We're happy to announce that Elisabeth Hendrickson will be speaking to the Portland Agile Users Group on Wednesday the 17th. She's an energetic and informative member of the greater agile community who periodically comes up from the Bay Area to share her knowledge with us. Her talk on ATDD[*] last year at CubeSpace was great fun and well-received.

This year she'll be taking us through an interactive simulation of an agile transition. When she ran this simulation at Agile 2009, it replicated a number of problems I've seen take months and years to play out on real software teams. Bring your team members! It's far less stressful to talk about problems in the context of an evening's simulation than in the context of three years of product development.

Pizza is sponsored by YesMail of InfoGroup Interactive. Pizza and networking start at 6:30; presentation starts at 7. If there's enough interest, we'll go to a pub afterward for further discussion.

[*] Acceptance-Test-Driven Development

[Full details at Upcoming] Tech + Geek + Culture. The event for the Portland tech community, produced BY the Portland tech community. Interesting topics, cool people, and great networking opportunities. Always free to attend. More details coming soon.

[Full details at Upcoming] Tech + Geek + Culture. The event for the Portland tech community, produced BY the Portland tech community. Interesting topics, cool people, and great networking opportunities. Always free to attend. More details coming soon.

Full details at Upcoming] Tech + Geek + Culture. The event for the Portland tech community, produced BY the Portland tech community. Interesting topics, cool people, and great networking opportunities. Always free to attend. More details coming soon.

May 1: 6pm - 10pm May 2: 9am - 10pm

RSVP at Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1435924

May 1: 6pm - 10pm May 2: 9am - 10pm

RSVP at Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1435924

BarCampPortland will be held on May 1 & 2 at CubeSpace.

Want to help us plan BarCampPortland or volunteer to help out on the day of the event? Show up to this meeting and / or add your name to the wiki to learn more!

http://barcamp.org/BarCampPortland

[Full details at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1492082/ ] So you've decided to incorporate a blog into your marketing, you're ready to make the leap, but you're stalled at execution. How do you build a blog? What elements and features does a blog have? What's an RSS feed for and how do you burn it? How do you promote your blog? This hands-on, practical workshop will answer these and other questions to help you launch a successful blog. Please RSVP to peterk[at]semiosiscommunications.com. Bring a wi-fi enabled laptop to get the most interactive experience.

Branding on a Shoestring: Discover Your Company's Soul and Communicate Value

An introduction to branding for small businesses and nonprofits, the workshop will define a brand, deconstruct its elements, and outline the process of brand development. Workshop participants will learn to define and evaluate their organization's brand and discover low-cost methods to develop an effective brand and brand strategy.

This workshop is part of the Entrepreneurial Series, and is being put on by Peter Korchnak. Cost is $20.
Event Contact:

CubeSpace, 503-206-3500, [email protected].

GoLife Mobile announces VADOWERX™, a revolutionary new Service Oriented Architecture that lets PhP and other web developers build, distribute, and monetize interconnected, personalizable, mobile applications. The VADOWERX™ ecosystem enables mobile consumers to easily discover and use a wide variety of compelling socially and contextually aware services on their phone. For example, one of our community members is actively developing an application for the Oregon swim team to provide parents with real-time meet information on their cell phones. Another partner is creating a mobile Point Of Sale solution for Latin America businesses. Using VADOWERX™, the possibilities are endless.

GoLife's Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Mounir Shita, will be presenting on VADOWERX and demonstrating how to create applications with it. Come learn more!

Workshop Description

This workshop is designed for those who are ready to start their business plan or who are in business but need to build a business plan. It covers all aspects of building a business plan including: how to get yourself organized, avoiding writers block, required content, focusing on what is important and tips on how to make your plan represent you in the best light.

Although there is no one way to write a business plan, attendees will be taken through a simple structure for building their plan. In addition, participants will be exposed to business planning software that will assist them in completing the financial portions of the plan.

Sample Content:

* The need for a business plan
* The elements of a business plan
* Steps in basic financial planning
* Organization and management strategies
* Using your plan to measure progress and obtain financing
* How your marketing plan fits into your business plan

This workshop also features break-out sessions for exploring specific topics in more detail.

Workshop Presenters

James M. Smith

Jim Smith, who began his career at IBM in sales and marketing, has over thirty years of experience mentoring entrepreneurial start-ups and counseling small to mid sized companies that are looking to expand or are under performing or under capitalized. Jim brings a deep background of executive management experience.

In 1993 Jim founded and remains the managing partner of YCHANGE International, a turnaround consultancy specializing in small to medium sized new businesses or existing companies looking to expand or needing a turnaround strategy. In 2005 he also started counseling clients and teaching workshops for SCORE, including business planning and internet marketing.

Len Van Regenmorter, Accredited SCORE Counselor and Business Financial Consultant

Len worked on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs with Honeywell, concentrating in the areas of inertial guidance systems, visual displays for astronauts, and hand controls for the Command Capsule and Lunar Excursion Module.

Len moved to Control Data in 1969 as a program manager for large computer systems. In 1977 he moved to Oregon to work for Floating Point Systems, a supercomputer company, where he became Director of Engineering. From 1991 to 1998 he ran his own consulting business working with small growing hi-tech firms. Len retired in 1998 and immediately began volunteering for SCORE where he has helped numerous clients, especially in the area of detailed financial planning.

To RSVP, register through SCORE's Portland website.
Click on Workshops on the left panel; then register for a workshop here; then Thr Oct 30, 8:30a-4:30p, Business Plan – Your Roadmap to Success.

presented by John Smith, CPsquare

Can a community design its own digital habitat? Can a professional design a habitat on behalf of a community?

Designing for a community is much harder than designing for a solitary individual. A digital habitat includes all the tools and the practices that enable a community to work and reproduce itself. It’s produced collectively, even though it’s experienced individually.

This talk will explore how digital habitats vary across different contexts such as a company intranet, a mostly face-to-face community like CHIFOO, and a mostly online community like Planet Ubuntu.

We’ll discuss some case studies of communities and the evolution of their digital habitats, exploring fundamental design tensions, kinds of tool integration, and the nature of technology stewardship.

Find out more details about John and his work at our website >>

SCHEDULE

5:00 pm
CHIFOOd — join us for dinner at East Bank Saloon across the street

6:30 pm
Registration, networking, and announcements at CubeSpace

7:00 pm
Program followed by questions and answers, and the rafffle.

CHIFOO is the Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon. We are the local chapter of the ACM, the Association of Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group devoted to computer usability. We usually meet the first Wed. of the month at Cubespace, but always check the schedule at chifoo.org..

      <div id="tickets">
              <div id="price">Ticket Info: FREE for CHIFOO member; $5 non-members. Membership is only $20 and offers benefits galore!</div>
    <a href="http://www.chifoo.org/index.php/chifoo/events_detail/239/" title="FREE for CHIFOO member; $5 non-members. Membership is only $20 and offers benefits galore!"><div class="blue-button">Buy Tickets</div></a>      </div>

Presented by Gerhard Fischer, University of Colorado

  A culture’s penchant for participation is not dictated by technology; rather it is the result of changes in human behavior and social organization including innovative design, adoption, appropriation, and adaptation of technologies. Gerhard will share his experiences designing and assessing socio-technical environments for cultures of participation. His approach is grounded in the basic assumption that innovative technological developments are necessary for participation cultures, but they are not sufficient. Socio-technical systems are needed because the deep and enduring changes of societies are not just technological, but social and cultural as well. 

  Throughout the evening, Gerhard will encourage the audience to explore two themes: meta-design (a framework aimed at defining social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place) and social creativity (focused on harnessing the complex problem-solving power of our interactions with other people and shared artifacts).

  Learn more about Gerhard Fischer and his work at 
  http://www.chifoo.org/index.php/chifoo/events_detail/247/

  Registration begins at 6:30 pm.
  Program followed by questions from 7 - 9 pm. 
  .
  We will meet for CHIFOOd, our traditional no-host dinner and chat session, at La Merde at Bistro Montage -- 301 SE Morrison (directly under the Morrison bridge) between 5 and 6:30 pm.

CHIFOO (pronounced ‘ky - FOO’), Computer-Human Interaction Forum Of Oregon, a local professional chapter of the ACM SIGCHI, serves practicing pro...

Join us to work on adding features and improving Calagator!

We have a full-day code sprint on Saturday at CubeSpace starting at 10am and ending around 6pm. You don't have to be there for the full day, join us for however much time you'd like to contribute.

Some possible tasks for the sprint include adding creation and editing of recurring events, improving Google Calendar compatibility, and other bug fixes and improvements.

Everyone is welcome to participate, even those that haven't been at a code sprint before. These events are great for learning more about Ruby and Rails, agile programming, and finding ways to work better with other technical people in a friendly environment while making a genuine contribution to a community project.

Join us to work on adding features and improving Calagator!

We have a full-day code sprint on Saturday at CubeSpace starting at 10am and ending around 6pm. You don't have to be there for the full day, join us for however much time you'd like to contribute.

Some possible tasks for the sprint include adding data versioning and rollback, improving Google Calendar compatibility, and reviewing whether we'd like to include basic reservation support as seen on this demo site: http://calagator-with-reservations.demo.pragmaticraft.com:81/events/1250455702

Everyone is welcome to participate, even those that haven't been at a code sprint before. These events are great for learning more about Ruby and Rails, agile programming, and finding ways to work better with other technical people in a friendly environment while making a genuine contribution to a community project.

Join us!

-igal

Our bi-weekly code sprint to work on making Calagator even more awesome.

Once again we'll meet to work on making Calagator the best calendar aggregator ever.

Come help build the Calagator!

Join us to work on adding features and improving Calagator!

Everyone is welcome to participate, even those that haven't been at a code sprint before. These events are great for learning more about Ruby and Rails, agile programming, and finding ways to work better with other technical people in a friendly environment while making a genuine contribution to a community project.

Calagator is an all-volunteer, open-source project to develop a calendar aggregation system for the Portland technical community. We're making lots of progress, so please join us in the effort. For further details about the project, see calagator.org.

We'll doing another code sprint to work on the project this Saturday, 10am to 6pm at CubeSpace. We usually meet in the FlexSpace (also the place where the Ruby Brigade meetings usually are), but the friendly front desk staff will tell you where to go if you're not sure.

Everyone is welcome to participate, even if you haven't attended a code sprint before. Experience with Ruby on Rails and agile development is helpful, but you're welcome to come even if you're new to these because this is a great way to learn. You do not have to come to the entire event, so swing by if you have time -- and if you drop in and we're not there, you'll probably find us eating lunch at the "Side Door" bar/restaurant a few blocks away.

See you at the code sprint!

Join us to work on Calagator, yay!

Join us to to work on the Calagator User Guide. This is a great chance to learn more about the project and help out with an important task. Previous code sprint participants and newcomers are all welcome to contribute.

Check it out!

Our next codesprint will be on February 2, 2008, 10pm-6pm. We’ll meet at Cubespace, 622 SE Grand Ave, Portland, OR.

You can RSVP on the wiki. Instructions for logging in to modify the wiki are on the front page of the site.

We’ll be working on Calagator, and all are welcome to join. The coders are using Rails for the development environment. If you’d like to code, please come with current versions of Ruby (1.8.6), Rails (2.0.2), and RSpec (1.1.2) installed.

If you’d like to work on research, documentation, UI design or graphical work, just bring yourself. If you have notecards for jotting down tasks and sharing with everyone, those are always useful!

Come join us to work on improving Calagator in recognition of its 1 year birthday. We'll have a birthday party afterward.

Calagator is an all-volunteer, open-source project to develop a calendar aggregation system for the Portland technical community. We're making lots of progress, so please join us in the effort. For further details about the project, see calagator.org

We have a full-day code sprint on Saturday at CubeSpace starting at 10am and ending around 6pm. You don't have to be there for the full day, join us for however much time you'd like to contribute.

Everyone is welcome to participate, even those that haven't been at a code sprint before. These events are great for learning more about Ruby and Rails, agile programming, and finding ways to work better with other technical people in a friendly environment while making a genuine contribution to a community project.

Join us!

-igal

Calagator is an all-volunteer, open-source project to develop a calendar aggregation system for the Portland technical community. We’re making lots of progress, so please join us in the effort. For further details about the project, see calagator.org

We have a full-day code sprint on Saturday at CubeSpace starting at 10am and ending around 6pm—although you can come later in the day and don’t have to stay the entire time.

Everyone is welcome to participate, even if you haven’t attended a code sprint before. Experience with Ruby on Rails and agile development is helpful, but you’re welcome to come even if you’re new to these because this is a great way to learn.

Join us!

-igal

Calagator is an all-volunteer, open-source project to develop a calendar aggregation system for the Portland technical community. We're making lots of progress, so please join us in the effort. For further details about the project, see calagator.org

We have a short code sprint on Wednesday lunch at Backspace, and a full-day code sprint this Saturday at CubeSpace starting at 10am (although you can come later in the day).

Everyone is welcome to participate, even if you haven't attended a code sprint before. Experience with Ruby on Rails and agile development is helpful, but you're welcome to come even if you're new to these because this is a great way to learn.

Join us!

-igal