgeball's New York City start. If you recall the old "situated software" story from Clay Shirky each of these solve some local problem in their city of origin that extends to the relevant part of the world that's close (enough) psychographically to matter.

More reading:
- How to win in the Twitter vs Jaiku battle, or what to do when 4000 people get your every sneeze IM'd to their phone
- Goodbye Twitter Hello Jaiku on the power of individuals to get people to try out new services

- Jaiku founder Jyri Engeström interview: "We believe that online social behavior as a whole is moving towards groups who are in a state of constant connectedness"
- Jaiku office on Plazes
- Quicksilver plugin for Jaiku using Plazes lets you update location and status message without fingers leaving the keyboard or switching to a browser (OS X)

Technorati Tags: jaiku, plazes, dodgeball, twitter, mososo, socialmedia

a2b3 protocol shift: one brief thing you'd like to do, see, learn, someone to talk to, a goal to reach or a crisis to solve

For the next lunch meeting, we're following this suggestion by Bill Tozier:

From today's lunch: When we go around next time with the name-and-who-we-are thing, could we instead offer up name-and-what-we-want?

In other words, say one brief thing you'd like to do, or see, or learn. Somebody to talk to, a goal, a crisis looking for a solution. Regardless of scale.

Might make an interesting hook for setting up a reciprocity network.

More on organized reciprocity here ("Reciprocity Rings in Organizations").

this message brought to you by the letters A and B and the numbers 2 and 3.

Technorati Tags: a2b3, annarbor, reciprocity