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SXSW Bound – Looking for Thought Leaders in Tech

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Well, it looks like I’m SXSW bound yet again this year. Still trying to find a hotel as they are all sold out and I was late to sign up – but that’s another story entirely!

While at SXSW this year I hope to not only enjoy a lot of great panels, but also recruit some of the top speakers and participants I find there to hopefully contribute to and collaborate in a virtual barcamp community I’m helping to launch. (There may even be a private rooftop party at SXSW for the chosen few *hint hint*).

If you’re a technologist who would like to connect with your peers, share your knowledge, and learn from others through teleconferences where you choose the topics to speak on and/or choose from a list of sessions led by others you wish to participate in, please contact me (diana [at] cyber-anthro.com)! We need thought leaders on all subjects who aren’t afraid to share their knowledge with the masses. Each conversation will be recorded and then posted as a podcast on our site to be shared with anyone who wishes to listen.

There is no catch to being a part of this community other than you have to participate! Only those who wish to participate in leading or joining in these conversations need apply. That said, this service will not only be free to all participants, but it will also all make all recorded sessions available to the public.

That means if you just want to listen, there is no need to join! You can visit the site, or follow the RSS/Twitter feed to hear the latest and greatest discussions on tech today. So, if there is someone you think would be great at leading and/or participating in these tech conversations, I need you to please send them my way. Otherwise, there will be no one to listen to and that just wouldn’t be any fun now would it.

I’m really hoping people in the Open Source and Fedora communities will step up and participate. This is not only a great way to get your voice heard, but it is also a great way to talk about the projects you participate in and may even help to get the word out to get other developers to join your cause.

Lastly, this isn’t just for developers. If you’re a scripter, coder, designer, or usability professional we need your voices too! The goal is to have thought leaders in all aspects of technology connecting, sharing, and learning through live audio conversations and collaborations.

We figure barcamps are very cool, but they are limited to the geographic area in which they are held. So, why not find a way for people from all over the world to participate in one without ever having to leave their desks.

I’m really stoked about this unique opportunity to bring people together from around the world to have live conversations with one another about all the wonderfully awesome things that are going on in tech today. I’m even more excited that these conversations will then be made available for FREE to anyone who wishes to listen and learn something.

If you’re willing to speak on something as early as next week and you have the perfect topic in mind (and perhaps know of a few people that can jump in on the conversation with you), I need you to contact me ASAP (diana [at] cyber-anthro.com)! We are still in the very early stages of getting the site up – but I need content to make it happen, so I need people now (who aren’t afraid to work through a few bugs with me) to help me get this going.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Fudcon – Zikula Hackfest

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So, here I am in a hackfest room for Zikula, actually using skills I have as a ui designer in css/html and contributing to the project.

Wait, what? I’ve just become a contributor. How did that happen?

Outsider looking in, now insider looking around.

Not being a Fedora user I came to Fudcon as a part of my research for the Fedora community (a much more in depth post on that will be coming tonight or tomorrow) in order to get to know people and understand more about the culture itself during one of the rare occasions people actually come together in person rather than their usual methods of collaborating online.

I had planned to use the barcamp day to introduce myself (which I did and will be apart of that larger post I talked about earlier), and then use the hackfest days to actually interview people. However, I realize yesterday that this time here in person amongst their peers is very very very valuable. So, rather than take up their valuable time away from this environment through in person formal interviews, its more about informal conversations. It’s just really getting to know people so that when I contact them later about participating in the research through more formal methods they know who I am, what the project is about, and will perhaps have more free time to contribute to the research rather than being rushed in this environment.

During one of these informal conversations I overheard there was a limited amount of people here who know CSS, so they weren’t sure how they were going to get the design work for this specific project done in the short amount of time they had here. Then I opened my big mouth and said, ‘Oh, I know CSS’, to which Simon responded, ‘I need you at my hackfest tomorrow’.

With that I had to learn more about what the hell I got myself into, so I attended the barcamp panel on it, got a better idea of what it was all about and realized not only could I help with my CSS knowledge, but because it was based on a nuke CMS framework I even had experience in that I could lend to the cause.

So there you go, even non Fedora users can become contributors.

Oh, and by the way, I’m working on that non part of that last statement as soon as I can. I just need someone to get the wireless working on my netbook (Dell Mini 9) in F12, as it doesn’t seem to recognize the card. I’ll even overwrite the current system if I can just get that working!

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