Events of the Past/Future

I’m making an effort to go to more events lately, below are MapLoser approved events I have attended or will attend.

This past week in addition to the OSM Baltimore Mapping party I also attended Social Matchbox DC, which is a start-up entrepreneur type of event. When ever I’m around start-up types all I can think is “I need an idea I can be that passionate about.” Of course sometimes to others it might appear as unbridled enthusiasm but if you don’t believe in your idea who else is going to?

As far as the future I’m signed up for all sorts of events. The one closest on the calender is eDemocracyCamp2 on April 19. I have never attended an unconference so I’m pretty excited about this one. E-democracy interests me as a citizen more than anything else, I can see mapping being useful to the process and hope I can be of help.

Later on in the week I’m attending JSConf 2009 which some might say I’m abnormally excited about. JavaScript never really excited me until I started using JQuery and now it has become one of my favorite tasks at work. I’m hoping to build a better JavaScript game soon and since the creator of gameQuery is going to be there (correction: Selim Arsever will not be there but a gameQuery based Pacman game made by Harry Guillermo will be demo’d) , maybe I’ll get some ideas. I’m really hoping that the secret topic involves the Processing port to JavaScript, but that is probably a long shot.

Later in April brings Safe Software’s FME training to Washington D.C. again. I will not be attending, but hopefully some coworkers will be. Personally I fly the FME flag high, especially after attending a training session. It helps you realize how robust their ETL tool is and in my case that I didn’t need to be programming using FMEObjects to do certain tasks WorkBench already did.

My first event in May is on the 2nd, Bootstrap Maryland. I have an assortment of business ideas and I’m hoping attending something like this will assist me in solidifying them into one that could work. ”I like iPhones, maps and Twitter,” is just not a business plan. Nor does it mean that my best ideas have anything to do with that as well. Key I think is finding something to be passionate about.

On May 14th I’m attending Ignite DC. The basis of Ignite is there are 16 speakers and each is given five minutes to talk with 20 slides that automatically change. People speak on many varied topics relating to art, technology, business, etc… I’ve only watched videos online of previous Ignite events, but I did submit a proposal to speak. If it does get voted to be presented I’m going to have to practice imagining everyone in their underwear. That and staying on topic as the slides keep whizzing by.

The following week I’m off to San Jose, California for Where 2.0 and WhereCamp. It was difficult to decide what workshops I wanted to attend at Where 2.0.

The workshops I decided on are:

GeoServer, GEOWebCache + OpenLayers
Spatial Database Tips and Tricks
Everything’s Moving: Displaying Dynamic GeoData with Processing
Stats on a Map: Spatial R
Building Location-Aware Apps on the iPhone & Android

Following Where 2.0 is WhereCamp but all the details aren’t entirely worked out yet. I’m going to wait a big longer on purchasing my flight so I don’t miss any of it.

I am already signed up for a couple events in June and July, but I’ll update about those in another post.