This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.

Friday, December 30, 2005

Help Take Coworking to the Next Level

Right now the Coworking space is a great place to work and can accomodate a fair number of people (check out pics of the space at http://codinginparadise.org/coworking); however, we are looking for larger, more affordable space that can accomodate more workshops, brainstorming sessions, more coworkers, and turn it into a permanent place where people can drop by, work, innovate, and have community. Imagine a permanent Bar Camp, or a contemporary Homebrew Computer Club; let's make it happen. If you have any leads on this email me at bkn3@columbia.edu.

I'm trying to grow coworking organically; right now it is very real. We now have five permanent coworkers: An entrepreneur and Ruby on Rails developer creating an interesting new kind of web application; a computer science researcher investigating a new kind of computer language; A researcher and programmer working on an interesting project for Commerce.Net; a playwright and screenplay writer developing a movie script; and me, a research engineer focusing on AJAX, DHTML, and collaborative systems.

As of this month we are financially sustainable. Moving forward, Michael Eakes, Chris Messina, and I would like to start creating a space that also helps support innovation, the kind of space that the Homebrew Computer Club and Bar Camp helped sustain. We probably need a bigger space that can accomodate room for workshops, presentations, as well as more coworkers, and we need something cheap (maybe even free?) since we are a nonprofit and co-op. Got any ideas?

Introducing Mash Camp at the Coworking Space!

Come join us at the coworking space for an all day stormathon and hackathon! Chris Messina has got the ball rolling for Mashup Camp:

"So here's the deal. January 17 we're going to have a Mashup Camp at the Coworking space....There will be 12 of us, mixed and mashed from a superlative cadre of geeks. It's open to apply, but we've got limited space and time, so, 12. Anyway, we start in the morning promptly at 10am (after informal coffee, etc). We do brief intros, discuss our project, what we're bringing to the table as far as knowledge, know-how and passion. We then break up into a couple groups based on what we want to get done and the utility of our offerings. ...Spend the next couple hours drawing, writing, designing, architecting… getting to something with teeth but not code. Break for lunch and cross-polination.....Maybe after lunch we play musical chairs with the projects. Y'know, mashup the teams? This means that the folks early in the day really need to be clear about what they want since it'll be someone else's fingers actually punching the keys and juicing the code......So after the mashing of people, a coding melee ensues and by the end of the day, we'll have something. Scratch that, we'll have a few things. Probably not all that pretty, but beginnings. And, I'll tell you this in advance, one of the projects will be to construct the website that will host these projects moving forward… what shall become a proverbial open source treasure trove of mashups. Oh yes my friends, this is going to be good."

Chris is the lead organizer of this; head over to the Upcomming page for the event to RSVP.

Coworking is a new way to work; it provides a great atmosphere for innovation, structure, and community. You should drop by and see what we are up to.

Status update on AMASS and dojo.storage

Hi folks, just wanted to give a status update of AMASS, the client-side storage solution for AJAX/DHTML apps. I've been seriously hunkered down porting AMASS into dojo.storage and testing, testing, testing. While AMASS was alpha level, the dojo.storage work is becomming much more solid. I should have everything wrapped up and finished in January so that people can start using it in their apps. I also plan to not support AMASS independent of Dojo, and continue all future work in dojo.storage, which I have already been doing. I've adopted Dojo as my DHTML framework of choice.

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