Development Seed Blog

Mobile Outreach, Crowdsourcing, and Unconferences: See You Out This Week!

What with the financial crisis, increasingly angry campaigning, and a blistering Redskins loss, I bet everyone can use a break and a day or night out this week. Here’s a look at some interesting tech events happening this week, and you can find a full listing of what’s happening this week over at DC Tech Events.

Tuesday, October 14

Noon

How Mobile Technologies are Changing Elections: Many of the candidates of this year’s elections have used cell phones to reach out to potential voters (everyone remember Obama’s 3:00 am text message about his VP choice?), but was it effective? And what does the growing number of cell phone only households mean for polling?

5:30 – 9:00 pm

Second Tuesdays New Media Salon and Dot Com Networking Party: It’s been three years now since this happy hour started, and it now attracts about a hundred people working with new media across DC’s biggest sectors to its monthly event. Need more of a reason to check it out? This month there will be cupcakes and quickie massages.

Thursday, October 16
3:00 – 5:00 pm

Internet Advocacy Roundtable – Crowdsourcing Message and Policy Development: Think crowdsourcing public policy is brilliant or dangerous? Join in a discussion about voter participation in politicians messages and platforms at this roundtable.

Debates, Open Source CMSs, and Start Ups

In typical DC-style, life is getting more political as we get within a month of the presidential election. If you haven’t yet registered to vote, get going. Today is the last day to register for Washington, DC and Virginia residents, while Maryland residents have until October 14. In more politics, it seems like almost every bar is throwing a debate watching party on Tuesday for the second presidential debate. If you don’t want to play debate bingo or presidential flip cup, stay in tomorrow night and plan to go out the rest of the week instead when there are some interesting tech events taking place. As always, a full listing can be found at DC Tech Events.

All Week

Plone Conference: Open source conferences seem to be flocking to Washington, DC, and with good reason since the city is home to so many techies using open source. If you work with Plone or want to, check out the conference and some of the post-conference parties.

Tuesday, October 7 and Wednesday, October 8

10:00 am

Presenting Data and Information: A One-Day Course by Edward Tufte: There’s little question that Edward Tufte is the master of presenting a ton of data in a clear, concise, and compelling way. If you want to up your data visualization know-how, check out this course.

Wednesday, October 8

7:00 – 9:00 pm

Drupal Lab: Here’s your chance to tear into the code behind a module with Drupal developers of all levels, show off your latest work, or just get a feel for what it’s like to program in Drupal.

Wednesday, October 1, 6:30 pm at Bailey's Pub

Tomorrow night the Northern Virginia Drupal group is holding the first of its newly revamped monthly meetups. What’s really exciting is that the NOVA group is going after a wider Drupal fan base, having the meetups not only focus on the business opportunities that come with a platform like Drupal, but also on topics of interest to Drupal developers and Drupal users. Phase 2 Technology is taking the lead in organizing these.  Tomorrow, two local shops will discuss

• Using Drupal for Multi-site CMS’s, presented by Phase 2
  
• Tuning for Drupal Performance and Scalability, presented by Blackmesh
  

This will also be the first NOVA Drupal meetup in awhile that is metro accessible, and it’s just a block from the Ballston stop on the Orange Line at Bailey’s Pub. More details are here. Alex and I will be there!

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Hacking, Grant Money, and Drupal: Come Out For Tech Events This Week

It was a busy weekend for many of us here in Washington, DC, what with the debate watching parties, updates on the financial meltdown and bail out plan, and then finally the celebration when the Redskins beat the Cowboys. After all that, I’m excited to dive back into technology this week with a few interesting meetups. Here’s a look at how we’ll be spending our evenings (and one morning) this week. For a full listing of what’s happening in DC, check out DC Tech Events.

Tuesday, September 30

8:30 am – noon

Innovative Advocacy: Intelligence, Media Monitoring, and Tracking the Buzz: This workshop will talk about what tools are out there to help you listen in to all the chatter happening online, and then figure out what to make of it.

7:00 – 9:00 pm

An Interview About In My Name's Online Strategy and Its Push to End Poverty

This week a consortium of international development organizations kicked off a campaign to end poverty that will push citizens to pressure their governments to advance the Millennium Development Goals. The campaign is called In My Name, and it has the support of Hollywood stars like will.i.am and Scarlet Johansson. Even with this star power, the campaign is using the internet as its main outreach tool. 

Last week I talked with Karina Brisby, the campaign's interactive lead,
about the online strategy behind In My Name. You can listen to the interview
here.

In My Name wants people to speak up by signing their name to the cause, and it's asking people to send in photos, videos, and stories (all through a nice workflow on a Drupal 6 website) and to spread the word to their friends via social networks. The campaign is also doing a lot to engage bloggers. It's opening up all its materials (even those star studded videos) for people to repost on their blogs, to translate, to riff on them, and to repurpose them however they'd like. It will be fun to see what mashups emerge. 

Drupal, ICT4D, and Politics, How Very DC

Happy “One Web Day”;http://onewebday.org! For those not familiar with the new holiday, it’s “like Earth Day for the Internet” – an opportunity to celebrate the internet and it’s awesomeness and also do a little something to make sure it keeps headed down the right path. Here in DC the One Web Day team is putting together an e-democracy time capsule (which will be great for archival reasons and to get some laughs in 20 years when techies look at the stuff we thought was cutting edge). There’s still a couple hours to submit your stories and videos about e-democracy, internet policy, and what you think the future holds. And in case you were wondering why the metro was extra crowded this morning, it’s Car Free DC day. I hope you remembered to bike or metro to work.

In addition to the holidays, there are a lot of other tech events happening around the city this week. Here are the ones we’re hoping to attend, and you can find a full schedule of the week over at DC Tech Events. Hope to see you out this week!

Monday, September 22

7:15 – 9:00 pm