Vancouver Startups Career Fair

Looking for a job with a growing high-tech company in Vancouver? Want to learn first-hand what it’s like to work at a tech startup?

The good folks at Techvibes have joined up with more good folks at Launch Party Vancouver to host the Vancouver startups career fair Wednesday, May 21st at 3:00pm at Republic on 958 Granville Street.

Who should attend? From web designers to systems engineers and all stops in between. If you’re a student, a recent graduate, or just part of the workforce and curious about what its like to work for a Start-Up — this FREE event is for you.

Sign up on Facebook for the startups career fair.

Barcamp Vancouver 2007 event details

Barcamp Vancouver 2007 is set to kick off tomorrow night, August 17, at 6 pm. The monster that is Barcamp Vancouver 2007 then runs for 24 geek-packed hours, wrapping up Saturday, August 18 at 5:30.

If you registered many weeks ago, all the details for the good, good fun are below. If you missed out on registering, I’m pretty sure we’ll be running again next year. So stay tuned in July for an announcement.

But before we get to the details of the event, I’d like to pimp the session I’m pitching for Saturday. Here’s the pitch:

Zero to 30 Seconds in Less than 1 Hour or So You Think You Can Make an Ad?

In one session we’ll go from concept to finished product on one or more advertisements (depending on number of participants) for anything we want. Email me if you’d like to get started on a few briefs before the session. — James Sherrett, ad hacker

I expect things may be a little wooly at first. It’s a pretty ambitious goal to bang out a few ads in less than an hour. But I think it’ll be one grand experiment! I’m interested to see how it shakes out.

Anyone interested in going a little pre-session preparation? Contact me and I’ll pass along the briefs I’m working up to get us rolling.

Alright, now the details.

Hello Barcampers!

Here’s our quick note with some details about Barcamp Vancouver 2007

Below you’ll find information on:

• registry and attendance
• t-shirts
• list of topics for sessions
• schedule of Barcamp events
• spreading the love

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Registry and Attendance
http://barcamp.org/BarCampVancouver2007Attendees

We’re oversubscribed (yay!), which means that some people who want
to come won’t be able to come (boo!).

So please, if you’re in the first 120, check your dates and availability.
Are you sure you’re coming? We want to minimize the wiki squatting.

If you’re not sure you’re coming, please strike out your name and post
the name of the top person left on the waiting list in your former place.

If you’re on the waiting list, are you sure you’re available to come?
If not, please cross out your name. If you’re still keen on coming,
check back on the list to see if you’ve been added to the first 120.

We don’t mean to be too anal about this. We just want to make sure
that all the people that want to be there and can be there do get
to be there.

And to do that, please help us get the word out to all Barcampers.
Blog this message if you can. Forward it on to friends who are
interested so people are in the know.

We’ve gone through the list of signed-up attendees. Everyone who
left an email address has been sent this message. But that’s only
53 of about 160 people and email is a fickle mistress.

We’re missing out on getting in touch with some folks and we need
your help to get the word out. So blog the hell out of this and
we’ll (hopefully) reach everyone.

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T-Shirts

We have printed 120 Barcamp Vancouver 2007 t-shirts to cover our
collective nekkidness.

They’re fuschia (!) and they’ll be available at the door on a first-
come, first-served basis.

We’re taking a suggested donation of $20 for each t-shirt, to
finance our lavish unconference lifestyle. Any monies left over will
be rolled into financing next year’s proceedings.

---

List of Topics for Sessions
http://barcamp.org/BarCampVancouver2007

One of the suggestions from past Barcamps has been to post a list
of potential topics for sessions before the unconference. That way,
people can do their homework and get a hint of the sessions
available.

So that’s a great idea. Now let’s put it into action.

On the Barcamp Vancouver 2007 main page we have a heading called
Topics. So far, we have 2 sessions listed. The page is a wiki.
Anyone who wants to add a session, please go to it.

From past unconferences, we’ve seen that topics for sessions that
get listed beforehand have a much higher chance of getting selected
and getting great participation, which is, after all, the point.
So if you want to lead a session, or even just see a session on a
particular topic, please post the topic.

We’ll do some active wiki gardening to lend some order to the list
of topics, but anything is fair game. Go. To. It.

---

Schedule of Barcamp Events

Friday, August 17: food and drink at the Alibi Room

• appetizers all evening
• open bar starting at 6:30 pm (until our credit runs out!)
• we’re in the private area downstairs
• The Alibi Room, 157 Alexander Street @ Main (map)
• sleepover at Workspace, 21 Water Street, Suite 400

Saturday, August 18: conference day all day

• start at 8:30 AM with day organization
• pastries and coffees available
• pizza lunch to be delivered at ~noon
• Workspace, Suite 400 - 21 Water Street (map)
• end at 5:30 PM
• your own reconnaisance

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Spreading the Love

Lots of folks have worked hard to make Barcamp Vancouver 2007
happen. Sponsors have ponied up cash. Busy people have volunteered.
People with work to do have reinvested their attention to see
things get done.

So if you have a chance, thank a volunteer or a sponsor or one
of the folks at Workspace (our venue!) for making the event happen.

Last of all, thanks to all of your for all the enthusiasm, energy
and passion. And for reading this far.

Barcamp lives in the relationships between all of us. All of us
make it happen. So come to the unconference ready to rock and
help us all kick some ass.

---

Any questions?

Check the website for answers:
http://barcamp.org/BarCampVancouver2007

Ask an organizer:

• Kris Krug - www.kriskrug.com
• Roland Tanglao - www.rolandtanglao.com
• Robert Scales - www.robertscales.com
• Zak Greant - www.zak.greant.com
• James Sherrett - www.adhack.com
• Ianiv Schweber - www.blogaholics.ca
• Megan Cole - www.megancole.org
• Jordan Behan - www.telltenfriends.com
• Aaron Gladders - www.2paths.com

See you at the conference!

BarCamp Vancouver 2007: register now!

As one of the organizers for BarCamp Vancouver 2007 I have a bit of an inside track on information. At least, I thought I did.

Then I looked at the BarCamp Vancouver 2007 registry and (gulp!) we were almost halfway to capacity! That was late last week, so I registered myself and Monique.

As I write this, 78 people have registered — 78 out of a maximum of 120 spots!

So if you want to come to BarCamp Vancouver 2007, go to the attendees page and add your name by clicking on Edit at the top of the page. That’s our formal registration process. We may also ask for a donation of $20 at the door. C’est tout.

So what is BarCamp?

The standard definition:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

In my experience, it’s a 24-hour, loosely organized, collaborative event with a focus on community, discovery and relationship building. We create a space that is intimate, open, casual and modest. Professionally, it is a refreshing and inspiring place to be for a few days. No one is selling you on the idea, we’re inviting you to be a participant.

Because everyone is a participant to the degree they’re comfortable. If you want to present, you’ll have a chance to present. If you want to just watch, you’re welcome to do so. If you want to see interesting, creative people in action and take part yourself, you have to see it to know it.

From about 6 pm on Friday, August 17 to about 6 pm on Saturday, August 18, we’re going to take over Workspace and participate in the making of culture.

Sponsor BarCamp Vancouver 2007

Of the organizers, Megan Cole and I are responsible for rounding up sponsors. So would you like to be a sponsor?

Sponsorships are $500 and limited space is available. Deadline for sponsorships commitments is Friday, June 22, but don’t wait because we anticipate being over-subscribed. In fact, we already have 5 companies signed up. More information is available on the BarCamp Vancouver 2007 sponsors page.

If you’re interested, get in touch with me and I’ll fill you in on the details.

The Return on Investment (ROI) of Online Communities

I’m often in the position of being an advocate of online communities. I think that when they’re well conceived and executed they work incredibly well to connect people across roles and organizational constraints. But it can be a hard slog to prove it.

(Not that I really believe in proving things with numbers. I believe marketing is practice of faith, not reason. Yet I have to be able to discuss numbers with some familiarity, and report on progress and results.)

Then today, via the Will Pate experience, I discovered a great post from Bill Johnson on the ROI of Online Communities, with numbers to boot!

Bill and Joe Cothrel presented the following numbers at the Online Community Business Forum.

• Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users (AT&T, 2002).
• 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004).
• Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006).
• In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options (ASP, 2002).
• Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options (Forrester, 2006).
• Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
• Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
• 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007).
• Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail (Jupiter, 2006).

There’s also an accompanying ROI of Communities powerpoint presentation (PDF). So now there are some good numbers to talk about when we talk about how to quantify the ROI of online communities.

Now the nubmers aren’t perfect. In fact, to me they’re more valuable for their consistency with each other and with my experience of conceiving and executing online communities, than as standalone factoids. Basically, people involved in online communities are more engaged in every behaviour you want to foster on your website and for your organization.

What more can I say? Connect with your people and you’ll discover in practice what makes communities so special. But don’t expect a flood. Online communities work more like drip irrigation than a fire hose—small, discreet interactions that accumulate in effect and momentum over time.

How would your website dress to impress?

I read a fantastic article today at the Guardian called The gentle art of selling yourself. For anyone concerned with marketing, online or off, with strategy and communications, it’s an article not to be missed.

That was the beginning of my self-invention, but it is not just me. We are all at it. We are all works of art, or, perhaps more accurately, works of architecture with those three essential elements of core, frame and envelope. For the moment, I am most concerned with the envelope. As Machiavelli knew, appearances are real.

...

In all of this self-invention, confidence plays a part. The great thing about confidence is that it is self-perpetuating. Get a little and you will soon have some more. It’s a cumulative process; as people respond positively, your confidence builds.

One of the things I’m enjoying thinking about right now is how personal identity is influenced by online relationships and avatars. It seems to me like in this new world of explicit identity creation our tools are back to baby steps in creating, understanding and communicating meaning. Email signatures, voicemail messages, profile photos, bios, blogs, ratings from five stars—all these hints contribute little pieces to our online identity. Yet each feels like such as a small cropped snapshop, out of context from the full picture.

So I guess my favourite part of The gentle art of selling yourself is the re-reminder of how rich a subject we all can be.

And what does this have to do with web marketing? Nothing and everything. You decide. It depends on what you get from the article.

To me it reinforces the long way we have to go in making the online experience richer. And, at the same time, it makes me think that we judge websites just like we judge people—from first impressions, making value judgements that are very hard to later overcome—and that, just like clothes, websites communicate the values of the people who build and run them.

Thanks to Malingering for the photo.

The Death of TV in 3 parts

One of the ongoing conversations I often have with clients, friends and colleagues surrounds the current volatile media climate. We’re swimming in more and more mediated information, communications and creative work than ever before, yet the overall landscape is shifting under our feet. Everything seems to be in flux.

The Internet is touted to kill all other media, yet this has never happened before with new media and hasn’t happen now. The usual grand pronouncement that overstate the new in the near term and understate the new in the long term abound. We are awash in people telling us what’s happening, yet there seems less clarity than ever.

Here are a few other salient characteristics of the current discussion.

• A tremendous confusion exists between communications delivery mechanisms (over-air TV and radio signals, wireless Internet, wired TV and telephone lines), presentations modes (audio, video, text) and content created for a specific transmission mechanism


• on TV: sitcoms, dramas, policiers
• on radio: documentaries, radio plays and call-in shows
• on the web: short videos, blogs, podcasts and video podcasts
• Content and services are become divorced from delivery mechanisms. We can watch TV on the web, talk on the phone on the web, watch radio call-in shows on TV, listen to podcasts on radios, watch web videos on our TV.
• Content is become unbuckled from a schedule, shifting to being available on-demand for users to draw it rather than being sent out at a specific time only. Subscriptions are oriented to the content and not the carrier technology or channel.
• Copyright legalities are challenged by the practices of new technologies that make perfect replication simple, cheap and necessary.
• I hear or read people prognosticating on media everyday and often I wonder if they’ve ever tried the thing that they’re supposed to be an expert on. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, P2P networks, blogging and whatever else comes along have to be practiced to be appreciated. In a kind of return to the 4-H motto: Learn To Do By Doing.

Into this conversation I was lucky enough this week to find a presentation by Gary Carter called The Death of TV. Here is Part 2 and here is Part 3. His point about communication devices moving through stages of domestication is lucid and wonderful. His clarity once he arrives at digital transmission and storage technologies makes me wish I’d written some of his speech. To whit:

This is the world of digital television, digital networks, digital everything. Power, in this environment, is certainly not a push, but it’s probably not, in fact, a pull: it is distributed equally, in all parts of the system, acting in all directions simultaneously. In fact, power is a peer-to-peer distributed network. The audience, having been first the recipient of the camera’s gaze, and then its subject, took control first of the means of production, and now, finally, of the means of distribution.

Media has become totally personalised, in all its aspects. It has moved into ‘my space’. The artist formerly known as the audience has become—to use MacLuhan’s prediction from the early ‘70s—the prosumer. To quote Andy Warhol just before his death: “My prediction from the Sixties finally came true. In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, in fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.”

Or, everyone will be famous to 15 people.

So go, read that full text of Carter’s speech if you’re at all interested in the conversation on our current mediated communications. And if you’re reading this, you already are.

Thanks to MIT Advertising Lab for formatting and posting the text of the speech.

Strangely, the 4-H Club motto seems to have changed over time and now seems to be the odd, vague, Orwellian To Make the Best Better.

Get a Travel Bursary for Northern Voice

As Darren says on the Northern Voice website:

This year Northern Voice is offering six travel bursaries of CAN $500 each. The organizing committee will be awarding these bursaries based on a number of criteria, including:

• The contributions you can make to the conference
• Your level of need
• The quality of your submission
• The diversity you might bring to Northern Voice

We’ll announce the recipients of the bursaries on February 2nd, 2007. The bursaries will be paid out via cheque mailed out to recipients or picked up on the day of the conference.

To apply, write a blog post, or record a podcast or video blog post describing why you want to come to Northern Voice. Then submit it via our travel bursaries page.

Essentially we’re trying to make the conference more accessible to folks who otherwise might not able to attend. So if you’re thinking of coming and you have a barrier to it - travel, accommodations, etc. - then be sure to apply. We want a new, diverse group of people contributing every year.