Rhode Island Nexus

Sara Czyzewicz is a passionate technologist, spending the past 10 years in research, conception, and development of mobile, web, and prototypical systems – from a "mood therapy" cell phone application to motion-sensing installations. As Co-Founder of DandyID.org, Sara is currently pursuing methods for identity management on the social web. She and fellow Co-Founder Arron Kallenberg will be presenting at the Providence Geeks Dinner on Wednesday Nov. 19th 5:30-9pm. Details and RSVP here.

Humans (definition):

Humans, social by nature, are both individuals and they are members of groups. Humans create complex social structures and utilize systems of communication for self-expression, the exchange of ideas, and organization. [wikipedia]

Since the birth of the Internet, social media has offered humans an additional, albeit unique, system for communication and "virtual" social structures.

This uniqueness of social media in contrast to real life is of great importance to fields including Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Usability and Artificial Intelligence. While humans evolve in our own understanding and co-existence with technology, efforts continue in parallel for designing technology as "user centric" and human intuitive systems.

Let's consider user centric design in social media specifically…

Social media enables humans to share and discuss information amongst each other, much like in real life. Using social media tools, humans can discover and identify "friends", share digital photos, congregate in "virtual" meetings, own "virtual" homes with purchased furniture, chat with others, portray emotions (emoticons).  Social media doesn't replicate real life entirely, but to the extent that it does is still quite amazing - and the number of humans engaged with these "virtual" experiences is momentous.

In what ways, then, is social media needing further user-centric developments?

We've found one particular area in need - identity. We are DandyID (www.dandyid.org) and our team is working towards a more intuitive model for sharing your identity on social media.

As a human, in real life your identity remains with you and thus exists wherever you go. In social media however, your identity is typically undefined where you go until manually communicated, repeatedly, and then exists as fixed. For example, many social media destinations ask users to create a 'profile' before using the site. This 'profile' will serve as your 'identity' for that site. You may enter another 'profile' with another site… and another, and another. These 'profiles' may each differ slightly but in essence attempt to portray who you are; unfortunately they exist separate and fixed.

DandyID proposes another option. Enter your profile and identity information once and let it follow you amongst your social media travels. Manage it in one place, and it remains up-to-date everywhere else. To see how we're doing this, visit our blog at http://blog.dandyid.org or jump in and sign up at http://www.dandyid.org/

In what ways do you think social media needs further user-centric developments?

The Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation will host two financing educational seminars this month targeting the state's small business community: "Navigating the Credit Crunch: Alternative Lending Sources " on Wednesday, November 19 at noon and "Financing Fast Growth " on Tuesday, November 25 at 10 a.m. Both events will be held at the RIEDC's Providence offices located at 555 Valley St., Providence and are free to the public.

The first seminar, "Navigating the Credit Crunch: Alternative Lending Sources," will feature a moderated panel discussion introducing local companies to non-bank sources of debt capital that can be used to expand and grow small businesses. Local businesses will meet alternative asset-based lenders, learn how their loan products work and create relationships with potential new lending sources. The panel, moderated by Commercial Financial Consulting's Ralph X. Stone, includes: Peter Aransky, Greenfield Commercial Credit; George P. Gochis, Diamond Business Credit; Jack O'Neil, Danvers Savings Bank; and David McIlroy, Wells Fargo Business Credit. The program and lunch are free, but registration ends on November 17. Please RSVP to Meghan O'Connor at moconnor [at] riedc.com

The second seminar, "Financing Fast Growth," will detail early stage capital sources for fast growing companies in Rhode Island, featuring local equity and near equity capital providers followed by lunch and networking. The event is hosted by Clear Venture Partners, a venture capital fund that acts as a venture educator and developer in secondary cities throughout northern New England. Attendees will learn about equity sources and how to tap into them, the venture capital process, how angel investors differ from venture capital, and innovation and technology grants. Panelists include: Michael Gurau and Michael Burgmaier, Clear Venture Partners; Richard G. Horan, Slater Technology Fund; Peter Dorsey, Cherrystone Angels and BDCRI; Tim O'Loughlin, Vencore Capital; and Richard Ferro, RLF Management Services. The program and lunch are free, but registration ends on November 18. Please RSVP to Jen Walker at jw [at] clearvcs.com

Andrea Jones is an undergraduate chemical engineering student at Brown University, class of 2010.  This is her second year of involvement with Brown University's student chapter of Engineers Without Borders. She is currently an executive board member of Brown Engineers Without Borders and a coordinator of the "A Better World By Design" conference.

I am part of a group of Brown and RISD students who have been working together on what should be a terrific conference, "A Better World By Design," November 7-9, 2008 in Providence. "A Better World by Design" asks the question today's designers, engineers, and economists should be asking. How can we use technology to improve the world? 

There is something brewing in the world today.  Look closely and you will notice that industries are shifting focus towards building a better world.  It is capitalism with a conscience.  Many businesses and individuals are practicing sustainability, addressing the needs of society, and responding to the calls of the greatest threats the world has faced.  The leaders are not only the executives, government officials, and large corporations of today's society.  Among these powerful professionals, college students are staking their claim as active leaders of this movement.

"A Better World By Design" brings together world leaders in humanitarian design from industry to academia to speak about their roles in this movement and pave the way for further discussions and innovations.  A total of nineteen world leaders have forgone their usual fee to participate as speakers in this student-run conference, and 300 individuals are already registered to attend. A number of the speakers will be of particular interest to the local info-tech and digital media community including:

• Iqbal Quadir is the Founder and Director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT, and the founder of GrameenPhone, which provides virtually universal telephony access to rural Bangladesh.
• Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net, specializes in the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world.
• Sheila Kennedy is a founding Principal of Kennedy & Violich Architecture, Ltd., an interdisciplinary design practice that explores new relationships between architecture, digital technology and emerging public needs.
• Erik Hersman is the founder of AfriGadget, a multi-author website that showcases stories of Africans solving everyday problems with little more than their creativity and ingenuity.

"A Better World By Design" will spread awareness of the importance that this movement has in shaping the future of our world.  It will not only bring together already established leaders in the movement to Providence, but will allow these leaders to share their individual pursuits with others, leading to more informed professionals, academics, and, most importantly, students.  Empowering students with the knowledge of the innovative changes that are taking place in the world will lead to a new generation of leaders that is ready to learn from previous mistakes and forge unforeseen paths in a way that no one has anticipated.

The weekend of October 18th-19th saw the coming and going of this year's Rails Rumble. The annual event brings together developers from around the world and tasks them with creating a web application using Ruby on Rails within a 48-hour timeframe. This year's competition drew 244 teams including (at least) one team from right here in Providence.

Teams had from Midnight (00:00 GMT) on October 18th, 2008 to Midnight (23:59 GMT) on October 19th, 2008 to design, code and deploy their app. Teams of one to four people were allowed to conceptualize their ideas prior to that time, but no "digital assets" were to be created before the start of the competition.

The local team was made up of RI Nexus/Providence Geeks regulars: Steve Babigian, Matt Gillooly, TJ Sondermann and Alex Taylor. They built an app called twalala, a fully functional Twitter client that distinguishes itself from the the crowd by allowing users to focus their twitterstream by muting individuals and/or filtering terms via keyword. If you're not familiar with Twitter, take a look at the twalala development blog for additional information. The initial feedback for twalala has been extremely positive (check out fellow community member Adam Darowski's review) and the team plans on forging ahead with a new release once the competition is over.

Once the complete list of all the Rails Rumble apps has been announced (two partial lists are available) the voting phase will begin. Voting is open to anyone (meaning you all should vote to support your local team!) and is based on "visible merits; in particular: completeness, user interface, originality, usefulness and overall design."

What do these teams stand to gain from devoting 48 hours of their lives to the development of a single application? Well aside from the glory and admiration of their peers, sponsorship prizes abound. The first place team even gets an honest to goodness Rails Rumble Championship Belt. And who knows? Maybe they'll get some angel funding.

While fame and fortune would be nice, that's not the only reason the team did it.  Team member Steve Babigian said, "We really just wanted to work together as a team, have fun, learn something, and create a cool app. Working with people I don't typically work with on a daily basis was great and they're really smart and talented guys. We've been extremely excited by the kudos the app has already received both locally and on the web. If you have the time, you should take part in these types of competitions, they're really rewarding."

If you're interested in participating in next year's Rumble, similar competitions, or just want to hook up and code something cool with like-minded peers, be sure to ask around at RI Nexus and Providence Geeks, and stock up on Red Bull.

Wayne Franklin is a Principal of Urban Sun Investments, Inc., a sustainable real estate and economic development firm. Seed Providence is the firm’s newest initiative to promote collaboration and investment in ideas, ventures, and places that further the economic, environmental and social sustainability of the city of Providence, RI. OfficeLAB is the first seed.

Last week I attended BIF-4, the Business Innovation Factory’s (BIF) latest Collaborative Innovation Summit and thought it was pretty interesting that within our 200+ person bubble of innovation-centric conversation, the topic of the current financial crisis came up very little. The energy at Trinity Rep was devoid of the fear and uncertainty that I’ve been finding in my other daily interactions outside of the Summit. But co-host Bill Taylor brought up a great point - the current financial crisis doesn’t stop the need for innovation. So those in the room obviously had more important things to talk about than crisis.

When I moved to New England from San Diego last July, I was drawn to the historic character, walkable streets, and communal atmosphere of Providence. After I spent a good amount of time in the city, I realized that there is something big and intangible brewing under the surface here. One of BIF-4’s guests, Jason Fried of 37 Signals sent out an interesting Tweet (via Twitter of course) - “Been in Providence, RI twice and I’ve met twice as many interesting people here than in any other city I can remember. 7:55 PM Oct 14th from web”. Providence’s art and design community, thought leaders, growing Infotech & Digital media sector, and educational institutions make for interesting people.

Richard Saul Wurman relayed at the Summit - the world is made up of cities. And as Richard Florida puts it - place is more important than ever as people become increasingly mobile. Robin Chase, founder of ZipCar and GoLoco and guest at last year’s Summit will tell you that we need to change our driving habits to combat the climate crisis. In addition - laptops, IPhones, 3G networks, WIMAX, distributed work, flexible work schedules, work-life balance and the influence of Generation Y are all changing the way in which we live and work. We are starting to realize the importance of promoting our city as a place for innovation and growing the creative economy. Creative Providence and the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce’s Knowledge Economy Roadmap are ways in which we as a city are pushing this forward.

We also know that much of the knowledge economy is mobile - millions of them work out of their homes and coffee houses and coworking is a bubbling trend among techpreneurs and freelancers. RI Nexus recognized this and helped drive the conversation of coworking in Rhode Island. The first post in the RINexus forum was an inquiry by a local programmer about interest in coworking. The RI Nexus community helped turn this thread into a 100+ person event about Next Generation Workplaces.

RI Nexus helped connect some of the dots, which enabled me to put together OfficeLAB, a unique coworking environment for entrepreneurs, freelancers, and mobile workers. We opened up for an open house last week and have generated enormous interest and support from the Rhode Island ITDM community. These are the types of organizations, events and places that bring about those purposeful random collisions that Saul Kaplan promotes.

If we can attract, support, and foster the mobile workers who could choose between working from their laptop in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Atlanta or Providence - then our innovation economy will grow. When people figure out that Providence is an interesting, multi-layered city with much to do at half the price — our city is going to be looked upon as the place for opportunity, entrepreneurship, and community. From this — I foresee much collaboration. And innovation. And an economically sustainable city.

Co-hosted by the Business Innovation Factory and RI Nexus

Fresh from his appearance at the BIF-4 Summit, 37signals founder Jason Fried will join Rhode Island’s info-tech and digital media community at the Black Repertory Company in downtown Providence on October 15 at 6:30 pm for a free, public event.

The evening will feature an onstage interview with Jason, open Q&A and socializing. This is a unique opportunity for Rhode Island's info-tech and digital media community and Jason to get to know one another. 

Jason is a passionate leader in the field of simple, clear and elegant web application design. He spearheaded the concept, design and development of Basecamp, 37signals' web-based project management tool for designers, freelancers and creative services firms. Jason is a co-author of the bestselling and highly-influential book, “Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application,” as well as of the popular blog, Signal vs. Noise.  

Many thanks to the Business Innovation Factory for facilitating Jason's visit to Rhode Island and for making this event possible.

Special thanks to our co-sponsors - Basics Group , BankRI , Bridge Technical Solutions and Providence Geeks

Where: Providence Black Repertory Company, 276 Westminster St., Providence.

When: October 15, 6:30–8:30 p.m.

This event is free, but space is limited. Snacks will be served. This event is 18+ and IDs will be checked at the door.