MadMongers

Just a thought - I'm sure the guy'd come and chat w/ us too ("rails?
Ruby? Come on! we got Perl!")


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Stephen Anderson
Date: Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 5:01 PM
Subject: [Mad-Railers] A chat about some practical approaches to doing epic crap
To: mad-railers@googlegroups.com


Hey Mad-Railers!

If you are at all on the fence about attending tonight's Mad-Railers
meeting, Preston sent me this blurb as an intro for you all:

================================================================================================================================
A chat about some practical approaches to doing epic crap

Geeks, especially open source web coder geeks, have a rich local
palette of big opportunities to do cool, impactful, relevant stuff
that will make people's lives better. When you build something open
that fills a need, that need stays filled until nobody cares. When you
build and share something cool, the whole world gets richer. If we
push that out in collaboration with 100s of organizations in
community, across 10's of thousands of communities, that's some epic
crap.

Here around Madison, local nonprofits and communities they work with
generally lack the capacity to employ skilled developers, both in
terms of direct financial resources and having any sense of when and
how to reach out to geekdom. Additionally, the public sector (city,
county, state, and schools) are really only beginning to grapple with
how to get out from under stultifying and stupid enterprise technology
approaches that waste time, money, and opportunity. They don't share
well, and when they fill a need, that need often stays filled only
until the funding runs out, and it always runs out. Its just plain
sad. Worse, the world is about to run out to its credit limit and all
this stupidity and other stupidity we're all familiar with will
suddenly be not good enough. This will suck in ways we have only
glimpsed, the above groups will be devastated by it.

So, these groups don't just need help with tech, they have a lot to
learn about collaboration, equity creation, agility, and just
generally not fighting yesterday's war from the development community.
You-all are _way_ better at sharing efforts to construct solutions
than possibly any other group in human history. You are fighting
tomorrow's war for a living. I want the groups above to see and to
understand this, to feel the vast deficit of awesomeness they are
experiencing first hand, and to have ways to reach out to the nearby
capacity to fill it - the skills, knowledge, and (I hope) willingness
to do epic crap represented by folks like madrailers.

It may be that you feel you are just not that important, but I think
you are. So if you have spare cycles you use to learn, explore new
techniques, or just to fool around with ideas you like that can't get
funded, I want your help.  The goal is to build bridges of reciprocity
between communities of technical opportunity (them) and communities of
technical capability (you) by you building code with them for them.
We're working on a kickstarter-esque tool to help, and we'll be
linking this effort to the Dane County TimeBank as a nexus connecting
resources with opportunities for over 100 nonprofits and 1600
individuals in Dane county. We represent TimeBanks USA's efforts to
build this together nationally with approximately 150 timebanks, and
we just got back from the kickoff of our project to link this stuff
together internationally with a likely reach of 33 countries and a
wide array of timebankers.

So tonight Stephanie Rearick, Director of the Dane County TimeBank and
Co-Chair of TimeBanks USA and Preston Austin, Geek entrepreneur type,
will talk a bit about this and would love to get your thoughts on it.
====================================================================================

Personally, I'm quite jazzed about all this!
-Steve-

--
Stephen Anderson
co-founder, Bendyworks
http://bendyworks.com

--

a

Andy Bach,
afbach@gmail.com
608 658-1890 cell
608 261-5738 wk