It’s been almost two years since that pivotal night when Aaron, Roby, Bill, Ryan and I were huddled around a table in Houston digging through a mound of chicken wings when we decided that we would stop bashing our local area for it’s lack of community. We threw caution to the wind, payed attention to the chip on our shoulders and dug our heels in.

Two months later we had native Houstonian Erica O’Grady come and speak to a surprising group of 35 or so folks at the very first RefreshBCS. Honestly, we figured we may be able to get a dozen folks to show up with half attending just to show support. But that was not the case. They showed up because they were genuinely interested in a creative/web community.

It became vital to promote our fledgling community and stick to it. Every month to be bigger than the previous with new faces. Each member of the community saw that if we all worked together and each did our part we could do something extraordinary.

As time went by, we had more and more folks show up and contribute. Some presented to the group, and other times put their feet to the ground and rallied those not aware.

By January 2008, nearly a year after the first RefreshBCS, we decided to call in all of our support from around the state and host BarCampTexas. Flyers, posters, emails, facebook notifications were sent out by the dozens hyping the event. We had well over two-hundred people attend from around the state and local area. We didn’t just represent BCS, we blew people away with the talent and conduct we showcased at our event. BarCampTexas was Bryan/College Stations big splash onto the Texas stage.

Over the past year, we have grown and sought after more community support. We’ve collectively grown as a community. This past weekend, the Bryan/College Station community hosted DesignCamp – the first Design-centric “BarCamp” in the world.

What was really surprising was that a majority of the attendees were not from out of town, but here locally. Seventy percent of the participants were from here in our local community – a vast difference from a year ago when it was inverted.

Stepping back and looking at what we have done over the past two years makes me, as a member of the greater whole, proud. To see everyone “get it” and take pride in what we do.

I wanted to say thank you to all of my friends for being there and contributing to making our lives better in lil ol’ Bryan/College Station. We have built a very strong and robust community of folks who continually show their support.

-Cody

Dirk Fowler has an exhibition running from November 8-22 that is open 8-5pm. His gallery is located in the Wright Gallery on Texas A&M’s campus. You can learn more about Dirk and his work here, or at GigPosters.com. You can also simply do a quick Google search. It is an honor to have such a talented individual in our area so please take time to view his exhibition.  If you have any questions, let us know!

- Roby Fitzhenry

My name is Dan Cary. I co-manage the .net users group here in B/CS. I also have limited participation in some of the other local IT groups.  In managing this group, I have constantly run into location scheduling problems. In addition, I have had friends(limited computer users) ask me to teach a course on various topics. When I first heard about The Creative Space, I thought yes, this is the place. But, that ended up being a little different than I had expected it to be. Not to diminish the efforts of Cody, Roby, et al, they did bring co-working to B/CS, but I feel like we need to expand this concept.

So, I was talking with Robert Stackhouse about my plans to build a warehouse type facility where people could schedule usage for free or nominal fee. Robert  mentioned to me that there are other people in the community who are interested in low cost communal IT socializing facility. So, I am going to try to help organize efforts to see if we can bring these people and their ideas together with this goal in mind.

My Ideal location Requirements:

• Central to B/CS
• Free / Cheap
• wi-fi
• Food Preparation Area (small kitchen/fridge/coffee maker)
• Alcohol is OK (for socials)
• Has couches and tables

Usage:

• Co-working during normal business hours.
• Local IT professionals could hold classes.  I have seen interest on even ones most basic computer usage.
• Professionals teaching professionals. If cost were low enough, people could just put together a sessions(e.g. ROR, Unit Testing, CSS, Class Design, Reporting services)
• User group usage(this is where food prep area comes in, Even just the use of a stove for cooking pizza or something to bring food cost down. I know this is not realistic but I thought I would include it.)

Ideas for securing a space:

• Tax Dollar Funded Community Center (perfect)
• Donated Commercial location (We could convince a landlord that is having trouble renting space to donate the usage of that location. It could possibly be a tax right off if any non-profits use the facility.) I have some friends who own property. I could ask them if there would be any incentive other than cash that would be acceptable.
• Interested participants put some money together and by a location for this use. I know of a 4-plex for sale @ 60k. (sorry, just brain storming.)
• Create a non-profit IT org that might be able to raise tax deductable donations and grants for such a location.
• Get a list of restaurants that are have facilities for use and convince them that this is good for business and ask them to wire the room for wireless.

This is just a start. I would encourage others to add to the list so that its comprehensive even if you don’t thing you desires will match with others.  Maybe someone could post some of this information on a refresh related blog so that other could contribute in the form of comments.  I am honestly not very good with blogs and social sites.

Thanks for your time, Dan Cary

I have yet to attend a BarCamp so you could guess how excited I am. It’s going to be a great time full of laughs, tears, and a lot of learning. Those would be good tears by the way. If ANYONE is interested in attending, we are getting a group together to show Houston what Bryan/College Station can bring to the table. There are lots of great talents in Houston so the networking opportunities are amazing. Be there or be square (even though squares are cool too). For more information, email us and we will get back with you asap. THANKS!

I was buying some produce this afternoon at the grocery store when a lady approached me and asked, “Is that rosemary?”

An innocent enough question coming from a complete stranger, so I proceeded to tell her where I found it.

She said, “No, I know where you can get it in this store.” Then she proceeded to tell me about a beautiful rosemary bush that she knew of by the physical plant on A&M’s campus where I could collect the herb for free. She asked me if I knew where that was. I said I did (I think after two victory laps, I know where most things are on campus now). She kind of nodded (and she looked as though she had been preparing to give me directions from the grocery store straight there). My initial reaction was to be a little annoyed at the interference in my life. She had probably slowed me down for a good thirty seconds or so.

A bit later while still in the market, my attitude towards her intrusion into my day changed. I began to feel grateful for the suggestion (although herb collecting on public land is not my sort of thing). A complete stranger had taken time to try to save me money. She had been concerned however briefly with my prosperity. After making this realization, I felt a little ashamed of myself. This kind soul was just trying to help me out, and I had reacted almost with repulsion

I’ve had the opportunity to live several places in my life: Colorado, Texas, Georgia, Virginia, New York, and Eygpt. Most of them are very near to my heart, but there is no place on earth I’d call home after Bryan/College Station, and folks like that woman are why.

We should all take a cue from this woman. We should concern ourselves with helping others to not just live but to prosper. Open-source software initiatives are founded on these ideals. So we as Ags or members of the community should donate our time to open source projects. To sort of quote Stephen King, karma is a wheel: you get what you give. The works you do for the public good will inspire someone else to do likewise and you in turn shall reap the rewards of your work.

If you don’t feel that you are a seasoned enough developer or designer to effectively contribute to an open source project, you might try writing documentation for one, or just blogging about one. Most open-source efforts are in desperate need of good documentation.

Well, I’ve been talking about it long enough. It’s time we start planning BarCampBCS. We’ll use the wiki over at barcamp.org and sign up. The password for the wiki is “c4mp”. We’ll be planning the event in a couple of weeks and announcing the logo/schedule/etc. BarCamps can be a lot of work, or a little bit of work. It all depends on how things come together. That’s all that’s known so far, but I’ll announce more later . Here’s a couple of videos for you to check out, if you’ve never experienced a BarCamp.

Many application developers have no formal graphic design or multimedia training, yet they produce applications that are experienced visually or aurally. In many cases, programmers primarily concern themselves with the quality of the functionality that they develop in their applications giving little thought to the quality of feedback the program provides the user (the user experience). Aritists who work in development environments seldom concern themselves with anything but layout and design. Many multimedia developers don’t really take to creating the art assets or touching the codebase that utilizes their content, but are comfortable scripting in their own environment.

In the world of today, it is taken for granted that applications will work, that they will be attractive and that they will provide high quality feedback. Working within our “comfort zones”, we can not produce as high a quality of work as what would be possibly if we could “speak each others languages”. In a world where specialization is king, eventually the people who can communicate across occupational boundaries will be the most sought after and the most highly paid folks around.

We are interested in breaking people out of their comfort zones and enabling them to cross occupational boundaries. We are not suggesting that you should give up all your training time to pursue previously undeveloped skills in art, design or programming. We are suggesting that it would be to your benifit to broaden your skills to include things not directly in your area of specialization. How much or how little is up to you.

We can see the benefit to the community of offering seminars covering art, design and programming from the perspective of what would be valuable to practioners of other disciplines. If you’d be interested in learning aspects of someone else’s purview, please leave a comment below. Comments should be targeted to give us an idea of what to cover. An example of a good comment might be:

I am a web programmer that works primarily with part time or freelance designers. Our shop has 3-5 programmers, and we are all extremely busy working on a large scale project. Whenever we are presenting a work in progress to the client, we like to make on the spot layout/style changes if possible to respond to the client, but our designers aren’t always available. I believe it would be helpful to know how to do a minimum of things in CSS to perform these changes when our designers are out of the office.

Let us know what types of skills you think you would benefit from learning about to help you out in your daily development life. Being an effective member of a multi-disciplinary team can often mean crossing those occupational boundaries to get the job done. Let us help you to do so.