Last night was the RefreshBCS event we hosted at The Creative Space and it was a huge success. Around 40-50 (awesome) people showed up to check things out and show support. I just wanted to thank EVERYONE who took time out of their night to come and see what we are all about. I even met a couple of people from Austin and San Antonio who are out to make their own collaborative spaces. So, lets keep this amazing ball rolling and we look forward to seeing you all again!
Special thanks to Square One Bistro, Maddens and BuildingProcess.com for donating the food and drinks!
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.
Date: Wednesday, July 11, 2007 When: 7:00PM Where: La Salle Hotel, Downtown Bryan
RefreshBCS is proud to announce that Whurley will be visiting Bryan/College Station on Wednesday, July 11th at 7PM at the La Salle Hotel located in downtown Bryan. He will be talking about technology, open source software, and how the open-source philosophy applies to the way we live and work. This should be lighter on technical things, and heavier on culture and creativeness. You don’t have to be a software developer to understand what Whurley will be talking about.
Whurley’s Bio:
William Hurley is the Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy at BMC Software, Inc. Also known as “whurley”, he is responsible for creating BMC’s open source agenda and overseeing the company’s participation in various free and open source software communities to advance the adoption and integration of BSM solutions. A technology visionary and holder of 11 important patents, whurley brings 16 years of experience in developing groundbreaking technology. He is the Chairman of the Open Management Consortium, a non-profit organization advancing the adoption, development, and integration of open source systems management. Named an IBM Master Inventor, whurley has received numerous awards including an IBM Pervasive Computing Award and Apple Computer Design Award.
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.
Date: June 27, 2007 @ 7:00PM Location:Varisco Building 219 N. Main (Bryan) [Map] Topic: Google is coming!!! RSVP is required
Hi folks, RefreshBCS would like announce that Google is coming to Bryan/College Station to speak to the community on Wednesday, June 27th at 7PM. FIBERTOWN has arranged for us to meet in the beautiful Varisco Building located in downtown Bryan at 219 N. Main. The folks from Google will be speaking about their product line, services, and what may lie down the road as Google continues to amaze us. A full meal from Square One Bistro will be provided by 372 Media. Please RSVP so an accurate amount of food can be prepared. We expect quite a few people will show up and we want to make sure we have enough chairs and food for everyone.
Date: June 13, 2007 @ 7:00PM Location: Hawthorn Suites Conference Center [map] Topic: Service Oriented Architecture: A Mashup Culture
Ben Floyd (Texas A&M) will be talking about the move to Service Oriented Architecture, and software as a service. Mashups are becoming very popular in high tech society today as a way to lower development costs and leverage social intelligence. Talk of the semantic web has fueled a new generation of thinkers to combine silos of information into much more powerful networks of software systems.
For the presentation Ben will talk about some of the more popular web service providers such as Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, and describe how they and others are using their services. Ben will also talk about SOA in corporate environments such as HP, IBM and Dell. Ben will also cover things like Flickr, YouTube, blogs, wikis, RSS, etc. Some of them are coming up with ways to link their information together in a SOA-ish way.
Date/Time: May 9, 2007 - 7:00PM Where: Margarita Rocks (sideroom) Speaker: Roby Fitzhenry Topic: Design is _______ - A presentation on design, it’s importance, and how to use it to it’s fullest potential. RSVP: upcoming.org
Wow. May 9th is coming faster than I expected. If there is anything anyone wants mentioned, let me know and I will try to fit it in. To add to the excitement, 372 will most likely be giving away things like a Square One Bistro gift card, an Activist Apparel t-shirt, and maybe a few more printed goods. I truly look forward to speaking from my soul to all who make it out. This is an opportunity of a lifetime and I plan to present it as such. See you soon!
Refresh is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in their areas. Promoting design, technology, usability, and standards.
The Refresh Manifesto
Let's Gather Great Minds
Let's Share All Of Our Knowledge
Let's All Grow And Learn
Let's Promote Local Talent
Let's Be More Than We Think Can Be
Let's Make Our Cities Better
